palordrolap

Unmentioned by other comments: The LLM is trying to follow the rule of three because sentences with an “A, B and/or C” structure tend to sound more punchy, knowledgeable and authoritative.

Yes, I did do that on purpose.

… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?

How about Bluesky?

I made sl on my computer a bit more literal. It takes the output of ls -l and reverses every line, including any wrapping within the column width, and pads it to the right of the terminal. One day I might get around to fixing it so that it forces, parses and correctly reverses the ANSI colour codes too.

In /usr/bin, I get lots of lines that “start” with spaces and “end” with things like toor toor 1 x-rx-rxwr-

US English dialects mainly, though there may be pockets in other Anglophone places.

Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.

… but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.

According to Wiktionary, Russian uses different words (as do a lot of languages for that matter) for the two concepts, so it’s hard to imagine how this could have happened.

Yes, I know it’s a joke. I think it would have been a cleverer joke if Russian was a language that used the same word for both, like English.

But then, if you do find a language that does this, the word order is generally different, and the word is generally conjugated into an adjective so it still can’t be mistaken for a noun. (This is based on what happens with “European Space Agency” which would otherwise be a better candidate for the joke.)

Using AI to find errors that can then be independently verified sounds reasonable.

The danger would be in assuming that it will find all errors, or that an AI once-over would be “good enough”. This is what most rich AI proponents are most interested in, after all; a full AI process with as few costly humans as possible.

The lesser dangers would be 1) the potential for the human using the tool to lose or weaken their own ability to find bugs without external help and 2) the AI finding something that isn’t a bug, and the human “fixing” it without a full understanding that it wasn’t wrong in the first place.

The basic functionality of sponge can be emulated with an AWK or Perl script, so most people who needed it in the past almost certainly rolled their own.

I get what they’re going for with the arrow coming from the process to STDIN, but I still feel like it should point the other way.

And shout-out to the sponge and tee command-line tools for those situations where the memory buffer won’t cut it.

You can also try signalling the parent with a SIGCHLD. Most of the time it does nothing, and hey, you’d be using a stronger version of the kill command anyway if it doesn’t work.

Is this the first human trial, or just the first officially sanctioned one?

IIRC there was that one guy who experimented on himself and cured his lactose intolerance.

… found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

Nearly 8 years ago.

“I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”

That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.

I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.

… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.

If 1) you’re smart or practised enough to be able to generate what you’re asking the AI to do for yourself, 2) you’re able to take what the AI generates and debug, check and correct it using non-AI tools like your own brain, 3) you’re sure this whole AI-inclusive process will save time and money, and 4) you’re sure using AI as a crutch won’t cause you brain-rot in the long term, go nuts.

Caveat: Those last two are tricky traps. You can be sure and wrong.

Otherwise, grab the documentation or a bunch of examples and start hacking and crafting. Leave the AI alone. Maybe ask it a question about something that isn’t clear, but on no account trust it. It might have developed the same confusion that you have for precisely the same reasons.

So anyway, Linus clearly fits 1 and 2, and believes 3 and 4 or else he wouldn’t be using an AI. Let’s just hope he hasn’t fallen into the traps.

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64’s BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn’t get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid “easy programming” platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

Where is this woman from? I don’t think the galactic economy has recovered enough for the Magratheans to have been awoken again.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.