palordrolap

Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is a microcosm that doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. We can stab at the tankies all we like, but it wasn’t their influence in the Fediverse that caused the result, even if they did manage to hoodwink a few into voting for fake tan man.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

Fears grow? Really? That’s what it’s been about for decades at this point.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)

First episodes almost always don’t count as far as lore goes, even if some things do carry over.

Uh-oh Spagetti-O’s

This is one of the larger plot holes in the 1980s remake of The Fly, in my opinion.

How to make it through school in China: Write the name Xi Jinping as the answer to every question. You cannot be marked down for doing this as Xi Jinping is never wrong.

Yep. If it wasn’t for the racist vote, Brexit would not have happened. That particular wedge of the pie was just enough to get it over the 50% mark.

Sure, you could argue for other wedges also being responsible if you order them differently, but, you know, racism is a pretty nasty one and given the context, it seems like the right one to point to as a culprit.

Are you sure? 1.6878×10^4566 is more comics than there are particles in over 10^4488 universes.

There, the spectacular drug is a BAC of 1%.

The terrain in Panama didn’t support it either.

Either way, my comment is accurate up to the word Gaza, “and then” or not.

That’s only part of the plan. The full plan is remove every last Palestinian from Gaza and then shove a canal through it. The other end will be at Elat, thus providing a western-controlled alternative to Egypt’s Suez.

There would be far more humanitarian ways of going about this, but murder is quicker and silences dissent.

You’ll notice that Jordan hasn’t been touched during any of this. Got to keep them onside because their port city of Aqaba is uncomfortably close.

If you have Windows, it might be worth getting it to run Scandisk - or whatever the current equivalent is - on that drive.

That would at least give it less excuse to set problematic bits. In theory there’d be no harm doing this. In practice, well, make sure you have other copies of whatever is on that drive on the off-chance Windows constantly setting that bit is a sign of an underlying problem that Scandisk would make worse (or Windows/the disk decides to mangle files for some other reason.)

You still have the bowl, Milhouse.

The ol’ postfix ‘not’. Wayne’s World is a thing of the past! … NOT

I know Tutu was Anglican. It’s just that he fairly frequently appeared in the news here (Britain) and given where Tutu was, his rank, and what he stood for, I imagine that might have been enough to unnerve the person I was talking about.

There’s also that Tutu was often used humour and was joyful, and the idea of that being scary to people who might think poorly of him is kind of funny to me.

A religious man I once knew reckoned the world would end if we ever had a black pope. Consequently, I kind of want to see that happen before they quit. (He wasn’t talking about the position sometimes known as “black pope” either. He definitely meant a man of recent African descent.)

I like to think the idea of Desmond Tutu gave him the creeps.