For me it’s a vowel sound, sure, but the mouth is definitely in, or moves to, the position it would be if a pronounced R, and presumably a vowel, was about to follow.

Probably more so than in the pronunciation of name of the letter R itself, in fact, which is indistinguishable from “ah”.

But perhaps more importantly, no, we generally don’t say “brr” anyway, except in exaggeration or for effect. You’re more likely to hear something like “it’s bl–dy freezing” or “my hands/feet are like ice”.

In addition to corsicanguppy’s comment, some — often important — programs actually expect the system to be secured in a particular way and will refuse to function if things don’t look right.

Now, you’d be right to expect that closing down permissions too tightly could break a system, but people have actually broken their systems by setting permissions too openly on the wrong things as well.

That said, for general, everyday use, those commands don’t need to be used much, and there might even be a way to do what they do from your chosen GUI. Even so, it nice to know they’re there and what they do for those rare occasions when they might be needed.

Ehh. Old 8-bit machines had no trouble with the veritable Gordian knots written by kids in their bedrooms back in the day, so any chip’s gonna be fine.

That’s not to say this chip wouldn’t run it better…

Try preceding the hash with a backslash. Not all of the Fediverse supports all of the same parts of Markdown when viewing posts between instances, but that one ought to be reasonably standard.

# If you see this line preceded by a hash, that’s because it actually starts with \#.

Based on the positions of the "bonk"s and "ow"s, I posit that the target is a sentient floating torus.

Paired with the recent change that Oscar award judges are no longer allowed to skip parts of the media they’re reviewing (because apparently that was a thing), the number of AI slop movies is going to be absolutely gruelling for them to wade through.

One possible outcome is that this means AI kills the Oscars… but it’s more likely to get that watch-all rule rolled back.

And either way, it would probably mean that we’ll never see another 2001: A Space Odyssey again because a bunch of that movie looks like AI slop.

… I just realised this means that AI-generated movies could well end up being trained - accidentally or on purpose - to determine what would generate the most Oscars by exploiting underlying psychology that exists only in the sort of people who are employed as Oscar judges, but which somehow manages to mostly exclude everyone else.

That said, many people disagree with the Oscar nominations and awards anyway, so whether that makes any real difference is probably moot.

Yeaaah, you’re gonna need to re-evaluate that cis-het label, friend. I like and respect the guy too, but if some miracle turn of events ended with he and I in the same time and place and he asked me for that, I’d politely but firmly decline. And then maybe enquire if his wife knew about this.

I’d probably be more comfortable if she put him up to it, but it’d still be a no.

Henrietta Lacks hasn’t managed it yet. Look her up. It’s at least as bad as this if not more so.

“Yet” being the operative word here. There’s a disease in dogs that started in some very similar circumstances (although happening in nature rather than from a science accident). One slip-up from an immunocompromised tech with just the right genetic make-up and it begins.

There was a post on a similar subject not too long ago, and it seems the landscape shifted about 10 years ago. A whole load of alt-lifestyle folks got into Linux and sysadmin, and maybe a few previously straight-laced sysadmins came out as alt too.

Vive les différences

True. I think of it more as a semantic shift. In the old days, processes would actually quit and some other process would resurrect it as necessary, but then someone had the idea of having some processes catch the HUP and do all that itself without actually bothering any other processes.

And the implementation might actually involve an exec of the process’ own executable, meaning that it actually does self-terminate, but it leaves a child in its place.

In order of decreasing politeness: 1, 2, 15, 9 = HUP, INT, TERM, KILL = “Please stop”, “Quit it”, “I’m warning you” and “BANG”

If you approach people and tell them you’re normal, they won’t believe you. Something similar applies to saying you’re human on the Internet.

Hello, yes, I am a human.

Suspicious, isn’t it?

The cynic in me wants to know: Once purchased, will it, and any media it might contain at any time, be under the sole control of the purchaser?

If not, it’s definitely not worth buying.

Can only speak for myself, but I think backspace is probably one of my most used keys, the number of typos I make. Generally, I don’t miss these*, but when proofreading or rewriting parts of comments I occasionally leave a word in from a previous iteration or take one out that I meant to leave in, throwing a wrench into the flow.

I can easily imagine that for some people that goes to another level and they might be too tired or stressed to be able to even notice, let alone fix the mistakes they make. There’s also some level of short attention span going on and people may not be bothered to fix it because they have to be off to the next piece of content or contributing elsewhere.

* The spell-checking red squiggly underline admittedly being something of a crutch. I’ve noticed an increase in the number of longer or more obscure words that I’m sure I was getting right before but now not so much. And about once a day, on average, I reckon, I reach for right-click to figure out precisely what I’m getting wrong because I can’t figure it out.

Most of the time, I’ve missed a letter or am woefully wrong, but very occasionally it’s not in the built-in dictionary and online dictionaries basically say it’s fine. And the-e-en I rewrite to avoid the word anyway. Not everyone’s going to do that.

Perl was originally designed to carry on regardless, and that remains its blessing and curse, a bit like JavaScript which came later.

Unlike JavaScript, if you really want it to throw a warning or even bail out completely at compiling such constructs (at least some of the time, like this one) it’s pretty easy to turn that on rather than resort to an entirely different language.

use warnings; at the top of a program and it will punt a warning to STDERR as it carries merrily along.

Make that use warnings FATAL => "syntax"; and things that are technically valid but semantically weird like this will throw the error early and also prevent the program from running in the first place.

Well, you see, Perl’s length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn’t been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

A case of “don’t order fries if your meal already comes with them or you’ll end up with too many fries”.

I like to think of it as the Conservatives chose to sit on the right because they can’t accept that they’re not.

And I believe this pun works to some extent in French too, which is where that arbitrary labelling started.

As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

* You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.

As far as people likely to say that middle one go, most of Britain would disagree that it rhymes with spider. You might get a crisp T or, more likely, a glottal stop, but not a D sound.

That said, Aussies are even more likely to use it and they do have some t-d merger going on in some of their accents.

Why the grimace? Rubber ducks definitely aren’t made of rubber these days. They’re plastic.