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

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  • Implementing such a change has another problem: Who gets to have the time-zone that’s noon at noon?

    Are we going to let the British continue to get away with it? Even the excuse of “that’s the way it has to be to keep things simple” would cause the French to revolt. Again. They still don’t like to talk about the fact that it’s Greenwich and not Paris that’s the prime meridian.

    Swatch’s “Internet time” was a decimal system designed to mitigate the problem because no-one would have any idea what the old time was supposed to be, but people are used to the base-60 system. It didn’t and won’t catch on.

    And it doesn’t fix the “0 isn’t my midnight” problem, which is pretty close to the original.

    It also doesn’t fix the “what time of day is it elsewhere in the world” problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.



  • JavaScript, like some other languages of the time, was designed with the Robustness Principle in mind. Arguably the wrong end of the Robustness Principle, but still.

    That is, it was designed to accept anything that wasn’t a syntax error (if not a few other things besides) and not generate run-time errors unless absolutely necessary. The thinking was that the last thing the user of something written in JavaScript wants is for their browser to crash or lock up because something divided by zero or couldn’t find an object property.

    Also it was originally written in about five minutes by one guy who hadn’t had enough sleep. (I may have misremembered this part, but I get the feeling I’m not too far off.)


  • I’d say it’s more like setting up a handler for a callback, signal, interrupt or something along those lines.

    Function declarations by themselves don’t usually do that. Something else has to tell the system to run that function whenever the correct state occurs.

    That doesn’t account for unconditional come-froms.¸but I expect there’d have to be a label at the end of some code somewhere that would give a hint about shenanigans yet to occur. Frankly that’d be worse than a goto, but then, we knew that already.



  • palordrolap@kbin.runtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLike a prion
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    18 days ago

    “If you took all the DNA out of a person and laid it end to end, that person would die.”

    The distance to Jupiter from Earth is but a mere blip though. Even the galaxy is small compared to what’s beyond.

    Thanks to chaos theory, what we do here can have some effect on the far future of the Universe, at least, for those places within causal reach. How meaningful that effect can be remains to be seen.

    But do bear in mind that even, say, a cow farting in a field in France last Tuesday might have as much effect as everything you ever do.





  • Chances are that many large entities are in too deep. It’s what Microsoft were counting on before the backlash, and now they’re probably going to do it by stealth instead.

    If I have to use Windows, I want the configuration of Windows that will run on the computers at a country’s top intelligence agencies.

    Because sure as hell those places will have it locked down and not sending one solitary thing back to Microsoft, whether they have to configure it themselves or put the fear of the unholy into Microsoft to get that to happen.

    And if not that, the configuration that Bill Gates or Mark “I put tape over my webcam and deactivate my mic for no particular reason” Zuckerberg will use.


  • Lawful good is asking for trouble. Before they know it, they’ll be inundated with e-mails to their personal company address with poorly worded help requests. They’ll spend half their time making and updating tickets on the user’s behalf that would have been mostly automatic if they’d gone the Lawful Neutral route. They need to insist requests are sent to the main support address. I’m assuming that’s tied directly to the ticketing system.

    When I was being Lawful slightly-better-than-neutral, I’d create the ticket and then put a paragraph in the reply telling them to please not e-mail me directly in future, because one day I might be unavailable and their e-mail could go unseen for hours or even days.

    Repeat offenders would eventually do it at a time when things were busy too, so I’d be concentrating on the tickets and not things to my personal address, so that slight delay often helped it sink in.