palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurg

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1 yr. ago

Hahaha, that's not dystopian at all, hahahaha.

When you have a hungry bear on your doorstep, your concern is not misplaced.

Deaf people will almost unavoidably copy the mouth shapes they've seen when other people have spoken. This means that how they sound will be at least somewhat informed by any hearing people they observe as well as indirectly through other deaf people who have also learned from hearing folks.

So yes, aspects of voice accent do carry over to deaf people.

There's also the concept of "accent" within sign language too. How people move between signs, carry themselves and act when expressing an emotion, which is usually exaggerated for the sake of clear communication, can vary from community to community, even if the base sign language is the same.

Decades ago, someone wrote a source filter for Perl that allowed for programming Perl-wise in Latin. To the point of conjugating and declining correctly, or at least in a manner that resembled correctness.

I figure with a sufficiently commanding voice you could do much the same with that as with this.

Link (which contains an example): https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm

Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices

You mean, make the Fediverse even more like Reddit?

Welp. If this keeps up I may have to talk to someone about selective blindness.

It must have been there the last time I looked, but part of me is convinced it can't have been.

I even made sure to check the headers and footers.

When I got rid of mine, I made a list of all the media I still wanted a copy of and then, over time, found second-hand or new old stock DVD versions online. That was ten years ago and I've still not broken the cling wrap on some of the replacements I bought. Just goes to show how much I really needed them!

That said, my collection was far less than 100, so your collection might be an expensive endeavour to replace.

Tapes with crud recorded from TV and computers went to landfill. All the commercial ones went in a consignment I had a charity organisation collect along with a lot of other things I was clearing out at the same time. In 2025, I'm not sure charities will accept them any more.

I did manage to digitise some of the stuff from the TV / computer ones with an old VCR and a TV card in the computer, but that must be coming up on 20 years ago now. That's all on a DVD around here somewhere. In one of those multi-disc wallets. Remember those?

They can still be had online if you feel like paring down the space your DVDs take up. People used to use them for burned DVDs, of course, but there's nothing stopping you from putting legit DVDs in one. Make a separate binder for the DVD covers if you really want to, and send the cases to landfill or recycling.

If you want to go really nuts, do the same with Blu-rays.

I do regret getting rid of a few things during that clear-out, but maybe only one tape had some sentimental value. And yet, if I'd kept it, I'm think I'd be equally disturbed that I didn't get rid of it with the rest of them.

1.2.0 here too... apparently.

I've also known and used it occasionally since the 90's but have never felt the need to find out its version number until today.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to find that information for my installation. xeyes does not report its own version number like newer programs generally do, and it's not in the manual page or as a hidden string in the executable either as best as I can tell.

I eventually found it in /usr/share/docs/x11-apps/changelog.gz, which in retrospect seems obvious, but it wasn't at the time.

You are [...] implying that people of (generally) Asian religions need to change their iconography

That is not and was not my intent, and I was less sure of yours until just now. (This may be reading (in)comprehension on my part, to which I'll be happy to admit fault.)

So, let me make sure I'm understanding you. Are you saying that you think that any and all gains from bigoted or unethical sources should be thrown away and that we should have nothing to do with them?

I understand why people would be extremely uncomfortable with some of these and I even think that where we can, we should avoid them, but we can't get rid of everything.

If we must insist on everything then the whole of humanity needs to get in the sea because we're all products of humanity's inhumanity if you go back far enough. In many cases, it's not that far.

If we say "nothing" then we give way to terrible people and let them have free reign.

So tell me. Where is the line? I still think that's a fairly difficult question, even if you don't.

You say it's a solved problem in one area as though it should be a solved problem elsewhere. That puts your comment on unsound footing.

As for the comparison you don't like, there are often only so many ways to write certain things in code. Some of those are invariably going to be very similar to that which was written by a bigot. That might be OK (like continued Hindu and Buddhist use of the swastika). Outright using that which was actually written by the bigot though?

