palordrolap

Somewhere around here I have an old (1970’s Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; “did be” do be pretty weird, after all.

The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

I’d like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don’t seem to be able to find it right now.

My parents’ house never had and still doesn’t have Internet. I was the one with the computer desk and it had a Commodore 64C and a 13" portable colour TV on it originally.

It finally became an Internet desk at some point in the mid '00s when I got my own place.

I’m still using it right now… and kind of afraid that if I mention its age, it will spontaneously fall apart.

Let’s just say that it’s older than Google.

Thanks for your concern. I’m getting by.

Did you ever have a crazy friend who hated you for weeks because of something you said or did in one of their dreams? How about if they could have ticketed you for that?

On and off, I’ve found myself watching Uyen Ninh’s shorts on YouTube. Her and German Flatmate / Boyfriend / Fiance have something like that dynamic going on in those videos, maybe in real life too. That’s what, or rather who, sprang to mind when I saw this post, for whatever that’s worth.

The focus has been more about their cultural differences (she’s Vietnamese), and the absurdities therein, presented with love and humour. Or else it’s the more “relatable” content that might apply to anyone, but the dynamic is definitely there.

Mediocre at best, and I lack the mental fortitude to work at much of anything these days, so wherever I’m at, I’m not going to improve much.

Some people relish the feeling of swimming through molasses* for the next hit of progress dopamine, or they don’t get that feeling at all, but that’s what happens to me and it basically short-circuits something in my brain. It’s bad enough that I struggled to write the last part of that sentence, and it’s happening while I’m proofreading this as well.

* or treacle if the unintended concept of small mammal anatomy bothers you.

Once I had a bottle of orange shampoo (fruity aroma as well as colour) shoved under my nose by a well-meaning person and it smelled delicious. Like “I must grab this bottle and swig it immediately” delicious. Thankfully I didn’t, mainly due to a comment along the lines of “Here! Smell this shampoo!” that managed to process before the scent did.

There were a few occasions thereafter where I saw that bottle left unattended and the temptation to “just give it a little taste” was incredibly strong. I’m kind of surprised I won out and never did. It would only have tasted of disappointment.

… or would it?

I’d like my mouth to stop watering now though, for real.

Going to assume you mean the meme.

Blake Boston, the guy whose picture was used for Steve, was alive and well as of August last year, at least according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA296fsdaB4, and there’s no obituary showing up online.

The Wikipedia article for the meme would almost certainly have been updated if there’d even been a whiff of that.

I’m sorry you’re having a bad time. I can’t fix it, but know that I wish that no-one had to go through anything like what you’re going through.

Usually people who speak English as a second language are, somewhat surprisingly, fairly happy to receive correction. I see now that you’re probably not ESL.

Since I’ve no idea whether someone is happy to receive correction or not, either I do so and hope for a good outcome - and maybe educate others along the way - or never correct anyone ever in case someone tells me to, well, you know.

FWIW, I do know what its like to not be able to communicate properly with that horrible tip-of-the-tongue sensation, and I also know what it feels like to lose one’s mind as well as lash out in frustration. Been there, done that, with bells on.

Not cancer in my case, but I’ve at least one close family member who had surgery and was on chemo drugs, so I can somewhat relate to that as well.

And since I didn’t quite say it initially: I’m genuinely sorry I upset you and made you feel attacked. It was not my intent.

Grammar nitpick: “Whom” should only be used for people, possibly animals, and maybe other things in an anthropomorphic context like companies, robots*, etc. Extreme pedants would forbid its use for anything other than actual people.

In this instance, “all of which” would be a better substitute for “all whom” in this instance. In fact, that ought to have been “all of whom” whether “whom” was correct or not.

If you’d said “who” instead of “whom” it might not have awakened my inner pedant, but if you’re going to use “whom”, someone is bound to tell you the proper usage if you make a mistake.

* recyclable or otherwise

He should spend more time admiring the view out of various upper storey windows.

“Quite. What is the Frankish for ‘Mr Mittens’ anyway?”

Whoops. It looks like I conflated it with the more recent 7zip vulnerability, which didn’t affect Linux much at all.

