palordrolap

Sharded barf.

A phrase from an ancient meme, that is simultaneously unconnected and also weirdly apt. However you interpret those words.

The meme itself in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb58GaJNpsA

I bet there’s a not insignificant chunk of Win3.11 code still lurking at the heart of Windows even now. Patched and recompiled for 64 bits, but still there.

Though most of it is probably for backwards compatibility by this point. Or so we should hope.

In British and Australian slang at the very least, “k*ddie fiddler” is a legitimate euphemism for, well, you know.

Would not be surprised if that’s somewhere at the root of the miscategorisation.

You ticket. You wait two weeks. When it isn’t paid, you find the car, impound and immobilise it.

Actually, since all cars of a certain type run the same software, they’re all effectively the same “person” doing the driving, so you’d have grounds to lock them all up at the first infraction. And I bet you could get a judge to agree with that.

I seem to remember hearing about a town that installed cameras to spy on citizens monitor for crime and took them all down again when a judge enforced freedom of information legislation. That is, the public requested access to what the cameras recorded and were found to be entitled to it.

It’s not true that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but the converse is true. And dirty cops reeeally don’t like it.

There’s a bit at the end of the article that might be counter to the RDP that it talks about, even if it is deliberately vague.

I’d like to believe that this means that these three pieces of software actually work and that someone in high office has decided that that is unacceptable.

Paranoid authoritarians really do not like ordinary people having access to secure communications and personal privacy. That might be an avenue they can use to organise and elect someone who isn’t a paranoid authoritarian, and that won’t do.

On the other hand, these pieces of software might already be compromised and this is all an elaborate double-bluff.

In which case it’s time for a few well placed communications over purportedly secure channels that would be guaranteed to generate an authoritarian response. Which they’ll then have to pretend they didn’t read until it’s too late.

I’m talking organising - horrors - peaceful protests. They really don’t like those. They have to use their brains, or someone else’s, in order to find a good excuse to stick the boot in.

Neat. Don’t give them the ability to self-replicate and we’re golden.

Part hubris, part greed. They believe their own hype and either think that other people will believe it too or that they can force it on the unbelievers, thus leading to great profit.

Where is the profit? Enforced cloud accounts and storage mean users’ information is permanently held ransom, and users shall pay monthly to retain access to it.

They can also pick through users’ files and sell that information to data brokers and advertisers, if not also various government intelligence agencies.

Actually that last one is more about the continued ability to go on bleeding users dry, but it amounts to the same thing.

That just means that the lowly, customer-facing peons that work for government offices don’t have access to any such master database.

Most people work for companies that hold information inaccessible to them. Other government databases would definitely be on that list.

You mean to tell me that such a database doesn’t already exist?

Sometimes the only real options are “bad” and “less bad”. An uncomfortable echo of something else we’re all familiar with, perhaps.

This does not mean that we should not criticise the less bad option, only that we should not switch to the the bad option.

And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”

… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.

Call me cynical, but I think you’ve put quotes around the wrong part of your title.

Try around “accidentally”.

I’m not sure that’s K&R style. In various places you have things where the thing that follows a for, while or if isn’t indented, and as far as I’m aware, K&R indents religiously. K&R omits braces on single statements, sure, but that statement is nonetheless indented from the parent keyword.

e.g. you have things like:

while (condition)
statement;

and

for(x;y;z) {
if (condition) {
    statement1;
    statement2;
}
}

Which I’m pretty sure should be:

while (condition)
    statement;

and

for(x;y;z) {
    if (condition) {
        statement1;
        statement2;
    }
}

respectively. The idea is that you can theoretically trace the keyword down to its closing brace, assuming there is one.

DDR4 is cheaper than DDR5, sure, but retailers have jacked the price of both by the same percentage, so it’s not really all that much of a rescue.

I expect people will need a full mortgage to pay for DDR6 when it comes out next year.

Interesting. And yet it’s still incomplete. F6 and Alt+D both do the same thing (focus the address bar), so there’s at least one line missing and definitely at least one column.

This must seriously be messing with the heads of people high up in insurance companies. On the one hand AI is something that no C-level can resist, but on the other, that’s an expensive way to say “no” to every request for money.

I saw a documentary about this. I think they called it Caprica.

One thing is certain: Your distro’s repository’s version of yt-dlp - even on bleeding edge distros - is likely out of date, and you’ll have to find and run the appimage version from the devs.