palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

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

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Dead people can't own land. Murderers can take that land. Profit.

No idea. I did find that WDC are still making a variant of the 16-bit successor to the 6502, so I hadn't considered that the tech might not still be around for the earlier generation.

It was only very recently that they stopped making Z80 cores for embeddable use, so if that tech was mothballed rather than thrown out it, theoretically it wouldn't take long to spin all that back up again.

That "theoretically" might just be an uninformed dream though.

Ha. What are the odds that someone resurrects the Z80?

(I'm a 6502 boy, but it would be interesting to see the rival come back)

Good point. Those actual scientists who crave fame have to be in there somewhere.

I can't really argue one way or the other. I'm a recreational mathematician at best. There's wanting to be recognised/known for good mathematical work and there's wanting to be famous, and I didn't really take that distinction into account. I wouldn't mind the former - however unlikely - but the latter, no thanks.

It's not clear what your narcissist associates (? or associates of associates) actually want out of the deal, but their crank level is clearly high even if they're otherwise legit.

Maybe someone could write a paper involving the punnet square crank/non-crank versus pseudo-scientist/actual scientist, and how many of each there is in each square. Or could it be one of those 2D alignment charts. Throw in a third dimension and there'd be a fame/infamy axis too.

Hawking definitely had some crank about him - and not because of his disability - so he wouldn't be at one of the corners.

Any household name from the STEM fields. Most people don't get into those fields with the intention of becoming famous.

Those that do are often cranks, which, mostly to their annoyance, usually ends in infamy, not fame.

Some those that have had fame thrust upon them adapted pretty well to it. Stephen Hawking was a notable example.

Others really wanted nothing to do with it and have shunned the attention. Grigori Perelman is arguably better known for not wanting to be well known than he is for his mathematical work. (This assertion coming from my remembering his name and his desire to be left alone, but not the theorems he proved.)

Like Mandarin, it may be that cat-speak is tonal. What sounds to an untrained ear like the same word could in fact be something entirely different. Even if your untrained ear is trained in another tonal language.

Cat says "Hi", you think you've imitated perfectly but accidentally imply something crude about their mother. Or possibly a horse. Who can tell?

The current government cancelled the previous government's "send 'em all to Rwanda" plan if that's what you're thinking about.

This is not to say we're squeaky clean when it comes to the treatment of migrants - we're still firmly in "could do better" territory - but as far as I know, we haven't been deliberately sending people just anywhere else. At least not yet. Deportations are to where they can be unequivocally proved to have come from, and there's usually a good reason for it.

If the Reform lot get in at the next General Election then the policy is almost certain to be MAGA-level insane.

It's not clear whether they're quoting Trump or not there, but yeah, that's a blatantly pro-Russian stance.

I have to wonder if they've become aware of the legitimate research that implies that paracetamol (= acetaminophen) may actually be no better than a placebo for pain relief.

Unlike a placebo, it does have real side-effects that are genuinely harmful, like potential liver damage and so on.

And then there's that other research that found increased levels of paracetamol in both autistic children and their birth-giver, whatever the heck that means.

Naïvely extrapolate from these data points and you can reach the same conclusion they have.

The truly terrifying things here are 1) their complete misunderstanding of the statistics behind increasing diagnoses of, and also the history of autism and 2) that autism is being considered a bad thing.

Like the concept of predeterminism (is the future already written?), the concept that this might all be a simulation has exactly the same "solution": Don't get too hung up on it. We might as well act like it isn't.

We have as much control over things whether this is all real or not.

Do what you can to get by with as little harm as possible to yourself and others until, well, you know: Game over.

If you have the strength and maybe resources, you might even be able to make this existence more pleasant for others, but if not, try not to worry about it.

As for brain chemistry, I've been in the same head space that brought about your question, and undoubtedly will be again at some point in the not too distant future.

It's probably only because I've taken a bath today and put on fresh clothes that I'm relatively chilled out and philosophical right now. Also the Sun is out, which is probably helping too.

Potential exception: "Adult." Arguably because it generally isn't a verb when emphasis is on the second syllable, some people do that even when it's a noun.

I'm an Adult vs. I'm an aDULT.

Use as of "adult" as a verb is non-standard and where to emphasise that is even less clear-cut for those of us who put the emphasis on the first syllable of the noun. Interestingly, "adulterate" is less strange as a verb and the emphasis is definitely on the second syllable there.

We could tie ourselves in knots analysing the late emphasis form as a verbified noun, re-nounified. Ow.

The underlying truth of said statement is irrelevant. Chronologically, I have been one for some time. Mentally... ehh.

In some countries there's definitely a catch-all law for this. It's called Driving without due care and attention where I live.

I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn't quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn't exist. Assuming that it's true that no such law exists, anyway.

I'm not saying it's not a good thing, I'm implying how much of a good thing it is.

Imagine someone robs your house, causes untold damage, takes all your valuables and shoots your wife, your child, and your dog.

The robbers voluntarily give back the clock you had on the mantelpiece and $20, claiming they feel bad. You get nothing else but those things. The clock is blood-spattered and cracked. But hey, that $20 counts for something, right?

She seems nice.

This year marks three for me. Also still learning.

I'd quote Abe Simpson about being "with it" until they change what "it" is, but that doesn't quite apply online. You're always going to be a couple of steps behind with something as niche things crawl out of the darkness, ever mutating as they turn mainstream.

And to think, when I started on the Internet, I was already technically an adult, but I didn't act like one, that's for sure. Some lessons were hard learned.

Some of it is immortalised if you know where to look. I've changed my pseudonym a handful of times as a result.

So does JPEG. It doesn't mean that people (will) use it for that.

You make a valid point, but the root word is Latin which obeys specific, much simpler rules about pronunciation.

These are unavoidably mangled by passing into post-GVS English, sure, but nonetheless, this is, uh, clearly a case where the spelling does reflect an intended pronunciation.

If it was to be pronounced "nucular", it would have been spelled that way. The spelling indicates that "nuclear" derives from the already corrupted term and should be pronounced as such.

If you really want to be etymologically correct, nuclear and nucular are both wrong and it should be nuculear (new-queue-le-ar), which is similar to and indeed also, a bit peculiar.

Markdown varies a little from instance to instance, but you ought to be able to get away with a backslash before a problematic character (like that dot) or else backticks around something to get monospace text.

editcom → editcom EDITCOM → EDIT.COM

Try not to twist your brain on how I managed to get the left hand sides of those arrows.