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


I think the point is when it came to secular things pertaining to Christmas, the church would have said “No”, and the state would have gone along with that, even if most people weren’t religious.
The same happens everywhere, regardless of religion or how prominent it is. If you attempt to do something that the elders of a religion say are offensive to that religion, the state will discourage it, and so people don’t bother in the first place.


In Britain, especially from the 1970s to 2000s, there was always a race to be the #1 charting song at Christmas, and songs with a Christmas theme often won out, even if they were otherwise secular pop songs. This means that over the years, we’ve ended up with probably a hundred of them ranging in quality from terrible to great.
America have followed suit. Or else, they might argue they started it with songs like “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells”.
This is largely down to the more permissive secular and Protestant Christian societies where irreverence is tolerated if not encouraged.
The Catholic and Orthodox churches are less tolerant of those sorts of things, so people in countries with heavy influence from those churches - like yourself - won’t have had anything like it.
Pros: Little screens on every key!
Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!
Get one today!
Let me save you a few characters: %Y-%m-%d can be shortened to %F
For visualisation’s sake I also like to put a space before the %F so that the year and the file size are separated a little more, but that’s more of a taste thing than anything else.
(Caveat: %F’s year is explicitly four digits in some libraries, whereas %Y is always the full year. If you’re planning for your code to last 8000 years you might want to consider that.)


Well, the Celts got distracted by the influx of Germanic tribes and as such had more immediate things to worry about and hate than the Romans, but I figure if the Franks, Saxons, Vikings, et. al. decided to stay home, the modern Britons would still grumble about the Romans occasionally.
I mean, the Germanic invasions started over a millennium ago and dislike of that’s still on a low boil, so I figure two millennia isn’t out of the question.
On the other hand, the Romans did go home. The Saxons, not so much.
Yeah. Right Control should be where Fn is for sure.
And as an ISO keyboard user, I need my right Shift key, so that Control has to be a Shift instead. On ISO, left Shift is small and right is large. For that and other reasons I use the right one way more than the left. And if that’s not possible for deep technical reasons, hard-wire it to the left one bypassing all of the trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time a keyboard did something like that.
… and what do you know, there’s a even little space there with no key where they could put the Fn key omitted by those changes.
Everything else I could deal with. Even the otherwise US layout. It’s been a while since I used one, but occasionally there’s a hiccup and I’ll reach for double quote or at-sign in the opposite places, so that muscle memory is still there, maybe waiting for mangling into typing on something like this.
I haven’t used Windows in earnest since Win 7. No wonder they want to force people to upgrade to new hardware.
Oof. That must be a single core laptop from 2010 or something, which if true, that sucks.
I have a 13 year old computer around here that had no problems with LMDE6 when last I fired it up. It was relatively high spec when new which takes some of the edge off, but I never had an input lag problem anywhere except maybe badly-written websites.
Just how limited is your computer?


As it stands, it doesn’t look like there is one. It appears to be a recreational mathematical toy for the creator to learn things more than it is for others to play with. It’s kind of neat nonetheless.
I think I might have made different choices for the reversal calculations, but I haven’t really thought about how I’d implement those choices, nor about nigh-insurmountable edge cases, and I’m only vaguely thinking about the “c = a OP b” case, not anything more extreme. The creator may have wanted to make the same choices but found themselves forced down a different path.
Verbatim from the creator: “it is imperfect”.


I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.
It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.
That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.
… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
alias name-here yields the line alias name-here='contents-of-alias-here' as output, and if you want just the part between the single quotes from that, sed, cut or, come to think of it, related shell tricks that do the same thing, would be needed to capture and convert it.
${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a name for what’s only between those single quotes.
For example, I have a lot of preferences built into my alias for ‘ls’. Occasionally I want to run watch ls -l somefilespec to watch a directory listing for changes to a file. But commands fed to watch don’t go through the alias mechanism, leaving the output somewhat different to my preferences.
It’s wordy, but watch ${BASH_ALIASES["ls"]} -l somefilespec mostly* achieves what I want.
* Unfortunately, watch also causes the stripping of colour codes and I have --color=auto, not --color=force in my ls alias, so it’s by no means perfect - I have add the latter if I want colour - but I don’t have to type the rest of the preferences I have in there.
FWIW, my ls alias is currently:
alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style="+ %F %T"'
I have an alias called save_aliases that does alias > ~/.bash_aliases. alias on its own just dumps all the existing aliases to the terminal in a format that can be parsed by Bash.
I felt especially clever when I came up with that and used it to save itself.
Bonus fact: ${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a way to get at the contents of an alias without resorting sed or cut shenanigans on the output of the alias command.


Explain please. All the ones I see in the image are shaped like four adjoined letter L’s which is the same way around that the Nazis used. Or are you referring to the fact that most of them aren’t stood on a corner, diamond-wise?
Because LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition
Interesting. LMDE seems to be more like MS Windows in that things like kernel updates insist on a reboot, and certain other things are easiest restarted with a reboot too, for example, X.Org changes.
I’m sure there’s still a way to bootstrap a new kernel on the bare metal without needing to reboot, likewise for restarting X.Org, but I foresee problems with any programs and daemons that were children of the original processes. For example, convincing them not to exit when their parent does and then getting them to play nice under a new session.
I mean, I guess you could just not update, or have a long period where they’re unnecessary and that’d work too. That could well be what this meme is getting at. Can confirm sessions (caveat: with standby and hibernate) that have lasted well over a month.
But this all raises the question: Does anyone actually not reboot when system changes happen, and what’s the workflow for bootstrapping without rebooting there?


In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.


Sigh. At this rate I can see a day where I end up switching to WebKitGTK’s MiniBrowser as my main rather than having it as a “secret” backup.


Your former colleagues see your potential but do not see, or choose not to see, the rest of you. The rest of you that’s messy. The rest of you that cannot operate at a high level for long periods. The rest of you that’s just f–king done.
Your former colleagues have stamina in spades - or at least, more than you do - and imagine a perfect individual that combines their stamina with your enviable potential.
But, that person does not exist. Or at least, if they do, that person isn’t you.
There’s no point running yourself into the ground trying to meet an ideal that only exists in the minds of other people.
Don’t buy into their idealism. At least, not until you’re sure you can be the person they think you can be.
Source: I was in a similar situation, but kept going, burned out and am not OK.
If by “too late” you mean “too late to get popular, rich or famous”, well sure, it’s going to be a lot harder now that there are enormous channels that got there first and where people are used to going for content, but if you have something that people want, there’s a chance people will find you eventually.
But that’s still not to say you’ll be big and famous. There are streamers who have been streaming for years who get only a handful of viewers every time they do. And yet they still do it because they love it.
On the other hand, there are many, many people who started streaming but quit because they had to make a living and their time was better spent elsewhere. Streaming only works as a career for, I want to say, the top few percent. (I don’t actually know the figures, but I’d be surprised to learn it was a big number.)
As for equipment, I’ve looked in on smaller channels streaming on Twitch. Not all of them have good stuff. No transitions. No Vtuber avatar. No mic. No webcam. Just raw, live game footage and maybe a little interacting in the chat. Upgrades can happen later.
But if by “too late” you mean that no-one should even think about starting doing streams ever because it’s all been done, or someone’s already doing it, then no, of course not. The day it’ll be too late will be the day all the streaming services shut down.