palordrolap

… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?

How about Bluesky?

Oh thank f–k. I don’t think I could have handled there being a war with the US over Greenland.

Now all I have to worry about is the Online “Safety” Act and the rise of authoritarianism and the far right in my country!

I bought a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle decades ago and while the interface has changed in Mint over the years, I’ve always been able to use it to communicate with my ancient flip-phone to get pictures off it. In fact I was able to use it with some very rough and ready software to pull the texts off it at one point.

It probably also worked on Windows, because I’ve had both since before I switched.

The phone’s camera got water damaged a while back and now all the pictures from it - not that I take many - have a literal watermark on them, but the Bluetooth still works both ways.

Can’t vouch for whether it would work with more heavy duty hardware like a headset or speakers, but I guess it must be luck of the draw with a lot of these things.

Strong odds he’s the next Prime Minister. Unfortunately at least 50% of my countrymen are (still) stupid enough to believe the lies.

Out of left field, and something I’ve posted online before: Arthur Tudor

Arthur was the older brother of the man who became Henry VIII. Like the curious echo in modern times, red-haired Harry was the spare.

Arthur’s death, therefore, is the historical pivot that turns Britain Protestant, cutting ties with Rome, dissolving alliances with Europe and sending us off into doing everything in the way we did it, for better or worse, since Tudor times

Shakespeare? Might never have happened. Spanish armada? What armada? We might well have remained friends and there’d be no need for angry Spaniards in ships. Arthur was married to Catherine of Aragon. We might have been part of any armada.

Mary I was Henry and Catherine’s child. With Arthur still alive, there’s no Mary I.

In the timeline where Arthur lives, Henry’s trajectory is completely different. Does he still marry Anne Boleyn and beget Elizabeth? Even if they do, she’s very unlikely to become queen.

All of modern history, especially that of the USA, would be completely different were it not for that one unidentified and lethal malady.

Nah. That change began when the towers fell, so we should probably point to the deaths of the 3000 as being the turning point.

Age is relative. Age is a state of mind. Both of these statements are true to some extent at any given time. Both are informed by age-related factors within and without what- or whoever is being assessed as being old.

That is, if I were a 36-year-old with a chronic pain condition, I’d feel a lot older than an otherwise healthy 36-year-old, and that doesn’t even touch on mental health and general disposition.

And either way, if I were a 72-year-old - because why not, let’s double it again - both of those hypothetical people would be youngsters, and an 18-year-old would be practically a baby.

It’s impossible to be sure. There are usually some red flags when mods end up out of touch or alignment with a community, but a sufficiently crafty mod team have the power to hide many of their transgressions where regular posters don’t. Quick edit: In the Fediverse, this is slightly harder to hide because the mod logs are public. But someone would still have to comb through them.

Whether the problem ultimately turns out to be the mod or the community (or a subset thereof) is a difficult question.

Sometimes it’s clearly one or the other. Sometimes it’s possible for both mod team and community to be out of order in completely different ways, and there are no winners in the court of morality. But the mods will win through sheer power.

Ever watched shows about nightmare landlords and nightmare tenants? Same kind of deal.

As with anything, contemptible people eventually get themselves into positions of power, and once they’re there, it’s nigh impossible to get rid of them without starting over completely.

Innie, Spinny, Sh-thole, Bob; Spotty, Hula, Turquoise, Outie. (Phteven)

Bonus bonus: Cark. Ceres gets to keep its initial like Pluto.

Spinny is ironic.

If you want serious… uh, well you could attempt to apply exoplanet order-of-discovery and label things Sol x where x is the order letter, but I think that gives (Sol) c, d, a, e, f, g, h, i. “b” would be the Moon, stricken from the list, or renamed to a-something once it was identified as a non-planet.

Good grief. I was six months into a new job that would peak in greatness about six months later before the stress really started to pile on, so I was riding high. QoL has been mostly downhill, sometimes rapidly, since then.

Trump and his family have gladly accepted Russian money and one of the world leaders he most admires is Putin because of the way he “handles” his political opposition, so they’re very much influenced by what Putin says, does and asks them to do.

Frankly both Putin and Trump can get in the sea.

I can think of at least one Commodore 64 game from back in the day that was hard to play, but I only remember the name of one of them: Quake Minus One. It was not a prequel to the 3D shooter Quake.

You sound like the sort of person who would say “it’s for their own good” if Russia did lean into its patently obvious expansionist plans and try to take land from other countries. “But Belarus is OK and that would be easy”. There’s a Russian puppet in charge there, just like there’s a Russian puppet in charge of the US.

I don’t think many countries have room to talk on that one.

Very much this. I took out a paragraph about it because what should have been a short comment was getting too long.

Much needed with the deprecation of ClamTK.

My only gripe is the choice of GNOME / GTK4 / Adwaita, because I really hate the direction GNOME have gone with all that. Anyway, I look forward to this being a standard package in Debians starting 2030 or so.

Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.

… but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.

Fully aware that I may end up eating my words here, what’s your Chess ELO and your Go rank?

Using AI to find errors that can then be independently verified sounds reasonable.

The danger would be in assuming that it will find all errors, or that an AI once-over would be “good enough”. This is what most rich AI proponents are most interested in, after all; a full AI process with as few costly humans as possible.

The lesser dangers would be 1) the potential for the human using the tool to lose or weaken their own ability to find bugs without external help and 2) the AI finding something that isn’t a bug, and the human “fixing” it without a full understanding that it wasn’t wrong in the first place.