People may say "please don't do that".

And there's the rub.

This is a tricky one. If a bigot says the sky is blue, they're not wrong about that. Other things, sure, but not that.

Maybe we could take their efforts and use it against them somehow. That is to say, we might deliberately use that code for anti-hate purposes, perhaps, subverting the bigot's preferred goals. Make it so that any gain they might have had is overtaken by their disgust at how it's being used.

On the other hand, taint is by association. There's a really neat and geometrically useful symbol; fourfold symmetry, previously used by Hindus, that picked up an extremely negative association around 90 years ago, for example, and short of humanity forgetting history, we're never getting that one back.

If you were someone helped by that code being used against bigotry and you found out where it came from, you're probably going to have mixed feelings about it when you finally get the time to reflect.

You might understand why people would want to avoid it, even if it is correct.

That'll, er, teach me to just go by the graph.

Thank you for your insight.

This does not appear to count work done outside school hours, which makes me wonder how much of the work teachers in other countries do outside school hours is actually being counted within the Japanese teachers' hours.

Or is it the case that Japanese teachers do proportionally more outside school hours too?

You're missing the fact that water wets itself, and is thus wet. The only non-wet water is that where the molecules are far enough apart to not interact with each other. That's very hard to achieve even in the vapour phase.

Yes, yes, I see you laughing. "It needs new underwear" ha ha ha. But seriously, though.

So, first of all, I'm not sure everyone here knows who Dave Plummer is nor that he's fairly open about his being autistic.

(For those that don't know, he's the guy mostly responsible for the classic Windows Task Manager and a whole bunch of other things that appeared in Windows back in the day. His YouTube videos are an interesting watch every now and again.)

Second, folks are going to find this to be in bad taste whether they know he's autistic or not.

The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD

In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.

I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.

Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.

Ouch. AMD and Intel are both US based. Intel was easy enough, but I'd have to do a lot of soul searching and research to give up AMD, their graphics cards and the x86 architecture.

And this is from someone in Britain, where ARM - probably the next best alternative - is based. (As in located, not the new sense of based. Though they might actually be that too.)

I have a set of commands I run occasionally to back up my homedir. That contains pretty much anything that's text, text-like and related metadata. Things like personal documents, code projects, etc. are all in there. Basically anything that isn't enormous goes into that.

i.e. Software installed into my homedir by things like Steam and Wine are currently skipped. It currently runs to about 1GB, compressed.

Minecraft worlds are also skipped but get their own separate backup command set.

Never really got around to compiling those command sets into actual scripts. I kind of prefer to copy-paste them out of a text document and into the terminal so I can take action at each step if something goes wrong.

The major failing is that they each build a single tar.xz, which I then copy to an external 1TB drive. There's no deduplication so that's getting a bit full at this point.

Photos and media hoards (software installers, website rips, music) currently go on a single Storage drive that isn't backed up. I should probably do something about the photos, tbh.

Warm freshly baked white bread is 10/10 for a bread lover.

Supermarket own-brand plain white sliced loaf is generally ordinary, basic and inexpensive, but nonetheless acceptable. 5/10.

This knowledge may raise more questions than answers, but it may help narrow the scope.

Scale may extend past 10 for sufficiently exotic bread. Ask the continental Europeans offended by that 10/10 rating.

Tiny Core Linux seems to be 32-bit by default (inferred from their downloads page which links to a separate 64-bit version)

Their minimum package is GUI-less.

Haven't used it myself, but maybe it's what you're looking for. Spin it up in a VM, etc.

This site lists that and four others: https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distros-without-gui/ (I only looked at Tiny Core for the sake of this comment, so I don't know if the others are 32-bit or not.)

Crazy alternative: FreeDOS. Pros: Lots of abandonware out there for that platform. Cons: I can't tell how good its support is for USB-connected drives and networking. It definitely has some. Maybe it would be enough for your hardware.