Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I’m here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

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  • 94 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s not about whether it works, it’s about proving that they’re keeping pace with the trends in technology that they’re not directly driving.

    They’re afraid that if they don’t give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that’s what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that’s what will happen.

    AI funding is so far up it’s own backside I’m not sure they’ll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.


  • Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

    Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

    … and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.





  • Surprised they haven’t tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.

    There’s a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven’t, and it’s still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.

    But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling “the public” what avenues have already failed, or that they don’t want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone’s bound to try it otherwise.


  • palordrolap@kbin.socialtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlCheckmate
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    5 months ago

    Is it still the norm to go to the dev’s office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we’re doing, tell them we’re shipping their machine to the client because it’s the only one that the code runs on?

    And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

    I’m assuming that this response from 4o isn’t real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.


  • My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

    This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.

    Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.


  • Not voting, if you’re otherwise able, is a tacit acceptance for how things are.

    Presumably you don’t want to vote for the incumbents, so vote for someone who’ll replace them, whether you like that option or not.

    Voting out a bad lot is the only legal way we have to protest.

    And then vote third party next time if they don’t change things to your liking. Then fourth. Fifth. Etc.

    Don’t like the political parties? Start one.

    Think the whole lot should be lined up and shot? (For legal reasons this is purely metaphorical.) Start organising.

    But if that’s too much for you, vote.




  • palordrolap@kbin.socialtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlOf course
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    6 months ago

    Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

    Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

    Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

    Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

    The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

    But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.




  • Peertube is the Fediverse equivalent of YouTube, the Fediverse being what Lemmy (where you are), Kbin (where I am) etc. are also a part of.

    As far as I’m aware, it’s a matter of finding an instance you resonate with, create an account and share away.

    Do bear in mind that since it’s the Fediverse, Peertube instances aren’t usually backed by a large organisation with bags of cash, so if you can afford to donate to your instance, at least consider doing so.

    I’d also recommend not using Peertube as a be-all-end-all storage for your videos. Always keep a copy for yourself. People do this with YouTube and they shouldn’t unless they’re OK with suddenly and forever losing that content at some unspecified future date. The same can happen with PeerTube, but the reasons are likely to be different (instance closing rather than unexpected account deletion).

    Corporation-backed video hosts include: Twitch, Dailymotion and Vimeo. You could probably also host on Facebook. While these are options, they might make you feel as unclean as I did typing that out.