palordrolap

I am reminded of that one guy who retyped an entire credit card agreement with clauses in his favour, formatted it to look like the original, then signed it and sent it back.

But at that point the stories diverge because he got away with quite a lot of “abuse” before they cancelled his card… and were required to pay his cancellation fee.

… or do they, because this Cop29 story seems to suggest that the Saudis have not only done this in the past, but they’ve been given secret permission to do so.

“Aw. Did you think we were friends? Haha. You’re brown. When we said we didn’t have a problem with racism, we meant we have lots of it and don’t think it’s a problem. Even if you were to fully embrace Russian values as well as worship Putin, we’d still despise you. Still though, do you have any weapons you’d like to sell?”

Instagram and Facebook feeds already work a lot like this. They throw in a few random posts between the ones you’re actually subscribed to see and after a while you’ll realise the random ones are more of the sort you lingered on for longer and there aren’t so many of the others.

The problem, for both the viewer and the content server, is that this technique gets stuck in local maxima, that is, after a while it tends to serve exclusively one kind of unsubscribed content and stands little chance of broadening into the viewer’s other interests, assuming there are any.

From an outside perspective, this is a good thing in a way because it gets that viewer out of the clutches of the content server for a while once the viewer is sufficiently bored, but it’s a bad thing if you’re a viewer hungry for content, and especially bad for the content server who is desperate for that viewer to stay, eyes glued to the site, where they will see more of the advertisements that pay for everything.

I never said what he did was right, only why he might have done it.

We like Linux, but not to the point we’re aping Steve Ballmer.

(If this is lost on you, search up “Developers developers developers” along with his name.)

Rumour has it that Charles is incredibly angry about the whole thing and Andrew is very much in danger of being cut off completely if he doesn’t keep his head down, so while Charles has paid people off, he has not forgiven or forgotten.

There’s also that he wasn’t king at the time he made those payments and may have been protecting their mother rather than his brother at the time. Andrew, idiot though he is, was the Queen’s favourite.

Had the Queen already been dead and Charles been king at the time the news broke, he might well have let Andrew suffer the consequences.

“We could have shut them all down immediately but too many rich people might have lost money, and even though that wouldn’t have caused them any appreciable hardship whatsoever, we absolutely had to give them a chance to prepare.”

That’ll be me fixating on the grammar of one panel and forgetting everything else then.

Bold of you to assume, etc.

With open source it’s either someone incredibly dedicated to doing things for other people (unicorns), someone being paid by a company to do it (workhorses. Some might have a horn, it’s hard to tell. Or the company’s the unicorn), or it’s someone with programming knowledge who also needs and wants to use the software they’re writing (hobbyists).

Outside of the horse analogues, you probably need to look at the demographics of the users of said software and put the programmer somewhere within that bell curve. As to precisely where, I’d guess not at the low end as they’ve had to gain at least some programming experience along with the knowledge of the topic the software is about.

For the unicorns and the paid devs, well, they could be anyone.

There are bound to be systemic skews not accounted for here. More men tend to go into programming than women, for example, or at least that used to be the case.

Mine eyes!

Don’t know about mobile, but on desktop, that website is an unnecessarily bright yellow.

But I guess the tune was kind of catchy.

Nitpick time: File this under “wrong usage of -eth when trying to sound medieval”. That particular usage became “-es” in modern English, and if you make that replacement in this comic (cometh → comes), it’s immediately clear that it’s wrong. “Come onward” would have been just fine, but that, of course, looks far too modern.

I mean, you could read it as being deliberately demeaning or objectifying - she is being a hard taskmaster - but I don’t think that was the intention here.

If she has permission - or dares take the initiative - to use the familiar form of address, she could try “Now, come thee onward!”, keeping both that “th” that was wrong before, as well as the syllable count. Might still be a bit weird in context, but not grammatically.

I guess my confusion comes from the fact I’m from a place that only within the last 100 years or so has all but lost the original “hw” in “correct” speech, except in “who”, and I was thinking that the ‘w’ had to have been preserved, especially if the ‘h’ was.

There’s also that the ‘w’ hasn’t vanished in “twenty” (or “twain”, etc.).

Hm. I’ve definitely seen this one or something like it during an exceptionally rare sleep paralysis episode, but the question remains whether it was outside, or technically on the inside, projecting out, but looking back in again. It was stood at the side of the bed, which was considerate, given that they often like to sit on people.

One of the few times I did not intentionally start into the abyss, but it decided to look back anyway. And I made a very funny “wuU-Uur!” noise as I roused myself out of it and watched the thing melt away. I now assume that’s the noise comic characters make when the speech bubble reads “oo-er”.

If I see it again, and I remember, I might ask it if it wants tea.

I thought it was the ‘w’ that had made the sound all along, perhaps modified by the ‘o’. The ‘o’ then became a schwa or an unnecessary similar sound and was then dropped as redundant. “hwo” followed the same development, but we spell that “who” these days.

Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.

Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that’s rare, and it’s mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.

Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.

Conan O’Brien went on to write for The Simpsons and later had his own talk show or something.

Condescending tone was not intended, but on rereading I can see how I’ve come across that way. Sorry about that.

I’m not going to disagree with this on the grounds that you could replace Python with any language and still be right for a handful of programmers using it.

Relatedly, there are plenty of people who write code in Python who know exactly what they’re doing (thus defeating the quote), to the point that an amateur reading that code has literally no idea what’s going on. Abstractions upon abstractions. Horrors upon horrors. Likewise this can be done in any language. Try taking apart one of the standard Perl modules (that’s written in Perl anyway), for example.

What does concern me is that the only source I can find for this quote is your comment. I can find Conal Elliot and even a suggestion that they have written code in Python (making the quote a self-burn, perhaps), but not the quote itself.

I would have expected that vehicles belonging to members of the royal family would have had trackers on them, and in hard-to-access, hard-to-disable places too. Anything else would be pure hubris.

Also, if I was the site security, I’d be expecting a dismissal. A stolen vehicle could almost as easily have been a, er, “lethally modified” vehicle, for example.

And the new staff get to do a full sweep of everything to make sure that this theft wasn’t a distraction from exactly that.