Anthony-G

Upvoted because that seemed like a genuine apology other than this phrase

> Whilst we can never put into words how deeply sorry we are

To my European ears that comes across as hyperbolic and insincere but maybe it’s fine for an American audience. These things are very culture-dependent.

Ah. Sorry to hear that. That's very annoying frustrating but I'm glad you were able to restore from backup.

I found it confusing that there are now two different sets of profiles and had panicked at first when my original profile was apparently gone.

After shutting down Firefox and restarting, I tried the new profile manager UI just now and also thought I had lost my existing profile. Luckily, it was still available from the hamburger menu (just below the “Synchronise all your devices” option) and I was able to switch back to it (with all my existing bookmarks, containers and extensions).

I upvoted your comment earlier but I figure thanking you explicitly for that advice would be more courteous. So, thanks!

Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.

I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.

I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.

A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.

There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.

¹ https://www.justinguitar.com/songs/edwyn-collins-a-girl-like...

Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?

I also looked up Transcribe! and see that they have a Linux installer (32-bit in addition to the 64-bit!) so I must try it out: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

I find man pages to be useful when I’m already familiar with the command or topic. For long man pages, I usually get on fine by `grep`ing for relevant key-words.

I agree that they are daunting and not so helpful for users who are new to the command or topic. They usually lack a quick-start guide with examples that give the user a starting point to build upon.

Anyhow, after hearing about `tldr` for close to a decade, your comment inspired me to install it. When I tried running `tldr curl`, I was delighted to learn something new and useful:

    # Resolve a hostname to a custom IP address, with verbose output (similar to editing the /etc/hosts file for custom DNS resolution):
    curl --verbose --resolve example.com:80:127.0.0.1 http://example.com

In addition to the other responses, ChatGPT is more wasteful and uses a lot more computing power than a locally run Base 64 decoder. When masses of people use LLMs for such trivial calculations, the environmental cost adds up.

A viral video? (I'll see myself out).

I’d broadly agree with this critique but I’ve had some success with Duolingo. About 10 years ago, I used it with the aim of learning enough Spanish to get by for a two-week holiday.

While learning useful language constructs (gender of nouns and pronouns, how to conjugate common verbs), I also had to learn some useless – to me – vocabulary, e.g., names of animals at the zoo. Anyhow, after a 2-3 months of using Duolingo, I had learned enough to be able to communicate with bus-drivers and shop staff. My conclusion was that Duolingo would be a useful tool to complement more structured learning.

I’m currently learning guitar and I feel the same way about Rocksmith: it’s a lot of fun and a great tool to incentivise me to pick up the guitar but it doesn’t substitute a more structured learning course and it completely neglects the theory of music.

Not true. Until a couple of decades ago, there was very little surveillance of Western European, and if citizens thought about guns at all, antipathy would have been the dominant attitude. Nevertheless, there was very little “bad behaviour” since the Second World War ended.

I had never seen Kimmel until I watched the YouTube clip¹ linked elsewhere in this thread earlier today. After doing so, I cancelled my Disney+ subscription, giving “cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel” as the reason and won’t be in any hurry to re-join (though I heard the new Alien TV show is worth watching).

I hate cancel culture whether it’s coming from the conservative right (we’ve had that in Ireland for most of the 20th century) or the liberal left (more recently) and I believe that comedy should be able to transgress social norms and push up against boundaries but what I saw of Kimmel was wholly innocuous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j3YdxNSzTk&t=123s

I had only heard of Belgravia from watching the Sherlock Holmes TV episode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scandal_in_Belgravia It looked like a fancy area from that.

Also referenced in the article: https://www.npr.org/2010/03/06/124397021/the-woman-behind-my...

That was probably de Valera’s worst judgement call and he was strongly advised against it at the time. Still, the actual history is a lot more nuanced than that. There’s no evidence that de Valera was anti-Semitic. His 1937 constitution for the Irish state specifically recognised “Jewish Congregations” in its Article 44 (Religion). While claiming in public to be neutral during the Second World War, the Irish state imprisoned Axis pilots who crashed in Ireland but downed Allied pilots were quietly repatriated.

