Posts made by Planar
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RE: WTF Bites
@Applied-Mediocrity Can't quite find the passage anymore but it went roughly like this in one of Pratchett's books:
Now, famous philosopher Alec van Quirm stated that atheism is actually not the optimal decision. It would be much better to believe in every religion at once*) - so that if you died you'd surely find yourself in the best position depending on whatever religion turned out to be true. And if none of them were right and there really was nothing: What exactly did you lose?
*) When van Quirm awakened after his death he found himself surrounded by several ominously looming figures wielding huge clubs. One of them boomed: "And now we'll show you what we think of smart alecs like you up here."
A nice twist (as usual with Pratchett) on Pascal's wager.
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RE: PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!
@PotatoEngineer said in PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!:
You picked the color, you write the copy."
What do you mean, you write the copy? I'm sure they have a neural network for that.
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RE: PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!
I've got an idea: they should sell it as an NFT.
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RE: On the time I accidentally emptied a workstation printer
@Rhywden said in On the time I accidentally emptied a workstation printer:
I mean, I myself once wanted to shutdown my workstation, typed in
shutdown -h now
and only when I saw theconnection lost
message (and the subsequentinternet seems to be down
) it dawned on me that I just had powered down the router.The guys at DEC SRC (or was it Bell Labs? I don't remember) had a shutdown command that demanded that you type the hostname of the machine before it would do anything. I thought it was a pretty good trick. It was 30 years ago and I still haven't seen it anywhere else...
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RE: Supercomputers in DuPage County IL?
@Gribnit said in Supercomputers in DuPage County IL?:
Don't forget Unix.
And the bipolar transistor...
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RE: In Spain, every time an OAP carks it, they take a child with them...
@bobjanova said in In Spain, every time an OAP carks it, they take a child with them...:
@homoBalkanus said in In Spain, every time an OAP carks it, they take a child with them...:
Or is the number of dead children 0 everywhere so it's a +infinity increase?
Yeah pretty much, Covid doesn't affect children - and in terms of deaths it's really only the old or people with a known vulnerable condition who are dying in any meaningful numbers.
According to what I read, that's true for the flu, but not for Covid. There is a noticeable proportion of "young" people (i.e. below 50) who die from Covid, even without vulnerable condition. The younger you are, the less likely to die, but the probability is not zero (unlike the flu). For very young children (below 5) without a pre-existing condition, the number of deaths worldwide can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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RE: Security Snake Oil Inc.
@Jaime said in Security Snake Oil Inc.:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Security Snake Oil Inc.:
A friend of mine likes to use an all-text password. It's seven words from an obscure poem in a foreign language.
Your friend isn't very good at this. No matter how good a password is, reuse will get you. It's only a matter of time before that password gets into a password dump.
Worse than that: if it's "from an obscure poem" then it's probably in some corpus somewhere on-line and a good dictionary attack will get it easily.
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RE: Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.
@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones? I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
You need to learn about Usenet. That was waaaay better than Discourse or any Web-based forum I've ever seen.
But when you need to talk to an ad-hoc group of 3 coworkers and one client, you don't want to (1) open a new topic on your favorite forum and (2) find a way to restrict access to exactly that group of persons.
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RE: Stack Exchange experiences Stack Meltdown, by enforcing preferred pronouns in site-wide communications
@Mason_Wheeler said in Stack Exchange experiences Stack Meltdown, by enforcing preferred pronouns in site-wide communications:
It's exactly what I said: a new post that says all the same stuff but in a more reasonable tone of voice. And given that it's currently not being downvoted to oblivion the way the last one was, the trick seems to be working.
This one contains the following gem: "Pronouns are a fairly well defined thing in language".
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RE: GPS tracking for...
@Carnage said in GPS tracking for...:
If it's an actual emergency, what bloody good will a GPS tracker do the parent in that situation?
It makes it easier to find the body afterward...
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RE: Speaking of garbage Silicon Valley companies, here's Uber!
@khudzlin said in Speaking of garbage Silicon Valley companies, here's Uber!:
You don't cross a fucking road without looking about for fucking vehicles, for fuck's sake.
