palordrolap

But if you do decide to do this, and I should stress that this does not constitute a suggestion to do so, make sure to go out in clearly identifiable footwear and clothing and with no head or face coverings so that the camera can get a good look at you before it dies, you filthy, filthy vandal.

Something somewhere was definitely doing the conversion for you, but it could have been your editor, the compiler or something in between like a C preprocessor directive getting loaded in by your configuration.

Sharded barf.

A phrase from an ancient meme, that is simultaneously unconnected and also weirdly apt. However you interpret those words.

The meme itself in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb58GaJNpsA

If you’re talking about applications that can be made to act how their namesake predecessors did 30 years ago, sure. The Unix mindset is all about that.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that anything on a modern Unix-like system hasn’t been modified, patched or rewritten from scratch at some point in the last 30 years. More than once. Even /bin/false has a changelog.

haha forking processes and killing children

wait

I dunno. There are some of us who run Mint not because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we do* and we don’t want to have to deal with any more nonsense than we absolutely have to.

From that small cohort, there are those of us who’ll frown when all we have open is a few browser tabs and the system’s using 8GB of RAM, twice the “recommended” spec. On startup with nothing running it’s over 1GB.

It’s hard not to see it as wasteful when you’re old enough to remember perfectly good machines running on single-digit megabytes. **

* Or at least, think we do.

** Yes, things are much more complex these days. But are they really a thousand times more complex?

There’s at least a couple of puns going on here. You may already know some of the following.

First of all, Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late '80s. It was designed as a system administrating, text processing glue language with aspects of shell scripting, awk, sed, the greps and a whole host of other things.

This is the first part of one of the puns. Perl was, and may still be, used as a filter in command line pipelines.

The other pun comes from the fact that perhaps the most important Perl book, Programming Perl was published by O’Reilly who generally put some sort of apparently unrelated animal on the cover of their titles. For Perl this was a camel.

Camel is, or was, a brand of cigarettes. Therefore this is the second pun. The pack of cigarettes has “Perl” where it should read “Camel” but still has the picture of a Camel, like both the book and the cigarettes.

Cigarattes, of course, often have filters on the mouth end of them, which completes the first pun. I do not know if any Camel cigarettes have these, but that’s not strictly important. Some cigarettes do. Perl-branded Camels almost certainly would do.

The third (fourth?) pun, which may or may not be intended, is that some people think that programming in Perl is damaging to one’s health.

Listen, I’m convinced the next kernel will finally fix the bug that in rare circumstances causes my potato to spontaneously mash itself and start whistling dixie.

… or maybe I’m confusing my potato with my brain again.

… aaas long your potato has a processor better than a 486 anyway.

What’s your opinion of the word “neologologist” and are you proposing that these “most linguists” are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

I envy these linguists’ ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

*whose

“who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”

Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There’s literally a command called pipewire-pulse related to this.

It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire’s emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it’s just Pipewire that’s acting up.

I’d say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that’s a non-starter. In which case, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire’s working again, assuming it doesn’t do that automatically.

I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can’t even imagine what might be going on.

NPC.

Oh. I have do the quiz?

It gave me “Multiclass”.

There’s a joke about inheritance in there somewhere. And the fact that no-one will want whatever I leave behind.

Can I choose NPC now?

I never had screen tearing with NVIDIA under Mint, but for AMD I found that something needs to be added to the Xorg configuration to turn screen tearing off.

I suspect the default is so as not to limit the graphics in any way, but I can’t imagine the majority of users want it that way around, so I’m a little confused by that choice.

This website has instructions on how to fix it for Ubuntu, but I can confirm it works in LMDE too, so I assume it works across the Debian family if not elsewhere: https://davejansen.com/quick-how-to-fix-screen-tearing-in-ubuntu-with-amd-gpus/

I’m going to assume you’re not kidding, in which case, no, I mean the first letter of the command name it was called by.

There are already commands that do this. For example, on my machine, ex is the head of a symlink chain that leads to the vim text editor’s executable and if I run ex, vim will know that it was started with the name ex and will start in ex mode. ex was an editor that worked in a different way but was vim’s ancestor, so backwards compatibility is built right in for those strange people who love ex, (or have some kind of automation reliance on it being present).

Usually, the main command has a command line option that achieves the same effect as the special name. Here, vim -e is the less clever way to start vim in ex mode.

For yes, symlinking the name no to it and then calling that should arguably cause it to print n repeatedly, but it doesn’t, for historical reasons, hence my suggestion to go back in time and make it act differently.

(None of this touches on the fact that the GNU philosophy wants nothing to do with clever tricks like this. They prefer to compile separate executables for each and every use case. For example, most Linuxes have dir and vdir as variants of the ls command. Their functionality could have been implemented through this symlink trick, but instead there are three near-identical executables taking up space instead.)

The two commands are not equivalent. sed 11q prints 11 lines whereas head’s default is 10.

Personally I would prefer head -11 in this situation as it more clearly indicates, for the sake of the meme, that something is being removed from the head.

There’s also that head seems to be ever-so-slightly quicker, perhaps proving what we already knew about thinking being quicker than speech.

TL;DR That’s what she sed?

The BeOS command line command set were all borrowed from or based upon Unix and/or Linux (IIRC many were straight from GNU), which is the basis for my comparison.

The kernel and graphics were all from-scratch and radically different from Linux, sure, but the same could be said of Linux when compared to the original Unix, or any of the BSDs.

Haiku is what grew out of the ashes of BeOS. And if you’ve never heard of that, you’re no worse off. It was another Unix-alike that was neither Linux nor BSD which showed early promise but didn’t gain enough traction.