palordrolap

Actually yes, but I didn’t expect they’d go down the same avenues with the Pi.

I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I’m of that same generation, but I couldn’t justify the expense.

Given the Alpha ideology’s interpretation of Alpha and Beta, I once quipped that I’m a Gamma male and owning it, but having had a long while to think about it, that might get me confused with The Incredible Hulk. And since I’m too old for sticking my arms out horizontally and saying things like “neeyowm”, pretending to be a Delta is out of the question too.

Behold, I am Epsilon male. Do not perceive me.

Edit: It has come to my attention that it isn’t actually the people behind the Pi doing this. I really should read more rather than jumping to conclusions. There’s a few obvious rewrites I could make, but I think the prediction at the end is still valid even if the route I took wasn’t the right one.

This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.

Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.

And now a computer in a PC-like case.

Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.

Well, I have a bunch of stuff around here that serves no real purpose that I’m otherwise sentimentally attached to or think might be useful some day, but I’m not sure I have many duplicates, even loosely speaking.

The best(?) example is probably the fact I have 3 CRT TVs, none of which I use regularly. One is the main house TV but, since I don’t use it much, I’ve never felt the need to upgrade it. The other two are portables that I’m keeping for if I ever get back into 8-bit computers.

The last time I decided to lose weight, I basically cut out all sweet things after meals and avoided regular snacking. It took a while to get used to not having those things (he said, with enormous understatement) but nowhere near as long as it did to lose the weight, so the good habits did lock in for a while, and the weight did eventually come off.

I allowed myself low calorie drinks whenever. The more water in them, the better. Tea with sweetener not sugar is my usual poison, but I switch it up with squash depending on mood and time of day.

A change in medication and slow fall back into old habits has got the BMI back over 25 again, so I intend to employ the same tactics again in the new year. Once all the Christmas snacks I’ve been bought are gone, anyway. *cough*

If I wasn’t snacking and still needed to lose weight, I’d probably try reducing my portion sizes. One less potato. Smaller chops. One less sausage. etc. but I can’t vouch for that because I’ve never needed to go that far.

“Uncle Grandma”

The eyes of the Cryptkeeper puppet in the TV series Tales from the Crypt are the same two eyeballs that were used for Chucky, the doll from Child’s Play.

Russia are never going to agree to this…

Russia won’t agree to anything that isn’t the complete capitulation of Ukraine and Zelenskyy being replaced with a Russia-friendly puppet leader.

Having a plan out there in public isn’t just about the plan, it’s also a message to Russia that Ukraine (and Zelenskyy) aren’t making it up as they go along and that this is what they intend to do if the Russians don’t idit’ na h-y go home.

The Grinch is green. Trump’s the Orinch.

Knee-leeks and spear-leeks. Delicious.

I did think about this, but I imagined that the Russians would find some way to fly mostly over populated areas on purpose so that shooting them down would risk a fireball falling on innocent civilians.

Escort flights might be a better choice, but I can see that turning into a multi-jet dogfight over innocent civilians instead, with a risk of multiple fireballs.

On the one hand, Hungary has remained somewhat different from its neighbours because it’s surrounded by mountains and hard to get in or out of by land so it would seem a safe bet for a swap, but on the other, it’s the 21st century and mountains aren’t so much of an obstacle any more. Would we really want to give Putin an airstrip in the middle of Europe?

It would be foolish to assume Putin’s expansionist plans are limited to Ukraine. It’s just that Ukraine is proving a bit more difficult than he expected and he’s had to concentrate his efforts there.

The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren’t needed.

As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.

Sometimes a person’s brain is only capable of operating in a conversation mode. Full, natural language sentences. Or sentence fragments (like these), I guess.

Then there’s the fact that some people can’t discern the line between the artificial and the real, or else are able to ignore it where they can see it because the LLM makes that easy.

I occasionally bounce ideas off free LLMs and I’ve been mostly conversational when I’ve done so, but I’m aware of things like 1) it’s a crutch 2) they’re mostly wrong about a lot of things and 3) any praise they give is invalid, so I’m not yet into the trap of thinking they’re people.

… but I still feel kind of bad if I drop a conversation when I’m done with it without saying goodbye.

For me it’s not about trusting the hotpatching; I know it can work. What I don’t trust is my own ability to not only do it properly but also to do it in less time than it takes to carefully close all my programs, reboot and then get them all started again. And so, reboot.

And to save making another comment elsewhere: About a week. It would have been longer, but I was having a configuration issue and a reboot seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Sugar free” on things that are mostly sugar because the serving size given isn’t great enough to overcome a rounding down to zero.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

VLC.

But then I’m one of those strange people who doesn’t listen to music much, so maybe I’m missing a trick.

The French word is more akin to the English C word, at least etymologically, which makes me wonder how high it ranks in terms of French profanities.

I think most English speakers know where the B word falls with respect to the C word (and say, something like the worst racial slur), but I have no idea where on that scale the French word falls.

Either way, I’ve definitely heard both English translations be called misogynistic, and I think that would qualify those words for “slur” status. I can’t imagine the French word is thought of any differently.