You also don't ignore the signs that say "don't cross here, there's a crosswalk a hundred yards down the road".
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RE: Mobile race condition
@greybeard said in Mobile race condition:
@kt_ Alice initiates a call to Bob. Mallory then initiates a call to Alice spoofed as coming from Bob. The calls are joined together. Alice thinks she called Bob but is instead connected to Mallory.
That won't work because the phone company won't use the spoofed number but the real one (which they know for billing purposes but won't tell you because spoofing is a good thing, obviously).
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RE: Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck
@the_quiet_one said in Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck:
Kind of like when burglars are off the hook if the houses they robbed had an open window or unlocked door.
What if the house has a big sign saying "Come in and take everything you want. You're allowed." ?
What if instead it has a super-small sign that says the same thing?
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RE: If you own an Intel computer made in the last 10 years, throw it away
@bugmenot said in If you own an Intel computer made in the last 10 years, throw it away:
Just toss it in the garbage.
Shouldn't this be in the "internet of shit" thread?
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RE: WTF Bites
Surely some US institution is storing the standard foot (of length) in a vault somewhere?
Seems like (what was) the standard metre is still in . It's not needed since 1960, so if wants to take it (?) and split it in 3.28084 for their weird system, they're welcome.
No need, the foot is by definition exactly 0.3048 meter. The weird US units are just derived units of the metric system nowadays.
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RE: How dare you say our site's insecure!
@anonymous234 said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@Fox I dunno, I kinda feel bad for the guy.
Religious obsession would probably be considered a mental disorder if it wasn't for the shitstorm this would cause.
IMO, religion is a mental disorder.
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RE: Reflecting on one very strange year at Uber
@cartman82 said in Reflecting on one very strange year at Uber:
From the author's perspective it probably felt like it took too much time, but Uber could argue (truthfully or not) they had to build a case against the guy before they could fire him.
That would be a very weak argument, given that they told her that, California being an at-will employment state, they could fire her at any time for any reason. (but of course we know that was bullshit)
To me, the most shocking aspect of the case is how much HR lied to her. Either they don't know the law or they utterly disregard it. In any case, if she had a record of her meetings with HR she could probably build a good case for getting the whole HR department fired.
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RE: How to Use a Vhs Tape: 10 Steps (with Pictures)
8 Always read the FBI Warning.
Sounds like something straight out of Illuminati! Is the FBI warning by any chance peppered with fnords that you can't see?
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RE: Warning: Contains nuts*
@Karla said in Warning: Contains nuts*:
It is an excellent solvent (for things other than nail polish); use to remove permanent marks on a white board.
I always use alcohol for that. Perfect results and it doesn't stink as much as acetone. Unfortunately for some reason it's becoming harder and harder to get a pure alcohol/water mixture without some nasty chermical designed to prevent you from drinking it.
Might depend upon the concentration. Hydrogen Peroxide is pretty dangerous at higher concentrations than you can buy in the drugstore which is only 3%.
100% acetone right here from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Onyx-Professional-Acetone-Remover-Artificial/dp/B0051IC96Y
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RE: Warning: Contains nuts*
@J_T said in Warning: Contains nuts*:
Acetone (might crystallize and blow up if you look at it the wrong way)
Acetone? It's an everyday household chemical that I get from the drugstore by the liter. It's highly flammable and mildly toxic, but all in all it's not much more dangerous than rubbing alcohol.
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RE: Return of the Template
@blakeyrat said in Return of the Template:
Somehow BASIC managed it in like 1988, I'm pretty sure PHP could manage it 30 years later.
I'm pretty sure PHP is worse than BASIC.
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RE: :fa_calendar: :fa_plus: :fa_plus: What's Fucking Up Today: 2016
Exactly what it sounds like. A calendar year is 365 days. A solar year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45ish seconds and, crucially, because orbital dynamics are a bitch, varies slightly and chaotically.
Leap days go a long way towards correcting the difference, but we have to add seconds here and there to cover the rest.
