ThrownOffGame

After decades of gleefully using signal handlers to handle all sorts of contingencies, systems programmers were solemnly informed that signal handler functions were very dangerous indeed, because a bunch of other stuff was on the stack and undefined while they were being run, and therefore, handler functions couldn't call anything that was unsafe or non-reentrant.

Systems programmers were told that the best signal handler function was one that set a flag, a volatile int, and then exited immediately without doing or touching anything else.

Sort of defeats the purpose of the elaborate signal-handler-callback-pointer-to-function system we had in place, but them's the breaks.

I could probably wax poetic about how it is perceived as a time of innocence but high culture, before "technology and science" ruined stuff, a time that is immortalized in literature such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, and imitated today by Tolkien and Rowling alike.

It is especially interesting the way people tend to portray it drained of all religious overtones and entirely secular in nature, so that it is palatable to all comers, whether pagan, Christian or Jew.

TFA completely fails to mention the utter fandom that has grown alongside RenFaires: The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). People who are involved with the SCA basically have ongoing year-round RenFaires of various magnitudes. They develop entire in-world personas for themselves and they're assigned to Kingdoms and such, regionally. I'm not sure of the relationship between the two, but it's certainly symbiotic and RenFaires give a taste of what people can have, 24/7 in the SCA.

Medieval life is also attractive to traditionalists of a Christian nature, again -- before everything was "ruined" by science and modernism. We all love going back to the 16th century to see how it all went wrong, or the 11th century to see how it also went wrong!

What's more, plenty of other subcultures draw on medieval tropes, such as goths and filkers and whatever con-going fandom is up to these days. Any competent cosplayer can "seamlessly" meld into a medieval princess or wench just by designing the right costumes, and there are plenty of YouTubers and Etsy sellers ready to assist!

BREAKING: BOOKIES BANNING BEST BETTORS? BETTERIDGE BOMBSHELL!

Bad news, folks: the erudite hackers have added an apostrophe to Harrod's logo

And in among the silence, we receive affirmation.

Except it isn’t money at all; only suckers call it ‘money’.

It’s considered a security; a representation of value for sure. Move it around all you want until you’re blue in the face.

But money still has to come out of an exchange and through some sort of bank. So it’s all a shell game that’s decidedly not anonymous or protected at all.

That’s why so many have concluded that crypto is a scam; we might as well be smuggling Egyptian grave goods.

Herein we find a fundamental flaw in the way society today treats gluten-based grains, bread, pasta, rice, etc.

Pasta that is not married to its sauce has not done its job. The point of putting a bunch of wheat-based filler into a food is that the flavors of the sauce and other liquids are absorbed and adopted by that bread/pasta/sponge type stuff. Then when you reach the end of the sauce, you still have pasta that is infused with its very essence.

I die a little inside, every time someone slaps some breadsticks on my plate and not enough sauce to soak up. The whole point of a breadstick is wiping that stuff up and sponging it out of the dish!

I die a little inside, every time I see a frozen "TV dinner" that has a little sauce on top of dried-out rice. You mean I am supposed to heat this up and it will magically be delicious?

I've been ordering rice bowls from a fun "healthy foods" restaurant in the college area. They dump a bunch of cooked Jasmine rice into a bowl and then whisper a curry sauce over the top. I gave up after 3 extra sauce orders didn't cover all the rice. And you can't "resuscitate" a dish by applying sauce afterwards: that is what the cooking in the pot is for. Marry the sauce to the rice or dump it in the rubbish.

One time, America's Test Kitchen published a photo of how to rescue old stale bread by dumping pasta sauce over it, while it's frozen. I told them, that's the dumbest thing I ever saw.

The whole reason for leavening bread is so that it becomes like a sponge! For God's sake, the whole reason for inventing the sandwich, the pita, and the Cornish pasty were to save the hands while the sauces absorbed into the bread! That you actually had good-tasting bread in the end, or for a tin miner, bread you could toss in the rubbish!

At this stage, I am convinced that 95% of "gluten intolerance/sensitivity/allergy" is induced by people who are improperly eating all these grains, just dry, just no sauces or liquids inside it. It's fundamentally stupid and ignorance of cuisine, and it's all based on industrial-scale food production and cost-cutting even in the nicest kitchens.

Here, let's ask Gemini: https://g.co/gemini/share/13b5989fca49

So it turns out that some infractions in some jurisdictions are "owner liability" and so all the authority needs to do is cite the registered owner, because they're always responsible for anyone who is permitted to drive their car.

If the jurisdiction is not "owner liability" then it may be necessary to ID the driver instead, but the ticket is still sent off to the registered owner for handling, because the ticket and the car and the driver all go together.