Just goes to show how often these things crop up though.

local administrator privileges

… are used by distro update mechanisms and very few people turn those off, even if they don’t use elevated privileges for anything else.

Admittedly, it’s unlikely that a distro’s repository will end up with a compromised microcode package, but it’s not impossible (Remember the 7zip debacle?). And if it happens, you can be sure that whoever designs the payload will use the temporary access to install something ugly that has more permanent access.

But as you say, AMD have issued a fix. And that’d be why.

Naturally. Advantage, privilege and money should only be in the hands of those who run large companies or better.

If that made you angry, bear in mind that’s what most top level company executives think. Well, actually they don’t think it, they know it unconsciously as the true order of the universe they inhabit and they get really uncomfortable should it even look vaguely like someone might be trying a competing philosophy to their own.

To be fair though, most people get really uncomfortable when something might undermine even part of the philosophy they live by.

The problem is, it’s probably true that a greater than average proportion of certain minorities find themselves in legally questionable circumstances more of the time. This is because they’ve always been treated poorly, and had to adapt to survive.

And now those communities have generational problems and familial mental health issues because the fundamental base of their society and community has been damaged, leading to a vicious cycle of maltreatment and increased criminality.

In general, the solution is rehabilitation, not imprisonment. But it’s going to have to be a multi-generational multi-community effort, because for any specific criminalised individual, there’s no guarantee that one person can be rehabilitated; they might be too far gone.

Don’t get me started on the ham-fisted idea of taking children from affected families and raising them away from “bad influences”. It sounds like a great rehabilitative step on paper, but the evidence shows that it’s almost always the wrong thing to do. And it’s usually a convenient way to destroy families, community morale and culture foreign to those who would take the child away, anyway.

I mean, ideally it would be nice to rewind the clock and get all colonial Europeans out of the Americas (and elsewhere) so that the damage never happened in the first place, but those ships have long since sailed. Literally and figuratively.

The real reason that none of this is being fixed is that it’s cheaper and easier to simply lock up those who fall foul of the law. There’s racial profiling in there too, sure, but that’s all part of the cheap and easy part.

A real fix needs time, money, intelligence, compassion and effort, and those are in woefully limited supply. Sometimes deliberately so.

There’s a whole bunch on YouTube.

bprp (= black pen, red pen. He has multiple channels of varying difficulty), Prime Newtons, Sybermath / a+bi, Andy Math and Michael Penn to name five. One or more of their respective styles or their level might not be right for you, but watch a few anyway and you might get recommendations for other channels that you like better.

If you like popular or recreational mathematics, Numberphile is a long-running channel with hundreds of videos, and relative newcomer Wrath of Math is doing numbers (in more than one sense) at the moment.

Without anyone around who would be sad if I ceased to exist, quite a lot of me would leave pretty quickly, if you catch my drift.

But then, there’s also that all but one of me would be in my house, with my things. I’m a nigh-agoraphobic hoarder. Several billion of me would be a long, long way from home and my (our?) stuff, and several thousand would start heading to my house as fast as humanly possible.

There’d be a lot of road accidents. I don’t drive.

Infrastructure would crumble immediately.

Anyone who didn’t “leave” would starve in a few days.

This is not a good plan. Do not use.

Back in the day in the kids’ comics I remember at least one occasion where the spade card suit was used for that purpose. (Britain, 1980s/1990s)

A character’s speech bubble contained “I h♠te homework” or something similar. Might have been spinach instead of homework. Or school. Anything an irreverent protagonist might not like.

The artist was clearly using this as a counterpart to the more often seen “lo♥e”, but as an adult thinking about it now, I have to wonder if the artist had forgotten about the potential racial connotation of using it, or if they hadn’t but didn’t think it was particularly important.

Either way, ♠ could be used as a symbol of hate if the context permits it. Maybe best avoided if you’re looking for a generic one though.

Some kid in a shiny car and a hazmat suit turns up out of nowhere five seconds later and starts shouting and cursing into a bulky radio about having missed it to someone called “Doc”.