Absolutely not. Leap seconds, unlike leap days, have nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth around the Sun.
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RE: :fa_calendar: :fa_plus: :fa_plus: What's Fucking Up Today: 2016
As an aside: we do break hard on leap seconds and minutes. 61 seconds in a minute and 61 minutes in an hour do not play. Fortunately our upstream systems are worse and are down for maintenance for most of those.
WTF is a leap minute?
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RE: The abhorrent 🔥 rites of C
It was written by someone who doesn't know how to make sscanf do what he wanted it to do. This is all you need:
[code]
ret = sscanf(filename, "%*s://%p"; &ffpipe);
[/code]You're overestimating
scanf
: %s cannot do that. -
RE: Configuration files are hard
@jnz said:
@NedFodder said:
&(unsigned short) lptport
I'm struggling to figure out how this compiles.
Huh, beats me. It's defined as
unsigned int
. The engineer is using Visual C++ 6 (that was the latest version when this project started). I'm not a compiler expert, but I'm guessing he's in UB territory and just getting lucky.No he's not in UB territory, he's squarely in "should be rejected by the compiler" territory. Quoth the standard: "a cast does not yield a l-value".
He could use
(unsigned short *) &lptport
instead. -
RE: Microsoft/Skype's login system -- almost 1/10th as confusing as Google's
[quote="blakeyrat, post:41, topic:54534, full:true"]
That's great, but it only deletes Google+ "features", it still doesn't give me a SEPARATE YouTube and Gmail login like I had before this Google+ disaster started in the first place. So it doesn't fucking do what I fucking want you condescending piece of shit.
[quote]
Maybe it doesn't do what you want, but it does what you asked for, which is what I replied to. Like many people here, I can't read your mind, so I have to go by what you write...If you want two separate logins, it's even easier: open two separate accounts.
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RE: Microsoft/Skype's login system -- almost 1/10th as confusing as Google's
And the answer seems to be: you can't. Fuck you.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that some things that everyone finds easy to do are impossible for you?
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RE: 🔥 First they came for the incandescent bulbs...
Do they work? I thought plants needed a full-on spectrum, including infrared and ultraviolet.
Give a blue photon to chlorophyll, it will go to a state where it can absorb two red photons to produce O2, H+ and e- from water. No need for full-spectrum, but the blue photon is absolutely needed.
Don't ask me for the exact wavelengths, I don't know.
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RE: 🔥 First they came for the incandescent bulbs...
Oh man, nice comment though: "i never did like phillips screwdrivers. guess the company isn't any better."
But it's not the same Phil(l)ips.
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RE: I'm glad they fixed THAT problem
yeah, let's not forget java applets. and, for some people: Tomcat
Java applets? On the web? Did that ever exist?
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RE: How much data did I use in 1970?
I have it as an emergency phone on a $15/year pre-paid plan. It's in my bag normally off. It has been useful a few times when my main phone was out of batteries and the train got stuck so I could let the wife know I was going to be late home.
An external battery would be smaller, lighter, and cheaper.
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RE: Checkit by hand
[code]
if (/ /.test(ch)) { x_space++; }
else { x_no ++; }
...
if ( x_no < min_nonalpha ) {
alert ("New password should contain at least one non-alpha-character");
x_good++;
}
[/code]Nice bug here: counting the number of non-spaces and thinking it's the number of non-alphabetic characters.
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RE: Sublime Text 2 chokes on long lines
Not a Sublime-specific issue. Pretty much every text editor and/or IDE I've ever tried has problems with really long lines. The good ones (like IntelliJ) at least warn you when loading such a file, the bad ones just crash.
Last time I saw emacs have such problems was way back in the last century when 40M was about the size of a whole hard drive.
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RE: Not to be compared to a number
TRWTF is that $LANGUAGE allows for logical negation of int and equality comparison of bool and int.
That, and the fact that $LANGUAGE has data structures that are routinely used as sets but don't have a membership-test method.
