palordrolap

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.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

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.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

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.

Vaporisation. When synapses are too far apart, or blown to atoms, confusion is not the result. Oblivion is.

@rglullis@communick.news @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es

It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).

This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn’t post notices in public places.

I used to go to a local supermarket once a week. I didn’t (and don’t) have my own transport, so I’d walk there (or get the bus there rather than home after work) and then take a taxi back home. Buying a week at a time worked out cheaper than constantly getting bits and pieces from even closer stores, but carrying the bags then became a pain, hence needing a taxi back, which undid the savings somewhat. (The bus is not really viable when you have four or more bags.)

Then I switched to every two weeks to save on taxi fare, shoe soles and dealing with weather.

And now I just order online and have it delivered every couple of weeks. I’d order more, but my fridge only holds so much, and fresh vegetables only keep so long anyway. And the delivery charge is a third of the price of a taxi home.

The only downside is that I don’t get the exercise of the walk to the supermarket.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.

I burned out and can now barely look after myself let alone my property. Thus work for me is existing. Actual paid employment would literally destroy me. The medication doesn’t help much.

But if you want interesting shift patterns, I was once on a rotating days and nights schedule that was a lot tighter at one end than four-on, four off. Day shifts were eight hours but staff were staggered so all hours from 8am to 6pm were covered. Nights were always 8pm to 8am. (On-call and a different team covered 6pm to 8pm.)

The worst part of it was that you could finish a day shift at 6pm and need to be in work for a night shift at 8pm the following day. 26 hours to adjust. That was all.

The best part was if your night shifts ended and the recovery time led into a weekend where there was no day shift. That made for nearly a week off, which happened about three times a year.

But absolutely none of that made up for the way it messed with my sleep schedule. I thought being a night owl would make it easy. I was wrong and it severely weakened me.

And it took several years of a different but increasingly stressful (days-only) job before I broke completely.

My previous landline phone had a digital answerphone on it, and yes, there was a while where I took inspiration from the funny answerphone message lists that made it onto the early WWW from prior junk faxes and chain e-mails.

My current one - because I still get the occasional call on the landline number - might have a similar “record your own” feature, but I’ve never bothered. I use the prerecorded message that came with the base station phone.

As for my mobile… I don’t actually remember what the message is that I have on there, but it won’t be anything interesting. Also it costs money to check / make changes to it on my plan, so it won’t be getting my attention any time soon.

This.

Now, that’s not to say I haven’t slacked off in other ways, but to be so obvious as to sleep? No.

And I say this as someone who has worked nights and been on call and had severe sleep deprivation as a result, but I still never slept at work.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.

Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.

For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.

Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.

And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.

But these are all evils.

Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.

It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.

There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.

FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.

Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.

Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.

Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)

I’ve always been fascinated by the act of pushing a button to make something happen. Like since before I remember. Lift / Elevator buttons especially at first*. Light switches, even.

Then combine that with relatively high-functioning ASD or AuDHD or whatever’s actually going on between my ears, creating an affinity for things are logical and lack messy, confusing emotions.

*There’s one lift that’s been in service longer than I’ve been alive, was frequently used by my mother when I was in a pushchair / stroller to bypass the nearby staircase. I still yearn to go back to it, press the buttons for myself, see the way they light up and ride the lift. The last time I was nearby it was busy and in use by mothers using pushchairs / strollers, believe it or not. The nerve!

You’ve already experienced non-existence. 13 billion years of it before you were even conceived. Or a few thousand if you’re religious and don’t agree with the science, I guess, but either way, you didn’t suffer any meaningful harm from it.

FOMO is a good one, but the dead don’t care. They’re not even capable of caring. And some day we’ll be among their number.