Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Is on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during a week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • Meh. They’ll continue to lie until they get caught and then lie that they believed what they said to be the truth.

    Even, nay, especially in cases when that admission would indicate that they were an absolute clown lacking the capability to distinguish their rear end from their elbow.

    Lies upon lies until a lie is reached whose truth is hard if not impossible to prove and the whole stack of lies will rest on that in an uneasy balancing act.

    It’s not like they haven’t been doing that for centuries already. They attend courses on how to do it, for heaven’s sake.


  • There’s often a rule about not wishing about wishing, either directly or indirectly. This rule’s not in the story of Aladdin (at least, not Disney’s version) because that would prevent what happens with Jafar at the end.

    It’s also not a rule in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach…, where Achilles and the Tortoise - characters Hofstadter frequently borrows as protagonists; his Tortoise is sapient and can talk - contrive to wish that a wish not be granted, or something like that.

    And if that last paragraph (with its nested asides) gave you a headache, you’ll love the book.






  • It’s complex I guess. There’s a stereotype that doing a good deed in China usually ends up backfiring on the doer of the deed.

    Here she died and was praised, but then, the backfire had already taken effect.

    We could conclude from this that the only correct way for a Chinese citizen to do a good deed is to die in the process.

    Then note that the praise could be not for doing the deed but for saving whatever other forces are at play from having to provide the backfire.

    The hard part is determining the shades of truth of all the various aspects here.








  • anaemic* (Sorry, that bothered me for some reason.)

    As for capture groups, you’ll have to find another way. Perversely, perhaps BusyBox continues to be included on certain systems because they know that the extra space is required for the code that works around BB’s shortcomings. That sounds asinine until you realise that “solving the problem properly” most likely leads to that one XKCD comic about the proliferation of competing standards.

    At worst, multiple sizes of BusyBox itself.





  • If we tried this in the UK with someone like, say, the late David Coleman, I’m not entirely sure anyone who remembers him would be able to distinguish - other than, as I said, the knowledge that he’s been gone for quite some time now.

    Coleman, was considered a go-to commentator for decades despite being gaffe-prone even at the best of times. He was occasionally oblivious and apparently lacking any self-awareness too. (He did kind of learn to laugh at himself though and was a good, well, sport, about it all.)

    Sounds very AI to me. Come to think of it, he may even have been kept around precisely because of the entertainment value.

    I assume that Al Michaels is not of this bizarre calibre and it wouldn’t take long for people to notice.


  • I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: There are better things to attack Trump for than how he looks, what physical conditions he has or how he smells.

    At face value, those sorts of things have little effect on the ability to run a country well.

    Even his hair is a better target because how he wears it would appear to show vanity, a quality that might actually interfere with stable management. That’s still a relatively big stretch without other evidence (of which there would appear to be plenty) though.

    Attack his ideas, his intents, his politics. He makes this easy enough, right? Start there.

    “LOL u smel” is something you expect in the playground. Something Trump himself might use, perhaps.

    We have to be better than that.