palordrolap

So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.

I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.

But I’ll give you a true one.

At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.

The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.

So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.

Many things could have gone wrong…

…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.

No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.

Depending on local laws, income and other assets obtained by a benefactor within a certain amount of time (perhaps up to a decade) before death may be subject to inheritance tax or higher inheritance tax rates before being passed to beneficiaries.

And if the parents don’t declare it, then the beneficiary will have the same “bag of cash” problem but a few years down the line, because the government has no idea where it came from.

Edit: Put a benefactor where I should have put beneficiary.

You might want to check out Tommy Edison on YouTube. Great fella. Blind since birth. Has answered most of the questions anyone has ever had for a blind person in his many videos. I don’t know him, per se, but I do know of him, so I hope that counts.

I seem to remember that he thinks of vision as being like a superpower, being able to know that someone or something is over at a distance without having to directly interact.

I have a signed copy of The Log by Craig Charles (best known as Lister from Red Dwarf), though it was a gift, so I never actually met him myself.

… though funny story, I could have met him a couple of times at a gig he did in my hometown.

The first was when I was walking to the venue, no-one else around somehow, and there was this guy jumping up and down on the spot not too far off near the venue, which is not what you generally see someone doing in the street. As I got closer I must have looked away for a second because when I looked back, he was gone.

When he came on stage I realised it had been him warming up outside, getting the blood flowing, etc. He’s fairly distinctive in appearance, so you’d think I ought to have realised sooner, but I don’t think I recognised him outside because 1) I usually see him on TV and 2) I genuinely didn’t expect to see him there.

Then later, after the gig, he was outside the stage door as I walked by on the street, but alas, I am an introvert and he was still “on” which was a bit too high energy for me, so I didn’t take the opportunity to join the other fans who were getting an outdoor encore.

Either they don’t have those here (UK) or I’ve never been invited to one. I don’t go looking for open invite reunions either way, so as you might guess, I doubt I’d go to one, morbidly curious or not.

They switched from opt-in to opt-out a while back here in the UK. They figured that most people don’t care either way, but that most people couldn’t be bothered to sign up for a Donor Card.

I’m kind of in the opposite boat. I have enough self-loathing and lack of desire to continue living on this planet any longer than I have to that I’m not sure I want any part of me to continue existing after brain death.

I didn’t opt-in before, and I feel bad about forcibly opting out, which is, I suppose, what the organ harvesters are counting on, so I haven’t.

Yet.

Well, I’m not going to downvote, but something in my brain is screaming “lossy compression!” and so you might say I’m at least wary.

Observation: When you stick your head out of a car window at speed, you’re going from almost no wind to a lot of it very quickly, and that’s bound to take your senses by surprise, regardless of whether you’re consciously expecting it or not.

Helmet-less motorcycle riders - inadvisable as their choice may be - have the advantage of being able to ease into it from standing to moving at whatever their cruising speed is over the course of a reasonable acceleration.

… though I note that other posters have given reasons why it’s still not entirely pleasant for the motorcyclist.

That sounds more like a protection racket than good advice.

… which will be fed into the next generation of LLMs in order to stop sounding quite so much like LLMs.

That’s a tricky one. I’m a big fan of Bourbons, but since they’re not restricted by copyright or branding, every UK supermarket and many other confectionery companies each make their own and the quality can vary quite a bit.

There are also two common form factors. The original is roughly 2:1 (as pictured in the above article) and the other, which is less common, is closer to 3:2 to match the common form factor of the Custard cream.

The supermarket own-brand I usually get (2:1) has the bonus of being dairy-free, which is not always the case.

Sometimes I catch myself involuntarily doing a little happy dance on biting into one, so the quality of that particular brand has yet to drop beyond that threshold for me.

I once worked on a project where a third party-parser had a bug that effectively made it sensitive to the order it loaded files.

This wasn’t a syntactic or a semantic problem. There was a stack processing issue that could be avoided by simply loading the files in a different order. This might have changed the final semantics if one file contradicted another, but that generally didn’t happen. Each file had a specific purpose and it would still break without any contradictions.

The default load order was whatever order the file system had the files stored, but knowing that wouldn’t necessarily help because changing the size or contents of a file in such a way that it retained the same position might trigger the same issue. Therefore you could force by-Unicode load ordering and still have it choke.

It was very hard to track down and I very much did not like editing those files for fear of triggering the parser bug. When I had to would be where the regret kicks in.

The other regret, and maybe a little more relevant, was renaming all the files to a different filename format that didn’t make any difference in the end, but it was uglier than the original and it stuck.

I believe a later version of that parser fixed the bug(s), but I moved on.

Some have aged like wine. Others, milk.

Some are still in use that ought to have been dropped years ago. Others have been forgotten and need to make a comeback, or at least get a remake.

And in a large number of cases, people will disagree about which memes fall into which category.

Also a lot of the newer memes have completely passed me by or else are so niche I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to have seen them or not. This revelation largely stems from a recent visit to KnowYourMeme to look for an old meme and all the recent posts were completely opaque and bewildering to me.

I guess this means I’m old, but I already knew that.

Binface could easily do better than Farage has. I mean, it’s not exactly a high bar.

Farage barely shows his face there and almost never in Parliament.

You can guarantee that Binface would be more than willing to show up in both places frequently. He might even go so far as to represent Clacton properly. Perish the thought!

(I can imagine that if he won they wouldn’t let him into the Commons due to not being dressed sensibly and then refusing to recognise him if he does so, because that’s the sort of dirty trickery I’d expect from Parliament. So I’d be very interested to see what he does in order to comply with both directives at the same time.)

Some of these people are so out of touch that they’d have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.

Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn’t humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.

Chances are that they didn’t have anywhere near enough space to give everyone the full terabyte and they were gambling on not everyone needing all their allocated space.

I mean, it’s not hard to throw 64TB of drives into a server, set up RAID with some level of redundancy (let’s say something that gives 16TB apparent) and get it hosted in a data centre somewhere. If you’ve a thousand users all taking up no more than a few gigabytes each, you might not even fill it.

And if they bought those drives prior to the recent price hikes on all things storage, it might not even have cost them much. (I mean, the initial outlay even now wouldn’t break $10k.)

This is all catastrophically bad planning, yes, but businesses do this sort of thing all the time, even long after the start-up period where something so basic might make sense.

(And thus we see a likely reason why they’ve suddenly shrunk the free tier to a slightly more sensible value.)

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

Local historical societies and any locations that still exist from those photos maybe ought to be given the option to save them if you don’t want to keep them.

If you can identify people and locations all the better. Since you have scans you can provide a physical thumbnail sheet with what’s going on in each one. Or do what they did in the old days and write on the back of them.

The password manager I use lets me create a hierarchy so I can subcategorise. Reading the other comments here suggests that it’s not a unique feature and so I’ll hazard a guess that most of them can do the same thing.

It also supports different databases if you really want to go that route, but since that means you’ll need a different password for each one, you’re undoing some of the work of having a password database in the first place… unless you intend to have a master password database with a master master password. That just hurts my head to think about.

Altavista circa 1999. Google stole the crown and was good for a long while after that, but it’s intentionally worse now than Altavista was back then.

If someone like DuckDuckGo could get their heads out of their cloacas long enough to fix the + and - features for “must contain” and “must not contain”, they could easily steal that crown.