palordrolap

Illiteracy possibly. Almost certainly more people will be less able to read older texts.

If that’s going to happen anyway, they could do worse than adopt Pinyin or some variant of it. Or they might prefer something like Bopomofo if they don’t want to use Western characters for whatever reason.

Either way, any decision like that is likely to be 20-30 years away at minimum, and that’s assuming literacy rates start going down, which they might not. I doubt Xi gives it any thought at all.

The vowel you’re talking about is “ə”, also known as “schwa”. It’s probably the most common vowel sound in all varieties of English - in defiance of spelling - but it occurs in lots of languages. (German often uses it as the sound for final e, and French still retains it in some words and dialects for the same thing too.)

As to how common it is in English:

“Thə vowəl yo~ə’re talking əbout is “ə” also known as “schwa”. It’s probəbly thə most commən vowəl sound in all variəties of English.”

In some varieties ə moves closer to ʌ, a similar sound that’s a little further back in the mouth. Links go to Wikipedia where there are sound files to listen to.

I feel like there could be a decent intermediate option here. It quickly glosses over page sizes and then talks about the modulus operator, but misses the fact that bitwise operations can emulate modulus for powers of two, which is generally the sorts of sizes that pages tend to be, and bitwise is generally much faster than the division that modulus performs.

In short, x % z is generally equivalent to x & (z-1) when z is a power of two and is often much faster.

Now, I get that the compiler might be clever enough to turn a modulus operation of the right size into a bitwise operation, but it’s still necessary that the programmer specify that power-of-two size for their circular buffer in the first place.

I would be curious as to whether this “greyer” magic has any benefit when not performing the page table hack.

Sometimes, programs that need to start up an editor will honour the $EDITOR environment variable, which should contain the name of, or full path to, a user’s preferred editor.

It’s not set by default though, and a lot of things will naturally default to vi or even ed. Something to be set in a .profile, .bashrc or similar.

$VISUAL is another variable that is used for similar purposes.

The resemblance to certain two letter commands is not entirely a coincidence.

It doesn’t help that some of the duplicates aren’t duplicates at all but some SO admin or mod hasn’t read or understood the question properly and points the asker at something that’s actually only vaguely related or irrelevant.

I’m pretty sure I’ve also heard of askers providing links to other questions that are similar to but not quite what they’re interested in, explained why their question is different and yet it’s one of those linked questions that ends up being identified as being identical to the asker’s question.

There may also be at least one pair of questions that each point back at the other as being the original, and there’s no useful information in either. (I don’t know why this idea is in my head though, so maybe it was a joke I read somewhere.)

Either way, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they’ve made a mistake. Unfortunately for them, stories like this get out anyway.

Petty little overlords of the toxic waste dump of their own making.

You could, and I’m just spitballing here, start sending your compiled executables to the anti-virus provider and only continuing work once they’ve been added to the upstream exceptions. Bonus points for compiling hundreds and sending them all. Do that for a day or two and there is sure to be a number of communications many levels above you.

If executed perfectly and all goes well, you’ll get your exceptions access.

Worst case… uh. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.

This is actually the correct way to do it in JavaScript, especially if the right hand side is more than 1.

If JavaScript thinks i contains a string, and let’s say its value is 27, i += 1 will result in i containing 271.

Subtraction doesn’t have any weird string-versus-number semantics and neither does unary minus, so i -=- 1 guarantees 28 in this case.

For the increment case, ++ works properly whether JavaScript thinks i is a string or not, but since the joke is to avoid it, here we are.

DuckDuckGo currently provides free access to four different LLMs. They say they don’t store user conversations, but I’m not sure I trust that, or that that won’t change at some point even if they don’t right now.

Most of them have the strawberry problem (or some variant where that word is explicitly patched(?)), fail basic arithmetic and apologise repeatedly and often without being able to better themselves when mistakes are pointed out. Standard LLM fare for 2024/5.

I’m genuinely confused how my advice to minimise harm has itself caused harm. And sometimes, someone’s “best” isn’t much at all. That’d be me most days.

