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

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

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

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • not sure what they’re trying to do here

    Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

    They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

    It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

    “Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

    Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.


  • My house has a smell like that. I noticed it on the viewing when the previous occupants were still in, and I assumed that it was “their” smell and that it would go with them. Nope. Part and parcel of the house.

    It’s probably coming from under the ground floor floorboards because I’ve never been down there. It would require tearing far too much up in order to get down there.

    My other theory is that something has soaked into the floorboards and has mostly but not quite been cleaned out.

    Anyway, it hasn’t killed me. I have rampant ADHD, but I’m pretty sure the two things are unrelated.


  • There’s a reason the word “multifaceted” gets applied to people sometimes. There are different faces we present in different scenarios.

    Sometimes people will be one way with family, another at work and another way again when with friends. There are funny stories (or webcomics) of people ending up in a group that comprises a family member and two people they know from respective second and third groups and the humour is that they have no idea how to act in a way that won’t confuse at least one of the people they’re with, including themselves.

    As for relating to your situation, there was one online content creator who went by a name that sounded like it was based on a real, given name and not something made up. It was a bit of a surprise when I learned that wasn’t anything to do with their actual name. They also posted things that were out of the mould I’d mentally put them in on another social media site.

    (Being vague because I don’t want to dox or disparage.)

    Thankfully, those particular revelations affected no-one but me, which might be a way for you to look at the situation with the person you’re talking about.


  • Current AIs often suffer from what’s sometimes called “the strawberry problem” and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There’s also the human element of “if it comes out of a computer it must be right”, forgetting the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

    The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can’t then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r’s are in the word “strawberry”, it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn’t been told is right and wrong.

    As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they’re to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you’ll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn’t know any better.

    LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG*. There’s a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that’s going to show up in the output if you look closely.

    Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.

    For a JPEG that’ll do nothing worse than make an image “deep-fried” or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people’s lives and it’ll do the same to them.

    * JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that’s not the right analogy here.



  • A current first-world problem for lovers of funny / harmless content is that many feeds are filling up with political calls to action instead of the usual apolitical or indirectly political stuff. This comic would be an example of the latter.

    I mean, I get it, those places are high traffic and they’re almost certainly the best places to put that information, it’s just that, hell, I already feel the pain of those people those calls to action are for, am powerless to do anything about it, and now one of my coping mechanisms for that now comes with a heaping side dish of more pain.

    TL;DR this comic gets more and more on the nose every time it’s reposted.


  • There were a few times up to the age of 13 that I ended up in the wrong classroom due to timetable confusion but after that, the closest was the first day at university where there were two buildings with the same name, and I picked the wrong one. I had the weirdest feeling I was in the wrong place, but I was early and sat in the empty lobby for a really long time unsure of what to do hoping something would happen before I’d have to go wandering around again.

    Someone else turned up who was equally lost and I explained the situation. Ended up making a friend to team up with to try to find the right building, which we did.

    I still wonder if I would have ended up in the same friend group I’d got the right building in the first place.

    Anyway, at least I didn’t get laughed at for that one.





  • There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

    It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

    Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character


  • The one that got me was being called “that man”.

    My dad is “Mr. <our surname>” and he thought of his dad as the same, but both he and I have courted and expected the same title in various places and if you’re called that name enough times, you can kind of get used to it.

    But when a small child almost runs into you and their mother chastises them with “Careful! You almost ran into that man!” and “that man” is you. Oh boy. And another time “Why does that man look so sad?”. As you might imagine, I was not having a particularly good time before that small child said that.

    But I suppose it wasn’t “that old man”…


  • Human flesh is said to smell and taste very similar to pork. At least one culture that partook in cannibalism called human meat “long pig” probably because of that. I’m also fairly sure I’ve heard stories of fire and rescue workers reporting delicious pork-roast smells that turned out absolutely horrifying and put them off pork for a very long time.

    It may also be one of the reasons that certain religious texts and cultures forbid the eating of pork. It’s probably more to do with how pork spoils quickly in the climates where those religions originated, as well as the risk of roundworms if it isn’t cooked properly, but it does also stop the butcher from selling you a pork steak that isn’t actually pork, so that’s a bonus.



  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldVersatility wins
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    6 days ago

    Being dangerously close to the truth is a hallmark of certain kinds of humour. I appreciate it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Most days it isn’t mine either.

    He died of drugs. Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis. Lots of bands do unspeakable things with groupies. I am deliberately not connecting any dots there.

    The dog thing, I have no idea where I got that. Probably one too many cartoons as a kid or exposure to horror tropes because I’d be horrified if someone did that for real.



  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldVersatility wins
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    6 days ago

    That’s the smile of a man who did something incredibly illegal and all the other guys are trying to get him out of there ASAP while worrying about the consequences if anyone finds out.

    As for what that illegal thing was, well, this is just me putting a concept to a picture that might have had no illegal acts preceding it whatsoever, but you know. Drugs maybe. Full on making out with an underage groupie who was loving the experience, but then their dad entered the next room looking for them, necessitating a rapid getaway and a s**t-eating grin. Grabbing a dog’s tail from the inside and, roink, turning it inside out or making an audacious internet comment with a sound effect like “roink”. Those sorts of things.


  • Yes. It is theoretically possible for a dictator to rule with the actual best interests of the people in mind, rather than a misguided belief about what those are, or else a complete lack of concern for anyone but themselves.

    Since political beliefs tend to align along party lines, the party of such a dictator does matter somewhat, however little that might be.

    Unfortunately, any benevolent dictatorship would be at constant risk of turning, and almost certainly be doomed to turn, into one of the other two options.

    Even less fortunately, most dictatorships skip the benevolent step entirely.