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Moo... moo...
  • It's the machine language monitor on the 40-column screen of the Commodore 128 (or, more likely, an emulator of the same). I had a whole part about that, BASIC DATA statements full of numbers, and about how anyone with any sense actually used an assembler even back then in an original draft of my comment, but decided to keep it brief.

  • Moo... moo...
  • It looks like they're going for "machine code" being directly putting numbers in memory, but if you know what you're doing that's pretty much just assembly in an obscure op-code dialect.

  • UK: 27 arrested under Terrorism Act at Palestine Action protest
  • So you can now be a terrorist without blowing anyone up or otherwise killing anyone. Merely inconveniencing and injuring (Edit 2: through carelessness rather than malice, by the look of it) is sufficient.

    Therefore the UK government, in that act where they took away benefits, inconveniencing and causing indirect injury to many, is by this definition a terrorist organisation. (And likewise the government before them.)

    Edit: Forgot the obvious point: Clearly, since the IDF like blowing up and killing people and are not classified as terrorists, that either means that such actions are not terrorist actions any more and only the milder actions now qualify, or they are the worst kind of terrorists and should be labelled as such.

    Edit 3: Source stating there may have been injuries associated with the group's actions: https://theconversation.com/palestine-action-what-it-means-to-proscribe-a-group-and-what-the-effects-could-be-259619

  • What is the X you use for the Y?
  • In principle, I'm all for that. In practice, I'm on a shoestring budget and when serviceable toilet paper can be had for half the price of a bamboo roll, I have to take the cheaper option.

  • What is the X you use for the Y?
  • I like to use the plastic wrappers that toilet rolls are sold in for waste bin liners. I don't know about other places, or even manufacturers, but the ones I buy come in a wrapper that doesn't have any holes except the one I tear to get at the rolls in the first place. All I need to do is widen that a bit once the rolls have run out and it's ready for any bin or bucket I might be using.

    I'm also using an old shredder bin as a waste bin because the shredder part died. Decided I might as well hang on to the lower part. Perfectly usable receptacle.

    It's rubbish, but that only makes it more apt!

  • How does one become a clown?
  • (The following is from my, possibly faulty, personal observation. Take it as you will.)

    Clowns are at least 80% mime. If you can convey a message - often a funny one - with only exaggerated actions and facial expressions, I'd say you're well on your way to clowning. They almost never talk and there's a definite shared white face-paint thing going on.

    The main talkers seem to be the ones that do kids' birthday parties or ones in "senior" positions in a troupe where it would be funny to imitate a bossy person. They might otherwise allow a shout or mock cry of pain, but rarely use words when they do.

    The other 20% is brightly coloured, ill-fitting (usually oversized) clothing, a bigger emphasis on slapstick, and props that make noise.

    I've seen mimes perform cheap magic tricks, so that's not exclusive to clowns, but I'd say that was more of a clown thing as well.

    There's a whole continuum from mimes to clowns to magicians and back again now that I think about it. Teller of Penn and Teller fits somewhere around the "back again" part. And Harpo Marx was basically a clown without the face-paint.

  • North Korean man makes rare direct land crossing to South
  • If, as rumours suggest, the DPRK is in the habit of punishing the families of defectors, I can only hope he was an unattached man with no family.

    At the very least, I'm sure someone in charge of the border patrol at the north side is going to get a stern talking to.

    As to those family punishment rumours, I can imagine the DPRK might like people to believe them, even if they're not true. It would go some way to discourage people from doing things like this.

  • Inquiry finds British committed genocide on Indigenous Australians
  • Well, once you've had your country invaded by rabid psychopaths, there's bound to be some gene admixture (to put that far too mildly) and so you've a chance that their descendents, even if it's recessive and rare, will have the desire go on to do the same.

    Of course, rabid psychopathy and the urge to invade other places can also come about on its own, but when you look at the way the Vikings and their Germanic cousins invaded western Europe a thousand years or so ago, and then note what happened a few hundred years later, it has to make you wonder whether it might have only happened the once.

  • Tap Dance – The Jenkins
  • There's the figure of speech "to tap-dance around (a topic)" meaning to make concerted effort avoid talking about a particular topic all the while talking about many things that are adjacent to that topic. It's usually to avoid coming across as offensive or ignorant in some way.

    The underlying cause and/or whether a bit more knowledge on the part of the speaker could render the dance unnecessary is highly contextual (and mostly irrelevant here), but nevertheless, people tap-dance around topics all the time. (The previous sentence might even qualify as an instance.)

    So, the question is: How much contribution to this n-gram is people pointing out that someone is, or was, tap-dancing around a topic?

  • Anthropic, tasked an AI with running a vending machine in its offices, sold at big loss while inventing people, meetings, and experiencing a bizarre identity crisis
  • That this happened around April Fools' makes me think that someone forgot to instruct it not to partake in any activities associated with that date. The fact it chose The Simpsons' address in its (feigned?) confusion is a dead giveaway (to me) that it was trying to be funny.

    Or rather, imitating people being funny without any understanding of how to do that properly.

    Its explanation afterwards reads like a poor imitation of someone pretending to not know that there was a joke going on.

  • What are your grammar bugbears?
  • It could be owned by an entity called Sutton Snax. That probably isn't what they're going for, but it could be read that way.

    Now, x-apostrophe might be (more?) correct in that instance but it's far more forgivable than any interpretation as a plural.

  • Is it possible for an neighbor's apartment to have mice but not mine?
  • You'd definitely find dry little black rice-grain-like droppings on all surfaces if you had mice, especially in rooms that have food, and more will appear if you clean them away. Also, little sticky splotches that are easy to mistake for drink spillages, because they pee everywhere too.

    I managed to get rid of mine, but I occasionally still find evidence they were here in out of the way corners that I forgot about.

    Brave mice - because I'm sure some will have that trait - and those infected with toxoplasmosis won't care about cats.

    Good luck.

  • Next-Gen Brain Implants Offer New Hope for Depression: AI and real-time neural feedback could transform treatments
  • I'm one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I'm on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

    The reason I'm in the state I'm in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

  • Next-Gen Brain Implants Offer New Hope for Depression: AI and real-time neural feedback could transform treatments
  • I'm one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I'm on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

    The reason I'm in the state I'm in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

  • [SOLVED] Trying to track down what game created a "dirks" directory under ~/.config

    Edit: Welp, I'm an idiot. After posting, I stepped away and realised that the name of the config file had to be the answer.

    The game is literally called colorcode. Found and installed it and lo and behold, the game's author is someone called Dirk Laebish, which explains the directory name.

    Ah well. I'll leave this here for posterity

    ---

    Looking through an old backup, I've found what appears to be the config file for some game or another at the path ~/.config/dirks/colorcode.conf, but searching the Internet (DDG and Google) turns up nothing for this, and searching apt, Synaptic (yes, I know they're basically the same thing) and even the online "wayback" part of Debian's package archive also gives no result.

    The reason I think it's from a game is that the config file, despite its name, contains entries like GamesListMaxCnt and HighScoreHandling.

    The only think I can think is that "dirks" is an acronym of some sort, which is why it's not showing up in past or present packages.

    Based on the sort of games I usually try out and play, it's more likely to be a simple in-window puzzle or card game than a 3D game.

    File dates seem to suggest 2021 as the last time I played / used it, whatever it was.

    It would have been under some version of Linux Mint or LMDE, if the Debian commands didn't give that away.

    Anyone have any idea what it might be?

    1
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
    palordrolap @fedia.io

    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

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