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RE: Things I wish I could say to my customers
It resurfaces, this time as a request to redesign it. By the way, asks the customer, I still don't understand why it broke login when we took it out. So that we can avoid breaking it in the future, can you tell me exactly what it does.
IT BROKE LOGIN BECAUSE IT'S DOING PART OF THE LOGIN PROCESS. IT'S A FUNCTIONAL PAGE, IT DOES STUFF BESIDES DISPLAYING VISUAL CONTENT. YOU WILL NEVER TOUCH IT DIRECTLY, YOU NON-TECHNICAL IMBECILE, AND YOU KNOW THAT BECAUSE YOU RAISED A REQUEST FOR A DEVELOPER TO MAKE THE CHANGES. YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS AND YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND IT ANYWAY. THE ONLY THING YOU NEED TO DO TO NOT BREAK IT AGAIN IS NOT DO WHAT YOU HAD ALREADY BEEN TOLD BEFORE YOU DID IT NOT TO F*CKING DO.
I totally disagree with your attitude. When someone asks how it works, you should explain. Otherwise it's your fault that they are a non-technical imbecile.
But then again, I'm in academia, so explaining is a big part of my job.
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RE: Pointless keybinds
@Onyx said:
I switch to QWERTY
You decided to switch keyboards and it wasn't to Dvorak?
What's the point of Dvorak anyway?
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RE: You go MIT
Does it clump?
Yes, it does. Not quite as well as clay, but well enough. I used it for 8 months while I was abroad and never thought of looking for a source of clay-based litter.
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RE: I++ vs i+=1
@Lorne_Kates said:
Until anyone can show that my complaints are about markdown in general, and not specifically about discomarkbbhtmlcodedown, I stand by my statement.
Just read them: they start with if a markdown langage... not with if discourse's markdown language...
Also, I think they are completely backward. A markdown language should use for its markup the characters that are most seldom used to write normal text, not the ones that people use all the time to write text.
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RE: I++ vs i+=1
In the second example, you have:var q = ((3+1) + 4) * (4 - 1) = 24
Wrong. In the second example you have nasal daemons.
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RE: Ashley Madison: Crypto Edition
md5(lc($username)."::"lc($pass))
I'm puzzled: why the fuck would anyone want to convert to lowercase before md5-hashing?
I mean, other mistakes I can understand but this one doesn't make sense, even for idiots.
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RE: X * f(x) semantics
C++, maybe. Sane languages like C don't disguise indirection and always pass function parameters by value, so f(x) can never modify the x that's visible to its caller's scope.
QFT
As for Haskell, it does it just as well as C.
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RE: Am I the only one who knows what "strongly-typed" even means anymore???
Stop and think about it for a second and you'll realize Unicode code points are virtually useless for the purpose of sorting already. Optimizing for that use-case is a dumb idea.
Collating is a very specialized algorithm with narrow usefulness that should be implemented in exaclty one library function. Sorting is a lot more general. For example I could be sorting strings in an array to be searched by dichotomy and code points are perfect for that.
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RE: Am I the only one who knows what "strongly-typed" even means anymore???
Ok; and what does it mean to subtract a character from a character?
Obviously, the answer to this question will be RTFM when they get around to writing TFM.
Using existing operators to define new operations on non-numeric types is nothing new. Some languages even define what it means to add strings together, for example.
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RE: Get rid of old technologies!!!!!!!!!! Blakeyrat is an idiot for even attempting to use this forum
Ever heard of a barter economy?
Yes of course, but if you do it for drinks, or food, or a movie ticket, it's called flirting, not prostitution.
So I'll stick to my restrictive definition.
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RE: Get rid of old technologies!!!!!!!!!! Blakeyrat is an idiot for even attempting to use this forum
While I'm at it: Does anybody know the position of prostitution on this list, and should it get an exemption?
By definition, money has to have been invented before prostitution.
So let's get rid of money. As a bonus, the check "problem" will just disappear automagically.
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RE: Disaster recovery drill
Protip: I am not telepathic.
It's funny, when you utter something ambiguous it's our fault for getting it wrong, but when somebody else does it, it's not your fault.