fps_doug

Yes, if only for nostalgia. The modern graphics look smoother/friendlier, but I just want it to look the way it always looked back then. :)

Do you keep the transcripts around on the server? It shouldn't matter much in terms of storage unless the site becomes crazy popular, so you could offer a "best effort search" or something along the lines, that just searches everything you got so far, so the site would get better and better over time.

> I don't know if you're confusing me for somebody else, but I didn't link to any tweets.

sigh.. Correction: the link to the tweet form the guy you replied to that you seemed to refer to.

> And as I've now said twice, which has been ignored twice, the thread alludes to numerous unmade arguments about the reliability of the BBC, the UN, Le Monde, and a reporter as background to motivate the inference that their reporting is unreliable.

I clicked the link again. I don't see any of that. It starts with claims about 1) a cursor (which I ignored) and 2) the issue with the characters, which is further elaborated on in a couple follow-up tweets. Then your comment mentions all these news outlets and I don't understand how that connects to the claims about the characters, or makes them taken out of context. It looks like a pretty stand-alone claim/issue that should be something to quickly do research on if you care about the topic, nothing taken wildly out of context.

> I can repeat this all again and hope the fourth time is the charm?

Sure, if that makes you feel better.

> It's hard to understand what the tweet is suggesting unless you read the entire thread

You linked to one tweet, which directly started talking about the traditional vs simplified characters. I don't see how there is much context missing.

> I'm not sure what you mean by language hints.

Because of the han unification, you can tell the font renderer which language context you're in and want things to be rendered. MSWord shows you the language in the status bar at the bottom, which is not only used for spell checking. In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.

> do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for?

Because ever since Vista, these come pre-installed regardless of your locale.

> Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points?

I don't believe anything in particular, just adding technical context. The documents could also have been leaked through Taiwan or Hong Kong and then mangled there resulting in this.

Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose source code of old software, or at least only have it accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually, but it apparently was a wild undertaking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc

That happens if you have no language hints, or the wrong one, e.g. posting in Simplified Chinese on a Taiwanese website. If this was written in something like MSWord by CCP officials, it should have the proper language hint, so render properly on any OS newer than XP.

"I don't believe it because I'm missing context" is a weak argument to make. The tweets read like the author isn't a native English speaker. The traditional vs. simplified characters accusation should be relatively easy to confirm if you want to put in at least a little effort. Looking up characters as someone who isn't familiar with them at all might be cumbersome but is absolutely possible.

But then again you wonder why such blatant mistakes would be made in the first place, if this was done by someone at least halfway professional.

But maybe just as many as old folks leaving it for Matrix et al? Might just even it out in the grand scheme of things.

Is there any hints at this being the case? I could just as much see him somehow doubling down on everything, twisting it as purging the network from bad actors and that the current state of freenode is actually what he wanted in the first place, or god-knows-what...

Yeah suffering from that too; we need an internet-wide PSA that people should just s/freenode/libera/ whenever they see/read/hear it somewhere. :-)

As fast as people who grew up with it die ;-)

I think my comment kinda agrees with this, maybe I didn't make it clear enough though. You can write good or bad code in any language. But because of this, a low barrier to entry is both a blessing and a curse. And as time passes, and the more people touch the code, the higher the chances you end up with something cursed.

So my aversion to Perl could be considered a pragmatic solution to that problem. :-)

I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still agree with that sentiment. There might be that theoretical wise and disciplined Perl programmer writing well structured and readable code, but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap that once was a small tool that "just worked" and then slowly grew completely out of hands over the years. You can have that in any language, but for some reason Perl always excelled at that discipline.

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jK0ytvjv-E

I mean, it was still clearly low-res. CRTs and smaller screen sized helped, but you could still see the pixels.

Yes, people who tell you that you can blindly buy any Lenovo laptop for Linux are lying. You have to do some googling first. Or check the inofficial Thinkpad Wiki. But other than that, if you pick a device that's recommended for use with Linux, it's as good as it gets regarding Linux on laptops if you ask me. Saying that your next Laptop isn't a Lenovo because your random purchase sucked is a little :rolleyes:

Oh and yes, avoid nvidia if you do Linux. Some people say it "works for them", but I for one would recommend just completely staying away from Linux if you want nvidia.

The truth is, and will probably always be, that you have to do some research before buying HW if you're using Linux and don't feel lucky.

I know this "trick" made the rounds several years ago. I figured it seems like a temporary solution only; once companies selling your data or hackers harvesting it get the memo they'd just remove the +xxxx part and then what?

Some of that doesn't have to do with C even. Like, changing memory layout of variables, or the way you access data.

