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

Lurked Digg until v4.

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

Now I’m here.

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

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

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  • 62 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s not about whether it works, it’s about proving that they’re keeping pace with the trends in technology that they’re not directly driving.

    They’re afraid that if they don’t give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that’s what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that’s what will happen.

    AI funding is so far up it’s own backside I’m not sure they’ll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.


  • Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

    Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.


  • Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

    Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

    … and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.






  • Surprised they haven’t tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.

    There’s a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven’t, and it’s still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.

    But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling “the public” what avenues have already failed, or that they don’t want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone’s bound to try it otherwise.


  • Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

    Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell’s manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

    Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won’t cause an infinite loop.

    * And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.


  • Dinosaur here.

    Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn’t have, I could get a surprising amount done.

    But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

    I’ve tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn’t intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

    Old Paint? You didn’t need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

    You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

    Damn kids get off my etc.





  • find’s expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.

    That said, there’s nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.

    The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I’m guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)