palordrolap

Wait until you learn the original joke dialogue was “Are you worried about mad cow disease?” and “No, I’m a tractor.”. I kind of messed up on the first line previously because either work with the punchline.

Orcas are in the dolphin family which is a branch of the whale family, specifically those with teeth rather than baleen. Compare how humans are in the ape family which is a branch of the primate family, specifically those that are less arboreal and lack tails. If we can say humans are primates, we can definitely say that orcas are whales.

Sea-star Cee-kay? Presumably the oddly named daughter of a disgraced comedian.

(I only joke because I tend to censor myself in the same way.)

Two cows in a field. One says to the other “Have you heard about mad cow disease?” and the other says “Holy s–t a talking cow.”

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn’t its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I’m not sure I’d be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

m’user

Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is a microcosm that doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. We can stab at the tankies all we like, but it wasn’t their influence in the Fediverse that caused the result, even if they did manage to hoodwink a few into voting for fake tan man.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Looks like Guerilla Mail still exists. Been around for years at this point. No idea if there’s any controversy about them, but there are reviews out there giving them high marks.

I’m imagining that your first name is something like Vijay and your middle initial is J, and so no wonder you wouldn’t notice.

Fears grow? Really? That’s what it’s been about for decades at this point.

Funny. I had a boss who thought that use of initials was pretentious. Or maybe I’m putting words in his mouth and it was specifically my use of a middle initial he didn’t like. Harry S Truman’s name would presumably have given him a headache.

Either way, I countered that having a customised number plate on a car was surely just as bad, to which he had no answer.

• Partial tip: There’s often the suggestion of concentrating on breathing, usually with some kind of regular pattern. This is an alternative to try.

You’ll need to have been in bed for a while, mind racing. Take how extreme that racing is and then taking a similarly extreme, almost uncomfortably deep breath to match it. This requires having been in bed for a while.

Hold it for a bit. Don’t count seconds - avoid numbers. As soon as you get the vaguest hint from your body that you need to let it out and breathe normally again, do so. Try to relax as much of yourself as possible as you do that. This is not a “hold your breath till you pass out” thing. You want to go back to breathing normally.

If the breath was too deep and that freaked you out a bit, try going a bit more shallow on the next one.

This has sometimes worked for me, especially if I’ve been asleep already and can’t get back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ve tried a regular breathing exercise after that.

Other times I have got out of bed and done something mindless for a while until I felt tired again. No doomscrolling.

• More traditional tip: No caffeinated beverages for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. Yes, six. Nine’s even better.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Watched a few back in the day. Wasn’t really my jam - I was too old for it even then - even if the tangentially related _asdfmovie_s are somewhat entertaining when they appear.

Oof. I’d never even thought about it in terms of race, but now you mention it, I have to wonder if I ever heard it in that context.

… and, not that I remember, probably have. sigh