palordrolap

@Toes @snownyte @otter

There are two mods currently, Ernest, admin of kbin as well as owner of /m/tech, and @artillect, who hasn’t been seen (except for votes maybe?) for 8 months.

The word is that Ernest has real-life problems and can’t maintain kbin at the moment.

I’ve applied here and a bunch of other places but hopefully better-qualified, more active people have also applied; Even if I get it, I can’t be here all the time.

… but it needs the owner of the magazine, Ernest, who isn’t around, to accept the applications.

One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.

There’s at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That “at least one” is me, which is how I know. I’m not here all the time and wouldn’t be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn’t laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

Comparing audio cassettes to modern high-density tape storage is pretty much the same comparison as an 8-bit computer with a modern 64-bit server, or, say, a hamster with a human.

Basically the same thing, but the differences are somewhat notable.

512KB? At the risk of going all Four Yorkshiremen, that sounds luxurious.

Floppy disks held 170KB if you were lucky to have a drive. The PET line, like many 8-bit computers, used a cassette tape drive (yes, those things that preceded CDs for holding and playing music). Capacity depended on the length of the tape. And it took ages to load.

The PET was fancy because it had a built-in cassette drive. That’s what you can see to the left of the keyboard in the picture.

Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there’s a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it’s very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn’t put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

</old man rant>

dude

Presumably this means that Musk/Tesla is looking to embrace this newfangled source of energy known as “aul” and can be extracted from the Earth itself with a magical device called a “puhmpjaak”. Older Teslas can be upgraded by installing a “gehneraydor” in their “truhnk” whatever that means.

Company may or may not be renamed to Texla and start referring to themselves as the largest state automobile company in the USA when they aren’t.

Panic attacks suck. Rationality goes out of the window. “This is it. I’m going to die.”

For me, stress plus a sudden-onset painful physical trigger usually brings them on. The painful trigger can be anything from a muscle sprain to a really bad stomach ache (we’re talking “I now think I might have some idea what period cramps are like and I don’t have a womb” kind of pain levels here.)

Even knowing about previous experiences doesn’t always help. That nagging thought that you’re going to die while feeling terrible in a stressful situation.

Ironically, I’ve wished I was dead many times, but during a panic attack, suddenly survival instinct is the one ringing the alarm bells. WTF brain.

Passed out in a hospital during one of them. Pectoral pain + Stressful day at work = Must be having a heart attack and going to die. Nope. Just a sprained pec and a panic attack.

In some interpretations of “bug-driven” programming, no file, or perhaps an empty file, is an instance of the zeroth-bug: The project does not exist.

One could argue that this bug zero is the true ancestor of all other bugs. There’s something satisfyingly set-theoretic about it.

“New bacteria/plant cell symbiosis discovered”

And if “symbiosis” is too much, “combination”. I also like “meld(ing)”, but that might be somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn’t use “hybrid” because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they’ve bred which isn’t strictly accurate, and “chimera”, while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.

The scientific method is pedantry made manifest.

How sure are they that his hasn’t happened in the last billion years?

Maybe it happens once every 1,000 years but they’ve all died out before humans were able to observe it. It’s not like things like this tend to leave much of a fossil.

And if you don’t like 1,000, there’s a few orders of magnitude to reconsider between there and 10^9.

Different Strokes might well be more of a Gen-X thing. I remember it being on TV (in England) when I was a kid and remember recognising Gary Coleman when he showed up in the '80s Buck Rogers TV series, but I was very young at the time. Pre-school age definitely.

Also, the younger cast of Scrubs are Gen-Xers and they definitely threw in a few references to it.

But let’s not forget that years-later re-runs were and still are a thing, even on the handful of channels that most people had back then, so there are bound to be some people younger than Gen-X who also grew up with those shows as their parents enjoyed them the second time around.

Thanks! I wanted something hard to hit by accident but with a nice mnemonic in it.

A cat-on-keyboard situation could just about manage it, but I don’t have a cat.

The iPod got me. Never had one. Never had a friend who did. This could be a Gen X experience or a cash-poor Millennial experience. If it hadn’t been for the hint I would not have got past that part.

I also didn’t have that particular Nokia so it took me a moment to figure out which button deleted mistakes. Mistakenly thinking that the CAPTCHA designers might not have implemented that part of the interface didn’t help.

Had to guess on the boomerang. I’ve seen boomerangs but didn’t know that’s what they’re called nor have I ever posted one. Again, this could be an “I don’t post on that platform” or an “I only post pictures and haven’t used that feature” experience. I definitely have an account on at least one platform that hosts them though.

I am technically not a Millennial. The term for my cohort is Xennial, I believe.

Weaksauce. Everyone knows you configure at least one Vulcan-nerve-pinch dead-key chord that primes the following key chord to switch the layout.

Only half joking. I’m the guy with Ctrl-Super-Alt-Shift-Pause set to put the PC into Suspend mode.

Unrelatedly, I hope the meme name isn’t a dog-whistle of some sort, because that really would be weaksauce.

Debian has a .deb that does the job.

Unless you have a really old graphics card anyway and then you have to use the .run installer from Nvidia. Pain in the a– sure, but still not Joker level hurt-the-world madness.

Nah. Notepad in Windows. Definitely.

Yep. The phrase “Personal Computer” is fairly old at this point. Everyone and their dog called their computer product a “Personal Computer” back in the 80s. The id-plate on the Commodore 128 and 64C computers had that exact phrase under the computer name.

“IBM-compatible personal computer” is a wordy phrase, and even before the “IBM-compatible” part became somewhat anachronistic, it was being abbreviated to just “PC”, heralding the death-knell for most other systems that otherwise had every right to use the name.