I should probably have put a conditional on “Look at yourself” to tie it in with the “might” in the lead sentence, though, that’s on me.

Male loneliness is as much a symptom of the “suck it up” toxic masculinity that pervades your comment as it is the content of your comment.

Men are taught to be stoic, to rely only on themselves, to suck it up and get on with it, and for some, they’re trying desperately to conform to something that seems frighteningly easy for others. They’re expending all their energy on that unnatural - for them - attempt to conform rather than being able to simply exist as they might otherwise be.

Your instinct might be to attack me for pointing this out. That’s toxicity at play. Look at yourself.

But I haven’t made my main point yet. It’s this same toxicity and trying to “be a man” that turns men into the monsters that women fear, and so it becomes a vicious cycle of negativity breeding loneliness and on and on.

My advice would be “Do better. And if you can’t do better, do your best. And whatever you do, minimise harm.”

There is no problem if both of these people are sane and are getting sane, non conflicting direction from those interested parties who are not involved in the software design.

Ha! Hahaha.

Hahahahahaha.

Oh, I made myself sad.

Many of an engineering bent, including programmers / coders / developers / whatever we’re called this week, have an innate desire to tinker with things and add “just one more feature”. This is known as “feature creep” as more and more metaphorical little bells and whistles are added. See also: “Bells and whistles” itself, “creeping featurism”, “feeping creatures” (ho-ho), and variants thereof.

Searching some of those actually finds other terms that other responders have mentioned.

Most of my stuff over the years has been hobby or job-adjacent rather than my actual job to produce the tools I did, so I think what really helped me to stop working on the very few things that were requested by other people was not being a user of the tool I created.

I still had to “use” things to test them, but once they were in real use, I didn’t have to see them all the time and think “I could just add this little thing here / there / etc.”

It was only at the request of the users that specific new features were added.

Getting someone else to design the interface is often helpful, assuming they’re not an absolute fool.

A few years later, a very similar tool I made, one that I was a user of, got a lot more tinkering and feature churn. Maintaining backwards compatibility reigned some of that in, but there were a couple of times where that wasn’t possible.

Instructions unclear. You have been assigned: ǿ. You now owe a million Danish kroner.

My brain makes some dumb connections. This is basically Dom Joly with his enormous mobile phone, shouting INCREDIBLY LOUDLY into it.

It is if you count your profit in terms of percentage of global profit, and then, should that break down, in terms of global wealth.

Similar to how it’s impossible to reach the speed of light, it’s not possible to reach 100% of global wealth unless you’re the only sentient being left alive, but you can get arbitrarily close. And getting closer requires more and more human suffering, as reaching light speed requires more and more energy.

Only time will tell whether the rich will (publicly) switch to this metric because so far, “Newtonian” measurements of profit have been sufficient, and fractions of global wealth generation look piddly by comparison.

What makes you think they care about that?

You probably mean well, but this sort of “advice” annoys me. It says what to do but not how to do it. Almost like explaining it would be as hard for the advice giver as it would be for the recipient to implement it, revealing what a sham it really is. It’s practically a heckle. “Boooo! Git gud!”

Many materials are biologically inert. Titanium, for example, is often used for replacement joints and doesn’t need anti-rejection drugs. They autoclave or otherwise sterilise things during the operation, so the infection risk is pretty much the same as for any other kind of operation.

Hey, back in the late 90s I bought a laptop from a reputable seller and had literally no idea who the manufacturer was. Was a pretty good laptop for the era too. The badge on the back of the monitor said “Notebook”.

I had to put the product ID code on the bottom into an online search engine - possibly very early Google - to find out it was made by Taiwanese company called Kapok.

Kind of wish I still had it, but I donated it to a good cause years ago.

I could have sworn that the last time I tried to tar-copy part of a filesystem containing hard links that I ended up with copies everywhere rather than preservation of the hard links, and the tar manual page isn’t particularly clear about it at all.

But it looks like I’ve misremembered because a quick test with tar confirms that it detects and saves hard links, and they unpack correctly too. Now I’m wondering precisely what it was that I was doing where I ended up with all those copies.