Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Is on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during a week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • If that’s the login or lock screen, Cinnamon won’t be handling them.

    As for restarting Cinnamon, Alt+F2, r, Enter is the mild restart. There’s also a deeper restart accessible through Melange, Cinammon’s debugger.

    By default, it’s bound to Meta+L and in its bottom right drop-down, there is an option to Restart Cinnamon.

    What’s the difference? For one it definitely clears up zombie child processes that Cinnamon might be ignoring. (It might have also ironed out refresh rate issues and screen-tearing that the milder restart didn’t help with, but my setup has changed a bit since then.)

    Always worth a try if the first one doesn’t seem to sort a problem out. Definitely worth it when the next two options are log out and back in, or reboot.

    (Just be careful when clicking because the next menu option is “Crash Cinnamon”.)


  • So I decided to go peek at the ragecomic subreddit. Yes, the very one-time ragecomic home-from-home outside of 4chan. Last post 17 days ago, using at least two “extinct” faces, got 600 upvotes.

    It’s complaining that there are no good tools to make ragecomics any more. (I have not checked to see if that’s true.)

    Y’know, I feel like they should stay there. Anything that’ll mess up an AI should stay on that site for as long as humanly possible. smilingthumbsuprageface.jaypeg



  • JavaScript, like some other languages of the time, was designed with the Robustness Principle in mind. Arguably the wrong end of the Robustness Principle, but still.

    That is, it was designed to accept anything that wasn’t a syntax error (if not a few other things besides) and not generate run-time errors unless absolutely necessary. The thinking was that the last thing the user of something written in JavaScript wants is for their browser to crash or lock up because something divided by zero or couldn’t find an object property.

    Also it was originally written in about five minutes by one guy who hadn’t had enough sleep. (I may have misremembered this part, but I get the feeling I’m not too far off.)



  • An analogy:

    My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.

    It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.

    I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.


  • xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

    e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

    You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.



  • I’d say it’s more like setting up a handler for a callback, signal, interrupt or something along those lines.

    Function declarations by themselves don’t usually do that. Something else has to tell the system to run that function whenever the correct state occurs.

    That doesn’t account for unconditional come-froms.¸but I expect there’d have to be a label at the end of some code somewhere that would give a hint about shenanigans yet to occur. Frankly that’d be worse than a goto, but then, we knew that already.



  • You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

    For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

    Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

    Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

    Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

    Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

    That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.


  • palordrolap@kbin.runtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLike a prion
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    10 days ago

    “If you took all the DNA out of a person and laid it end to end, that person would die.”

    The distance to Jupiter from Earth is but a mere blip though. Even the galaxy is small compared to what’s beyond.

    Thanks to chaos theory, what we do here can have some effect on the far future of the Universe, at least, for those places within causal reach. How meaningful that effect can be remains to be seen.

    But do bear in mind that even, say, a cow farting in a field in France last Tuesday might have as much effect as everything you ever do.


  • This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

    At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

    Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.




  • Chances are that many large entities are in too deep. It’s what Microsoft were counting on before the backlash, and now they’re probably going to do it by stealth instead.

    If I have to use Windows, I want the configuration of Windows that will run on the computers at a country’s top intelligence agencies.

    Because sure as hell those places will have it locked down and not sending one solitary thing back to Microsoft, whether they have to configure it themselves or put the fear of the unholy into Microsoft to get that to happen.

    And if not that, the configuration that Bill Gates or Mark “I put tape over my webcam and deactivate my mic for no particular reason” Zuckerberg will use.


  • Lawful good is asking for trouble. Before they know it, they’ll be inundated with e-mails to their personal company address with poorly worded help requests. They’ll spend half their time making and updating tickets on the user’s behalf that would have been mostly automatic if they’d gone the Lawful Neutral route. They need to insist requests are sent to the main support address. I’m assuming that’s tied directly to the ticketing system.

    When I was being Lawful slightly-better-than-neutral, I’d create the ticket and then put a paragraph in the reply telling them to please not e-mail me directly in future, because one day I might be unavailable and their e-mail could go unseen for hours or even days.

    Repeat offenders would eventually do it at a time when things were busy too, so I’d be concentrating on the tickets and not things to my personal address, so that slight delay often helped it sink in.


  • There are probably pre-written awk scripts out there that already do what you want, not that I know where they’d be.

    That said, you might be better off using one of the bigger but still fairly commonly installed languages. There’s bound to be things on PyPI (for Python) or CPAN (for Perl) that could be bolted together for example.

    If you’re really lucky there might even be something that covers your whole use-case, but I haven’t checked.