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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you’re forced to use Windows, you can minimise the amount of disruption from updates by remembering:

    • they’re only released on Tuesdays, so you can make sure you get several days without interruption by installing them on Wednesdays
    • there’s a pause updates for seven days button in Settings that you can use if there’s a Tuesday between now and when you’re going to definitely need the computer to be available

    It’s much easier to plan around them when you know when they’re coming.





  • Children are born loving their parents, and should figure out pretty quickly that their parents love each other (sometimes even if they don’t). Understanding the gist of marriage should therefore come pretty naturally to children, whether gay or straight. If they’re perceiving straight marriage as normal and gay marriage as odd, then that’s something they’ve been taught rather than their natural state that needs protecting and preserving until they’re older.


  • Dextrose is specifically right-handed, which is why it starts like dexter, the Latin word for right (and the rest is just ose, which means sugar, so the whole thing just means right-handed sugar). It got its name because when it was first identified as its own molecule, it was because it polarised light to the right, whereas l-sucrose, which had already been identified, polarised it to the left. Glucose is also possible as left-handed l-glucose, although it doesn’t occur naturally in earth life.






  • The exact quote is:

    And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

    I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

    I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

    But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

    This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus “round_up()” to a “round_down()”, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus

    That’s a long way short of finding the bug and pointing it out, and instead is just the tedious work of adding checks and then deciding where to add more checks when you have the result of the previous checks. I suspect if we’d spent a trillion dollars on a tool for that, we could have come up with something much more efficient than an LLM.





  • You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.

    If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.





  • They stock things they make more profit on. If the margins on sugar water are much higher, then they don’t need to sell as much to make it worth stocking it instead of juice. If the margins are higher because consumers are unaware they’re being sold a cheaper-to-manufacture product for the same price because the packaging is deceptive to anyone who hasn’t been told they have to look or is in too much of a rush to have time to look, then shops end up full of sugar water that few consumers actually want.