It’s extremely easy to fuck up cryptography code; you require both extraordinary mathematical insight and the programming skills to defend against every known and future side-channel attack. I would suggest instead trusting software where you can read the source yourself, and which has been openly reviewed by a selection of experts in the field.

“Also, be sure not to hallucinate and don’t make any mistakes.”

Our forever-DM is all-in on AI generation of stuff. Which I understand; it’s a role that requires a lot of thankless prep, and he wants all of the in-game maps and character artwork to look fancy. But on the other hand, I play D+D for the human interaction of it, and actually prefer the ‘theatre of the mind’ way of playing it. Dry-wipe pens on a whiteboard, there’s your adventure map. Now get roleplaying. If I wanted to play a computer game, then I’d play a computer game.

My wife used to work for a company that manufactured the glass for solar panels in the UK, but there was just no way that they could compete with Chinese prices. They would have had to have sold it below cost to match, let alone make any profit. It’s not the most labour-intensive of industries, but the energy costs are massive to melt all the glass. China has made massive investments in hydro and has a lot of cheap power for industry, which ironically means that making solar panels for green power is easier too.

An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there’s much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can’t be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn’t changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there’s not much point in redoing it.

When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don’t touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can’t touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That’s not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.

And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn’t any Linux at that point.

Six legs, and a tail split into two for what looks to me like flight. I think you’ll find that’s a beautiful Butterfly Cat.

Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I’ve found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it’s unbeatable.

I’ve also found that “fancy Git dialogs” just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.

I just don’t see the thinking here.

• buy a decent steak
• leave it out at room temperature for an hour so that it will cook properly. During this time, prepare the vegetables, potatoes, sauce that will go with it.
• cook the steak for two minutes a side in a heavy frying pan on high heat
• let the steak rest somewhere warm for ten minutes while you finish assembling everything else.

I could spend a fucking fortune, enough to live on for months, to cook my steak upright in a toaster for 90 seconds instead, for a worse end result, and it would save me zero time, because cooking the steak is not the time-critical step here.

Would only save you time if you’re buying the kind of steak that can be cooked in 90 seconds, and taking it straight from the fridge, cooking it, and then putting it in sandwich, and anyone who thinks that sounds a good idea frankly doesn’t deserve to have a decent steak.

Alas, no.

I call mine ‘little Elvis’, because that’s what Elvis called his, and it’s always struck me as a good name for it.

Yeah. Am using Connect on my phone, which shows “comments to the same link” all in one view. That’s not quite right; would be better if it showed all of the posts that had the same link together too, but it’s a massive improvement.

Not suggesting we should have Fark-style ‘only one post per link’, because that ended up having some, eh, niche blog takes on news articles, since you couldn’t post mainstream articles. But accumulating posts with the same link or same post together would be great.

Okay - that’ll be interesting. There’s not much “the future Addams family” in that collection; there’s quite a lot of creepy-and-kooky, a fair amount of 1940s humour that’s aged really badly (misogyny and foreigners with funny ways) and also a fair amount of stuff that I just don’t understand at all. Will be pleased to see the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ for what’s actually going on in some of them.

Bit of a prototypical Far Side in a way. Addams has a fair amount more technical skill than Larson, but can be a lot meaner in his jokes; they’re very much about an ‘everyday picture with funny caption’ or vice-versa.

Been a while since I’ve had to use that piece-of-shit in anger; but doesn’t the “save as” options give you the possibility of saving it as HTML but with all of those changes baked in? It’s easier to copy-paste HTML.

My Ryzen 9 had a default boost limit of 90 °C, which caused a lot of stress to the rest of the cooling system in my PC but it didn’t seem to have any problem running like that for a few hours. (Fortunately you can crank it down to something a bit more sensible in the BIOS.) My laptop will spike briefly over 100 °C, but only for a second or two. I can see the ‘failure’ temperature being a bit higher, but 200 °C seems unreasonably hot.

Josuttis’s books are normally pretty good, lots of examples and a clear explanation of why you might want to use something, but oof that looks akin to a kick in the essentials.

Even if you’ve no other reason to update to C++20, the fact that if constexpr gets rid of half the things you’d previously need to use SFINAE for, and concepts gets rid of the other half, makes it well worthwhile. Amazing how much it stops hurting when you stop doing ridiculous things.

Sands of Time is straight-up one of the best games of all time, and that’s even including the not-great combat which makes up a lot of it, and a few puzzles which just grind the whole thing to a complete stop. Its quality is not completely representative of its era.

What is representative of its era, is that it’s a complete bastard to run nowadays. Requires a GPU with hardware transform and lighting, but also a single-core CPU, which means you need a very specific age of computer to run it. Even patched up, there’s some things that just don’t look right - I’ve never managed to get it running with the portals to secret areas looking the way they should.

I am quite envious of you being able to replay it, tho. Think I gave up the last time I tried.

Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you’re developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn’t all that much extra, and we can prove there’s a growing install base.

Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.

Would have posted the same, but this exactly. Don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing really. Enthusiasm for niche topics is awesome, but you need to maintain that enthusiasm to have a community, and that’s easier with fewer, larger groups.

We also used to have a lot of ‘porn on the front page’, but that’s gone too. Have no objection to a bit of nudity, but there’s plenty of internet for that elsewhere.

Managed to snag free tickets to see them and Buckcherry warming up for Steel Panther a while back.

Bowling for Soup were absolutely superb; charismatic crowd-pleasers, loads of energy, top songs, great to watch. Buckcherry played for about twenty minutes and then fucked off, which is gutting because it was them that I really wanted to see. And then Steel Panther played for about two hours, faaaar too long for a one-joke band, and went past ‘satirically sleazy’ into just ‘sleazy’, which is not the same.

Take home message is really ‘go see Bowling for Soup’, I suppose.