A simple example is if you have a 2D array, and you have the data from the individual rows consecutively in memory, but then you loop over the columns in your outer for-loop and over the rows in your inner for-loop. This means you access the first element from the first row, then the first element from the second row, then the first element from the third row, and so on. All these elements are far apart in memory, but every time you access one element, let's assume it's an uint32_t, the CPU fetches a whole cache lane of e.g. 64 bytes and puts it in the CPU cache in anticipation that you access data close to this in the near future. But you don't, so the CPU has to fetch another 64 bytes block for the first element of the second row, uses only 4 bytes from that, and so on. If your 2D array is large enough, by the time you finish the first iteration of the inner loop and start reading the second element of every row, the 64 byte cache lane that was fetched when you read the first element of the first row has already been evicted from the CPU cache again when you read the first element of row 2000, so the same 64 byte block has to be fetched from RAM again. This makes a huge performance difference, and is applicable to pretty much every programming language.

I'm anticipating his video every April 1st, and was already fearing he might have skipped this year when it wasn't uploaded in time. One of the people with the perfect mix of funny, smart and bat-shit crazy.

I was recently pleasantly surprised by the YT algorithm and was recommended Tech Time Traveller's video about Miniscribe, which just blew up for this guy for reasons unknown to mortals. ;-)

The Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TechTimeTraveller/videos

Videos mostly about retro computers and companies from the 70s and onwards.

It's amazing how high quality the videos are and how much effort this guy puts into them even thjough he only got about 2k views per video up until the latest vid. Seems the persistence finally payed off.

It's amazing to me how people resort to these "hurr durr China bad" rhetorics to justify any claim about China. I don't see how the numbers are off besides how they simply couldn't do nearly enough tests by the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.

If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.

> It's still thousands of potential deaths, and nearing a million for all of China.

People die all the time. Every day. Shanghai has 25M people. Let's assume the US's annual death rate of 8.8 per 1000. That's 220k deaths per year, or 4230 deaths per week.

Statistically with the current numbers, getting everybody infected would result in less deaths than having no covid at all :o) Sure, we'll only see real deaths with a delay of a few weeks, so that's witless, but as stated in my sibling comment in this thread, Omicron seems not to deliver on this from my personal experiences at all.

Having a total lock-down over it seems absolutely ridiculous to me.

I won't argue with that. The US has vastly improved in that regard over the last 70 years (or however far you want to go back), or the West in general, and could be considered ahead in many ways. However, if you want to put yourself on that high ground, it always comes across rather weird if you add overly specific inb4's. And actually, I think "well at least we can openly call out our government for having done fucked up shit even though nobody in charge will get prosecuted" is kinda rather a sad state of affairs too.

As a side node/regarding initial topic, I also really dislike the quick jump to "whataboutism" to try and kill off any form of discussion that draws parallels and comparisons with other countries (or, to anything else more generally). Because this is unfortunately how it mostly gets used today.

Purely anecdotal of course, but currently, covid is rampant here in Germany, at least my region. Everybody and their mom is catching it currently, I had it two weeks ago, most of my colleagues did or currently do. All were vaccinated, nobody went down for longer than 2 or 3 days with a fever, and a few more days to get up to speed again. No loss of sense of smell/taste, nobody short on breath. This is very different from any cases from my circle of acquaintances in 2021/2020, which were way more severe. Also, no more overloaded ICUs here. I guess this is why they're lifting all the restrictions here currently, despite case numbers skyrocketing.

This seems to be the norm with Omicron. If Shanghai is just Omicron too, I'd be surprised if a wave of deaths will follow.

7 in 12k is way less than the rate you'd expect in the overall population. It's 0.5 in 1000 people. The US' overall death rate was 8.8 per 1000 in 2020.

> What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.

And ironically, with the case numbers vs. deaths we see there, it seems to strongly support the stance that the crisis is over. 7 deaths for 12k infected is ridiculous. They just cannot change course from zero covid without losing face, this is why they push through with this nonsense.

Sure, you deliberately placed the goal posts as such that they exactly put the US on the moral high ground.

I found a VM titled "Windows 1.0 Premiere Edition", both sequences do nothing. I couldn't find any "About" window to tell me the exact Windows version, though.

Sure, the bus driver was supposed to represent the other extreme. In reality, they probably wouldn't care no matter how simple the setup is. But the at-least-somewhat-curious non-tech person has probably better chances finding a problem with a systemd service than a sysvinit script, even if they just open a ticket in the end. The info they can provide is more likely to be useful with systemd, I'd argue.

You know, I have kids too, but I still wonder how much more dependent on big tech we might potentially get over the next decades, and how much responsibility I have in protecting and educating them in that regard. I'm postponing self-hosting mail for several years now, because it has A LOT of gotchas and requires tweaking and debugging every couple weeks/months because someone considers you a Spammer again (looking at you, Hotmail (German: Schrottmail)).

But eventually they will be old enough to require an email address, so should I just let them use Gmail and stop worrying, or try to have something up and running until then? At least protect them from the data kraken until they can make their own informed decisions about that. But then I'm not just responsible for my email, but my whole family's email. What about 30 years down the road, when they long moved out? Am I still gonna sysadmin my family's self-hosting galore when they finally have kids on their own? Is it even still possible then? At least for mail it looks like when it's growing over my head I can just sign up with some mail provider (that hopefully values privacy) and let them handle that whole BS.

It might not even be worth it anymore at some point though, if basically everyone else you communicate with via mail is on Gmail. Then Google already has all my email as well.