palordrolap

fedia.io had disabled sign-ups when I last looked. Ended up on kbin.run instead. Despite the name, it’s also an Mbin instance.

Not voting, if you’re otherwise able, is a tacit acceptance for how things are.

Presumably you don’t want to vote for the incumbents, so vote for someone who’ll replace them, whether you like that option or not.

Voting out a bad lot is the only legal way we have to protest.

And then vote third party next time if they don’t change things to your liking. Then fourth. Fifth. Etc.

Don’t like the political parties? Start one.

Think the whole lot should be lined up and shot? (For legal reasons this is purely metaphorical.) Start organising.

But if that’s too much for you, vote.

C’mon now, the full name of a writing quill is “quill pen” because it’s the shaft (quill part) of a feather, Latin penna. Dumbledingus really ought to be able to connect the dots here.

Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

This is mean sale price, right? Got to wonder what the current median property value (not sale price) is, and how close that is to this mean.

My point being that a lot of churn at prices near the mean would keep that mean away from a true median property value.

“I’m a million different people from one day to the next; I can’t change my mould, no no.” — Bittersweet Symphony

We all show rotating aspects of ourselves, but we remain fundamentally the same. Unless something drastic happens that changes how those aspects present or function anyway.

(Maybe that lyric doesn’t mean what I’m reading into it, but it’s what I’ve taken from it. That’s a funny thing about art.)

So yeah, I’ve looked back through comments I’ve made and realised that I knew something at the time that I’d since forgotten, and seen how smart I’d been - or how utterly cringe-inducing, and known that at some point, that if the cringe is bound to return, so might the smart. Hopefully. Maybe. Please.

There’s also the fact that we distil ourselves down for a comment. Present the best side, or the best of the aspect we’re going for. Even trolls do this. Unfortunately. So when we look back, not at all in the same frame of mind that we were at the time, it’s like looking at the highlights of someone else’s life on some other social media, not seeing everything else that’s going on besides.

I probably won’t remember all the edits and corrections I’ve made to this comment before submitting the first time. Only time knows how future me will perceive it, should I ever look back.

Against Putin the fight will end. Putin is a man, and eventually men die.

The question is whether his replacement will have the same ideals. Or puppet masters.

250 million years? Seems optimistic by a few orders of magnitude, and that assumes that we’ve stopped evolving. We haven’t.

25? Sure. 250? Probably. 2500? Uh. 25000? Yeah, no. 250,000? Definitely not, evolved or not.

Prove me wrong, humanity.

In before this comes with a taser attachment.

@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.

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>

One wonders how a state with increasingly fascist tendencies would handle this crisis if it became impossible to ignore…

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.

That’s how it works. If mail isn’t paid for it’s made unavailable to the recipient.

I don’t know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they’re lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they’d at least shred it.

Chances are they don’t get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone’s probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it… and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.

And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it’s going.

Only if they want the letter. If they don’t want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.

Thus, this isn’t necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don’t have postage.

Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they’re concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.

Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.

The reasons they’ve backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.

Do you want deforestation because that’s how you get deforestation.

An older person I talk with (older than Boomer generation if you can believe that) keeps trying to moot that it’s an “invasion” and then goes on about how these invaders have paid thousands to some people trafficker to be able to get over here.

I point out that invaders generally don’t pay more than their life savings to invade, they get paid to do so. And they usually turn up with weapons.

Bless 'em, I keep having to reset their compassion because the newspapers must be what’s putting these “invasion” ideas in their head.

There’s a vague chance they might not vote blue in the upcoming elections.

In other news, and riffing on the “skulls” comment elsewhere, I’d quite like for someone to stand up in the Commons and ask what the government’s jackboot budget is these days, and whether teaching armed troops to goose-step is coming back into fashion.

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.