Regarding a sibling query if the car is stolen, I'd say the owner has bigger fish to fry, and therefore would have reported the incident already, and so untangling a speeding offense would necessarily involve documenting the report and the incident of theft prior to those infractions. It may get a little sus if the owner said "hey my car was stolen and then returned to me just around the hour this photo was taken! it weren't me bruh!"

Let's not forget all the disparate jurisdictions and patchwork of laws which make up this sort of scenario. We can never make blanket statements that cover every situation.

That will not be a viable response for very long. Will it affect the entire fleet in one market or the entire fleet worldwide? How long will it affect the fleet? When robotaxis are an integral part of a local economy, then the incentives diminish for taking them entirely offline. The three instances you mention are fleets under testing circumstances and not commercial service, so there's a distinction!

Sooner or later we'll be making so many omelettes that the occasional broken egg will be, reluctantly, accepted, and the penalties will amount to the usual corporate wrist-slapping, and that will be that.

What about pronunciation? Many of the assertions I've heard about adults in a foreign language is about our ability to recognize, differentiate, and reproduce the different phonemes, many which do not exist in our language.

These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it is much inferior to seeing/feeling/hearing a native speaker make sound-shapes with their mouth!

I made many efforts to imitate my Spanish teachers in my youth, in terms of pronounciation, mouth shapes, accent and emphasis, etc. I credit the in-person instruction with achieving a nearly fluent comprehension and ability to make myself understood.

So the argument goes: if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?

That is certainly an attack vector of concern! I've had friends where the attacker just exfiltrated a single check from their own checkbook and cashed it as legitimate somewhere else!

It seems that a third-party check printing service could run off checks for the attacker instead. The attacker would need to cover their tracks insofar as payment methods, and then intercept a package which would be mailed to my home address listed on the checks they ordered. That seems elaborate, but doable, if they want a whole stack of legitimate checks.

It is possible that there are even disreputable "security check" printers who aren't Walmart, but just counterfeiters in a 1BR, running off bogus checks for anyone who asks?

But who needs/wants a whole stack of them, anyway? It only takes one or two.

It is so strange, too, that we rarely hear of check fraud in the States. It would seem so easy, so is it widespread or rare?

It is really nothing new to offer up credentials to some third party who promises to act benignly on your behalf.

When my niece was about 10, so let's call it 2005, she wanted to access some Barbie service. And I think it was the legit Barbie, mattel.com-affiliated website for children.

So she navigates there, and gets a login screen that wants her email credentials. Like from yahoo.com. I don't know why--to add her to a list or something? Was it an early "federated identity" login that I wasn't aware of?

And my jaw dropped open as I looked at what they were trying to do and I shouted "That's phishing! Don't ever do that!" and I force-closed all the windows and handed her over to her parents.

And looking back, I almost had a twinge of regret because I had come to find out that the Barbie service was not some Russian hacker but actually Barbie just asking to log in to her email, and it was totally normal for thousands of kids. So was I the bad uncle for stopping her in this regard?

Slack was created by Silicon Valley insiders and enjoyed a smooth rise to fame and prominence, so it has led me to ask for years, is it a project of the Church of Subgenius?

Of course, prominent Subgenius adherents may not tend to acknowledge their "faith" outside of pseudonym-based posting on Usenet or other media, but the intersection of irreligious techies working on a project/company named for their central tenet seems too much coincidence to be an accident.

If Slack's chat service sort of destroys productivity and ruins workplace hierarchies and relationships by design, it seems that it is achieving the goals of the formerly "parody religion" and introducing more "Slack" to the world in the process. Mission accomplished, Bob?

I suppose if they are comfortable with confusing foreigners with this lingo.

In all my years on the Internet and written forums, as well as watching British TV for 50 years, there has been no notable usage of “Blighty” that caught my attention.

If I had been aware of the usage, (other than archaic slang) I would’ve learned it sooner. But it’s notable that this Anglophile hadn’t been bothered until the Year of Our Lord and Reign of His Majesty Charles III, 2025.

That depends on what other drivers, I guess

The Waymos I ride have developed a habit of swinging right into bus turnouts.

A bus turnout looks like a dedicated right-turn lane, except it ends and you must merge before turning right!

So these Waymos are illegally entering these lanes for no good reason and seem completely unaware of their actual designated use or signage. I cannot figure out why.

Sure, I could order plain "insecure" checks, but those aren't the one I'm depositing by image. My checks are written to others and I've got no idea how they deposit them.

I've received checks with watermarks, temp-sensitive ink, you name it, and I almost never walk into a branch anymore. As long as the mobile app works, the image is the negotiable instrument, and I can't change what others give me.

Look, they told us from the start that there would always be a “responsible operator” with a license and insurance and this individual person would be liable for tickets and implicated in accidents, whatever happened on the road.

Waymo has been deployed for a long time. It’s absurd that law enforcement has no idea how, or whom, to ticket!!