For more details: https://www.irishtimes.com/history/2025/05/02/de-valeras-con...

I’m reminded of the film Falling Down but I’ve given you an Internet point (upvote) for fighting the good fight. If good people do nothing, evil will triumph. In Ireland, we don’t (yet?) have such devilish instruments of torture but I imagine my cortisol levels would be through the roof if I had to deal with them.

My preferred dash is the en-dash – with a space on either side. I find that many people don’t notice the difference between an en and em-dash but a huge amount more just don’t care.

I’ve had similar issues running the latest Firefox (currently 142 as per this discussion) on the latest Fedora (42). I used to be able to lock the screen and go home but I’ve recently had a couple of mornings where I’d come into work and find my system unresponsive. I use the Magic SysRq command to trigger the OOM (out-of-memory) killer as many times as required to free up enough resources that I could log in on a virtual console (Alt-Ctrl-F2). This would allow me to manually kill Firefox, freeing up about 15GB of RAM and all 16GB of the swap file.

I’ve been too busy with work to spend any time investigating the cause. At first I had been blaming the `teams-for-linux` electron app but figured that wasn’t the culprit because I close it every evening. In Firefox, `about:processes` is useful while actually using the application but I’m not really sure how best to diagnose what’s happening after the fact.

The article mentions streams as being a safe source of drinking water for rural communities — as most of the population were during the medieval period.

My mother from rural north-west Ireland drank water from a stream for the first 25 years of her life. There was no running water in her home-place until the late 70s (after she had moved out). Rain water was collected from the gutters in barrels for washing and other uses but water for drinking had to be carried by bucket from a stream 1km away across fields on the side of a hill that were muddy when it rained. I’m guessing drinking water from a stream would have been even more common in the preceding decades and centuries.

I saw this earlier today and thought it might be of interest, considering that other German court decisions are currently being discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912085

Note: the headline is somewhat misleading. The first line of the article reads

> A court in Hamburg, Germany, has stated in the details of a ruling concerning a Karl Marx reading group that Marx’s teachings may be contrary to the “free democratic basic order.”

(emphasis mine)

I bought her the laptop a few years ago from a local, independent retailer who also specialise repairs as I try to support local trade and retailers as much as possible. It came with Windows 10 and the retailers had configured it with local user account authentication (no microsoft.com account), removed the advertising and other annoyances and without Bitlocker. She has since upgraded to Windows 11 but it works mostly the same (without obnoxious advertising and distractions).

Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues.

I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.

Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.

For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.

> https://xkcd.com/538/

I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation.

Me too so I reckon it’s sarcasm.

I haven’t followed this issue closely but would lying in court about their ability to remotely modify data not be perjury?

Well, resigning to play sudoku is certainly preferable to seppuku. :)

Upvoted. As a beginner guitarist, I find that Rocksmith’s approach doesn’t work well for learning songs. I prefer to turn up the difficulty to 100% and turn the tempo down to something I can play comfortably and then gradually increase the tempo. This has the drawback that the song sounds very different when played at 25%. It’d be nicer if they were more judicious in their choice of notes to play for their lower difficulty levels.

At the moment, I’m focussing on working on my timing by playing rhythm instead of lead guitar.

Similar to how Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was actually a curse because she was unable to use her foresight to avoid or mitigate the predicted misfortunes and tragedies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra

If it kept happening like that, it kind of sounds like he was subconsciously willing to pay for the “privilege” of chatting with a “hot online friend”, similar to how some lonely people pay to chat with a famous pornstar on Only Fans – even though they (should) know they are chatting with a random call centre employee.

Very cool project that I would have figured to be impossible to do in real-time.

I thought I'd let you know that the web page is rotated to the right on my desktop monitor so I have to tilt my head or drag the browser window to the landscape-oriented monitor. I'm guessing that this is an optimisation for mobile devices but I doubt I'm the only one with a portrait-oriented monitor (viewport dimensions are currently 1200×1779).