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talideon

2,659 karma · joined December 26, 2013

https://keith.gaughan.ie

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/talideon; my proof: https://keybase.io/talideon/sigs/xrQeNgJwDeDVr__AMXDdSK8I6jDosMvyymcRZIGGMyA ]

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talideon··on RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)
I would add to this that tag URIs (see RFC 4151) are a fantastic way to mint entry IDs.
talideon··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
When doing the right thing regarding things like addiction are tried in the US, there seems to be a habit of learning the wrong lesson. Attempts to apply the successful Portuguese model have failed because decriminalisation by itself is just an enabler of what _really_ helps, which is all the follow-up support.

And don't get me started on how public health interventions in general seem to end up treated as moral hazards or wasteful in the US, even when they're _saving_ money...

talideon··on Z80 REPL (2018)
You don't. Just choose a block of RAM to write stuff to and use that. The block on the right shows the printable ASCII value of each address.
talideon··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
It's not the 16th century anymore. Can we please just give this up?
talideon··on Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
If you want to be pedantic, then this also wrong: half of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland are actually on the Laurentian plate, which split apart. The Scottish Highlands used to be part of the same range as the Appalachian. Plates are not continents.
talideon··on Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
Lake Ontario wasn't a "nationalist" name. It's an anglicised version of the Wyandot name for the lake. The Canadian province is named after the lake, not the other way around.

Don't be a ghoul.

talideon··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
The term "cartel" might be useful here.
talideon··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
s/actual NAT/actual firewall/
talideon··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
NATs are not firewalls. Any firewall-like functionality provided by NAT is entirely accidental and better provides by an actual NAT.
talideon··on The Indo-European Family Tree
Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.

[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]

talideon··on The Indo-European Family Tree
And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!
talideon··on The Indo-European Family Tree
Well, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist.

(Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)

talideon··on Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
We're not talking commie blocks here, nor macmansions, which is what passes for top-of-the-line in a disappointingly large segment of the US.
talideon··on Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
Well, the likes of Wordpress make this a bit of a mixed bag. It still publishes multiple feeds in multiple format, with what proports to being an RSS feed actually being a Frankenstein's monster of RSS, Atom, and random other namespaces.

I don't know why they persist in still doing that after all these years.

talideon··on Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
You don't have to convert anything to XHTML5. You only need to do that if you specify type="xhtml" on an element, but you can use="html" and escape the markup. RSS has this behaviour too, but it's spelled out better in Atom.

I suspect you've been making your lifeIfe difficult for no good reason.

> why should I care where the files are published?

You don't, but those consuming your feed do. You do it for their benefit.

talideon··on The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous
It's almost like every release is just basically advertising.
talideon··on The Apple Disk II Controller Card (2021)
It wasn't really the hardware's fault though. It was crippled by Commodore's marketing department wanting to maintain compatibility with the VIC-20's 1540 FDD, which meant that the bit banging method used to work around a bug in the VIA chip had to be used. Then to add insult to injury, because of how the VIC-II and 6510 need to share the bus, it ended up running even slower than the VIC-20.
talideon··on Introduction to Atom
Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.

There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.

talideon··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
And so it begins...
talideon··on Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games
Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.
talideon··on Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games
Hah! I never noticed that, but you're right!

For those interested in how the Wizball soundtrack should sound, the best place to go is DeepSID: https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...

talideon··on Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games
I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though.

Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.

talideon··on Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games
That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over tracks, I'm afraid.
talideon··on What are skiplists good for?
Plenty, but these days mostly if you either (a) want a simple implementation or (b) don't have to worry much about cache locality. The problem is that (b) doesn't really exist outside of retrocomputing and embedded systems these days. It's still one of my favourite data structures, just because it's a clever way to get most of the benefits of more complicated datastructures on small systems with minimal code.
talideon··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
talideon··on Sc-im: Spreadsheets in your terminal
But originating on Unix in '81, and thus predating Lotus 1-2-3 by ~2 years.
talideon··on Sc-im: Spreadsheets in your terminal
It's a tool with a long vintage, and it wouldn't make sense to port it to a different language just to take advantage of the likes of bubbletea or textual.
talideon··on OpenAI Acquires TBPN
I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
talideon··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
Germany has a population of ~87,000,000 though.
talideon··on Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?
The US is not in a position to process much of the sweet crude it has. Instead, imports sour crude, which is what much of the US's refineries are actually built to handle. This is why Venezuela was such a thorn in the side of the US, as they were one of the major producers and also largely produced sour crude.

As adwn says, it's a globally priced commodity, and the US is not in a position to disentangle itself from that market because in spite of being one of the world's largest producers, US refineries are not in a position to process that product, so it needs to go abroad. The US needs to import significant amounts of sour crude to be refined for their own use.

The US is just as screwed as the rest of us.

Also, the primary worry for Europe isn't oil, it's natural gas.

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