I was being a silly goose and pretending I was more clueless than I actually am.

(Probably not by as much as I’d like to think.)

Assuming constant accumulation at the same rate, they’re on for about two thirds the target amount in a full year. It’s undoubtedly devastating, but there’s a lot of room for it to be worse.

Yes, but not yet, which is all CERN needs for now.

They’ll undoubtedly switch to something else in a few years if they continue to favour hardware retention over software compliance.

Spiralling off into rampant speculation, I can imagine they might end up finding some way to create their own in-house Linux distro that supports old hardware if all the stock distros raise the bar out of the reach of what they have, but I’m sure they hope that’s a way off yet.

But it could be a good thing for folks outside CERN with old hardware if that ever comes to pass.

Perl doesn’t radicalise anyone, but it might turn them into a funny character.

False. It’s a shell synonym for /home/ah-ha-ha-nice-try-you-are-not-getting-my-real-homedir-name

… it’s a PITA to type out longhand, let me tell you.

Wait until you learn what the other seven parts of a byte are called when the first one is called a bit.

Both you and @radix@lemmy.world came to the same conclusion I did that “operating astern” might mean “we are slowing down” but the impression I got from Wikipedia was that flag was for literally travelling backwards, and the ship is clearly not doing that.

Interpretation 2 is that the first flag is the blue Peter referring to obstruction (usually fishing nets) and it is instead a reference to Jucika herself, kind of a “hey, you, the thing in our way”.

Interpretation 3 is the in-port meaning of the same flag, which is “come aboard”

The third flag about having a pilot aboard is also a little weird and I can’t be sure whether he’s saying the ship has crew or whether they’re asking if she needs guidance back to shore.

Still fairly mystified by Jucika, especially the spotted neckerchief. Spots don’t seem to be a good match to anything.

… though I do like the idea that the shorts mean she might be calling herself a firecracker.

The flag code may actually mean something, but it’s a bit hard to interpret. The middle flag is “you are in danger” which certainly fits the circumstances, but the others are a little harder to interpret, as is Jucika’s response. Her shorts, for example, could be interpreted as “I’m carrying explosives”, which probably isn’t what she’s going for.

I forgor the tilde and its taking a long time. wat do

Something has to trigger my memory, but there are things in my head that are easily pre-Internet. There might even be a couple that are from before my own existence passed down from my parents.

The question is then whether I let them escape my head and I’m not sure where the dividing line on “still use” is.

For example, and I don’t know why this one in particular, “Nice one, Cyril” is older than I am, and exists in my head, but I don’t post it anywhere online either in earnest or sarcastically because no-one would understand it. But my head uses it occasionally.

Veterans as in “in receipt of an army pension” veterans? Because that seems like a way to begin to deal with the issue.

Yeah, I think this guy was at my house the other day.

I have a lamp on a digital timer. Day in, day out, it comes on at the same time and goes off at the same time, whether I’m here or not. We’re talking well over 15 years at this point. Might be pushing 20.

The other day I went into that room for the first time that day after dark and the lamp wasn’t on. Thought the bulb had died. Manually turned the lamp on via the timer. I was able to deduce from the number of button pushes it took that the timer had been in auto mode and that the lamp should have been on. But it wasn’t.

Absolutely no reason for it to have been off. The lamp, the bulb and the timer have all continued as if nothing weird happened since then.

Therefore maybe a ghost did it.

A rare case of “I can fix her” rather than “I can fix him”. With the same predictable conclusion.

And maybe a missing body part or two.

The thing is that it’s apparently expected that everyone use AI.

With StackOverflow it was less than the full complement of developers who went there for help, so there was always someone to provide answers.

AI will kill StackOverflow and places like it. AI will create a dearth of new developers, and those that still choose the profession will be AI rotted and unable to move up or advance. They won’t post anywhere on the Internet, and even if they do, what they know was derived from StackOverflow before it stopped being updated. That’s not even a complete cover of tech now, let alone several years down the line when tech has moved on.

This whole thing is cashing in an investment and in 20 years we’re going to be confused about why that investment is no longer accruing interest.

The soft option perspective (I see plenty of command-line-only solutions here already):

These days, if I’m doing any major navigation, I do it the uncool way and use the GUI file manager bundled with my distro. I have the option enabled to show the “open a terminal at this location” button if I really want to start issuing commands.

If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted. (It was possible to patch Win 9x to behave like earlier Win 3.x so that it stopped at the DOS prompt and didn’t load Windows, which fit my aesthetic at the time.)

These days I prefer my comforts and I sure as heck don’t boot Linux to a command line unless something’s really wrong!

These things should not exist, but if they must then they should be put to this sort of use.

Enjoy your levitating cat.

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.” ― Douglas Adams

(Copied from an online source because I never remember the exact wording.)

One of the Easter eggs of this quote is that when it was uttered in the 1980s BBC TV adaptation, the scene cuts to a man, seen only from the back, disposing of his clothes and possessions and walking naked into the ocean. That man was Douglas Adams.

I had something about stagnation in the comment at one point, but I guess my attempt to make it implicit didn’t quite survive the edit.

My concern is that the current models have been trained on current technology by stealing knowledge from the existing pool of senior and junior engineers as well as a whole load of hobbyists.

If everyone moves up to senior now using LLMs, that’s all well and good now, but then there’ll be no juniors to steal the grunt work from to train AI and no-one to move up to senior in a decade or two.

Do you really think that the hobbyists are going to be enough to steal from to perpetuate the system in the near future?

Ah. You’re saying both are equal because they both count for nothing and two zeros are equal.

I disagree that “gift”, despite being a singular example, is nothing. 1 > 0.