palordrolap

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.

They’re doubling it every week, so a googol is only ~4 years off.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

In before you’re going to need a telemetry spoofer in order not to attract attention. On the other hand, it takes an extraordinary amount of government paranoia before they start going after random citizens.

North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia’s effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK’s effort as a starting point.

But I wouldn’t try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn’t.

Also: something something falling out something something Windows.

I believe the joke was something like it was spelled “Netscape” but pronounced “Mozilla”. Web searches (at time of writing) for “pronounced Mozilla” seem to confirm this. I also seem to remember that its user-agent string identifier was “Mozilla” from the earliest version and never contained “Netscape”, which goes some way to explaining why I initially forgot the real history and assumed a rebranding to Firefox.

The apparent heat resistance was a surprise. Struggling to wade through the rest of it, but it currently needs human intervention to get the data into and out of storage. Even if they’re untrained volunteers as is says, this isn’t something we’re going to be replacing consumer SSDs with any time soon.

(Which I say half in the hope I’ll be proven wrong.)

And here I was about to say that it had simply become Mozilla Firefox.

I guess I pruned my knowledge (read: forgot) at some point because I know I went from using Netscape to the Mozilla Application Suite as my browser of choice, and then ultimately onto Firefox when that died. (Firefox and Thunderbird were well established and Seamonkey was still in its infancy, otherwise I probably would have switched to that instead.)

Looking at the facts, the AOL buy-out is what must have got me to switch to MAS.

My question is this: Do Microsoft ship crap-infested versions to people who could make their lives uncomfortable, like, say, intelligence agencies, or do those agencies take a crap-infested version and have their IT security strip all the crap out?

Because if I was in charge of an intelligence agency I’d be asking - with dangerous smile - for the crap-free version, turn IT loose on it anyway and then be, shall we say, horribly invasive to Microsoft if there’s anything still left in it.

… and if I wanted Windows, I’d want whatever the end result of that is.

On the other hand, maybe this has already happened and that “horrible invasion” is the cause of all the spyware crap in the consumer release.

Sigh.

It’s not just about primes, it’s about proving the technologies and techniques needed to verify such a number is prime, which might then be extrapolated to things unrelated to proving things prime.

For example, GIMPS (the organisation behind this find) was a great example of distributed computing long before people had multiprocessor supercomputers in their homes.

But let’s not forget the hobby factor. You don’t get to decide what other people do for fun. If they want to lend a portion of their computer’s runtime to a distributed computing project, that’s up to them.

Some people climb tall mountains, and that’s not of much use to anyone either.

All their media is hosted under the redditstatic domain, and as far as I can tell, that’s hosted on AWS. (There’s actually also a redditmedia domain, which they may also use, but that’s also on AWS).

That probably means that Reddit can get away with saying they don’t host any of it. They merely point their web addresses at the third party host.

LMDE6 still uses ntfs-3g as far as I can tell, so I’m going to assume that regular Mint does too. lsmod reports nothing like ntfs, and the tried and tested, if no longer developed, ntfs-3g suite is installed.

Things might change as and when the kernel driver is more stable for writing. I’m sure more bleeding-edge distros are already running the kernel driver, but then, those who run those distros are deep into Linux and NTFS is not really something they deal with regularly.

As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it’s SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.

Worst case, you could still move your important files to an exFAT partition (or into an archive) where permissions don’t apply.

Interesting. A quick search around finds someone confusing a bot into selling them a Chevy Tahoe for $1 at the end of last year.

Can’t tell whether that one went to court. I can see an argument that a reasonable person ought to think that something was wrong with the bot or the deal, especially since they deliberately confused the bot, making a strong case in favour of the dealership.

Now, if they’d haggled it down to half price without being quite so obvious, that might have made an interesting court case.

NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.

If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.

That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.

This has already been tried in at least one court.

There was that story a while back about the guy who was told by an airline’s AI help-desk bot that he would get a ticket refund if turned out he was unable to fly, only for the airline to say they had no such policy when he came to claim.

He had screenshots and said he wouldn’t have bought the tickets in the first place if he had been told the correct policy. The AI basically hallucinated a policy, and the airline was ultimately found liable. Guy got his refund.

And the airline took down the bot.

I think they thought they could be the “true Tesla” to rival the “Edison” thief or mangler of ideas that the company named Tesla is or, at least appears to be*.

Ironically, that seems to have been the only truly good idea they’ve had.

* For legal reasons this is a hypothetical opinion I believe, in some form, might have belonged to the founder(s) of Nikola Motor, and says nothing of my own disappointment opinion.

Peeked at Bluesky the other day and was thinking “wow a lot of these posts are in Portuguese”. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to connect the dots.

Anyway, my point is, damage has been done to Xitter’s user base in Brazil. How much damage remains to be seen.