So what happened? Did you fork ’em over?

Alexa Is Listening https://m.xkcd.com/1807/

My final stretch of employment lasted from May 2020-March 2024. My company went through mergers and acquisitions and 4 rounds of layoffs, and I managed to tenaciously hang in there (I was even "terminated" 4 times but they just kept re-hiring me!)

I was definitely competing with entry-level kids who had just graduated, even those who had just graduated from the boot camps we provided. And I was hired with no college degree, no certifications, and nothing relevant on my résumé since 1999. So yeah, I got minimum-wage treatment.

It was a fantastic, cushy WFH job. The parameters were ideal for my style. The supervisors were very, very patient and encouraging. I was a rock star, if I do say so myself, but there were plenty of competent colleagues who had plenty to contribute in the same role as me.

Eventually I earned 3 certifications and a college completion certificate, and that made zero difference. No raises, no promotions, no acknowledgements of my achievements from my employer.

So, college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yes, seniors are competing with juniors and entry-levels. It's fierce. Be the best and do your best, and don't be reluctant to settle for a good employer.

The crazy thing about the "paperless office" of the 21st century is that authentication of documents has gone out the window, completely back to the stone age of forgeries.

Didn't we recently see where a landlord attempted to forge a lease document but was caught by the tenant?

Nobody wants to see your authentic ID/DL anymore. Just FAX it in or scan it. Nobody can examine your birth certificate or passport (except for real officials) but you need to scan and present it to all kinds of third parties. It absolutely destroys 80% of the countermeasures that are built in to those types of documents. Wrote a check from your checkbook? Your bank immediately photographs it and the image traverses their network, not the paper thing. They just shred that useless paper thing. The image is, for all intents and purposes, the negotiable document. Most of us pay a premium for "security checks" with a bunch of microprinting and other bullshit. That's utterly useless once you push it through a cellphone cam!

I've drawn a lot of public assistance from entitlements. They often require a stack of paperwork, like bank statements, paystubs. I usually ran Linux and had all the third-party PDF-manipulation tools. They would just accept screenshots from my banking apps! I could've easily forged anything, down to pixel level, or in the HTML itself, print to PDF, undetectable. No checksums or hashes to worry about!

So perhaps this headline is a symptom, a symptom of landlords being skeptical and wary of tenant-side forgeries, that they feel the need to grab the documents straight from the horse's mouth. I can't blame them for being risk-averse and wary of forgery, but this is crazy. Just... figure out a way to authenticate electronic documents. We cryptographers have worked this all out, but it's been ignored for reasons of cost and expedience. You can't ignore it anymore.

Do Englishmen frequently refer to “Blighty” in ordinary conversation?

I refer to my homeland as “The States” out of courtesy to those from Canada, UK, Australia, but I had to rack my brains, and Wikipedia, about “Blighty” because it seems archaic, stilted, and arcane in a tech forum.

I’ve heard England called a lot of things by its citizens, but I was under the impression that “Ol’ Blighty” died out with Queen Victoria.

Clandestine weddings have presented a huge problem for Church and State authorities at various points in space and time.

A clandestine wedding would often leave significant doubt about the facts of the ritual, the participants, and their actual state of mind. In most places it really is not legal to conduct a clandestine wedding without strict regulation and some sort of documentation, before and after the fact.

No officiant: invalid. No witnesses: invalid. Prior bond: invalid. Duress or coercion: invalid. These are all really, really important reasons for public ceremonies attended by, essentially, randos off the street.

You may need to define your terms more precisely.

By “Blighty” are you referring to Great Britain, or a town in NSW, population 326? That seems to be a vast difference!

And I am at a loss to imagine security guards checking invitations at a church door and giving heave-ho to the unworthy. What particular denominations have you polled on this? How many different types of ceremonies have you crashed?

Weddings held in churches have been public with nobody turned away at the door. Perhaps you are thinking of receptions, where invitations are checked, and accountants are eyeing the attendees accordingly.

An impending wedding is usually one of the most publicized events in any city. The banns must be published, typically in a special section of the newspaper. In order to give notice for anyone who may object or know about a prior bond. Also any hint of duress or urgency that may impede free consent. The banns are the actual execution of the ceremonial “callout” you see in films.

The witnesses of a wedding are not optional. The witnesses serve as representatives of the general public. Typically a clandestine wedding would be invalid without witnesses to verify and vouch for the identity, presence, and consent of bride and groom.

Taking photos for verification is sort of after-the-fact, and it would be most unfortunate for the banns to miss the mark until after the ceremony, or the consummation.

But only crazy people would consider a wedding ceremony “private” or “closed to the public” other than “renting an officiant” and flying off to a Caribbean elopement that only your billionaire girlboss bridesmaids can afford.