palordrolap

On the one hand I like and respect Gabe for staying relatively down to Earth.

But on the other Steam is the DRM that prevents people from owning what they bought and the dude has a fricking yacht. “But he eaaarned it waaah”, yeah, and how did he earn it? I refer you back to the previous point.

I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.

It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.

That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.

… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

alias name-here yields the line alias name-here='contents-of-alias-here' as output, and if you want just the part between the single quotes from that, sed, cut or, come to think of it, related shell tricks that do the same thing, would be needed to capture and convert it.

${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a name for what’s only between those single quotes.

For example, I have a lot of preferences built into my alias for ‘ls’. Occasionally I want to run watch ls -l somefilespec to watch a directory listing for changes to a file. But commands fed to watch don’t go through the alias mechanism, leaving the output somewhat different to my preferences.

It’s wordy, but watch ${BASH_ALIASES["ls"]} -l somefilespec mostly* achieves what I want.

* Unfortunately, watch also causes the stripping of colour codes and I have --color=auto, not --color=force in my ls alias, so it’s by no means perfect - I have add the latter if I want colour - but I don’t have to type the rest of the preferences I have in there.

FWIW, my ls alias is currently:

alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style="+ %F %T"'

I have an alias called save_aliases that does alias > ~/.bash_aliases. alias on its own just dumps all the existing aliases to the terminal in a format that can be parsed by Bash.

I felt especially clever when I came up with that and used it to save itself.

Bonus fact: ${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a way to get at the contents of an alias without resorting sed or cut shenanigans on the output of the alias command.

No. My distro still provides the latest release of the original GNOME system monitor.

As time has gone on, GNOME have enforced more and more of their own look and feel, completely ignoring any styling that might be provided by other window managers. Some of those might even be using older GTK libraries, but that doesn’t matter.

Basically if you run a modern GNOME app under KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc., it’s going to look like a GNOME app regardless of what the other windows look like. Very Henry Ford.

The system monitor is no different. The new version works but the earlier version I found and installed also works fine and fits in. I suspect it’s GTK3 (old) versus GTK4 (new), but I can’t confirm. It’ll be something like that.

The folks responsible for Linux Mint started the XApps project of GNOME forks to roll back some of GNOME’s nonsense, but I guess they haven’t got around to forking the system monitor yet.

… and I’ve looked at both Resources and Mission Centre. Neither are to my taste (and are both Flatpaks).

That was the first one I tried, but it’s a fork from too far back.

The two main issues I had with it were 1) It only reports CPU usage in multiples of X%, where X is the number of cores, which was a long-standing SNAFU in the original GNOME version and 2) the usage graphs on the performance screen are light-mode only, even in dark mode, and there’s no easy option to change it.

Well, I was going to say GNOME’s System Monitor which has always been the default GUI task manager on my distro, but it’s been getting steadily more and more GNOME-ified with every revision and frankly, I hate how it looks now.

Might be time to shop for an alternative.

Edit +44 mins: So, the immediate alternatives all have other things I don’t like about them, but an older version of GNOME System Monitor will still install and run, so I guess I’ll be using that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m a hoarder who refuses to buy more stuff because I can’t bear to part with the stuff I’ve got. So all of it, I guess?*

But if you want a simpler answer, there are a couple of old stuffed animals that I’d mourn as much as I would a living pet, so probably those. They’re a lot lower maintenance than an actual pet though, which is a big plus.

* Actually I can think of a few things that I don’t want, but they need to be disposed of properly (broken electrical; dead batteries) and I don’t really have the means to do that.

Add more colours a button that turns it into a slot machine. Three sevens and you win a prize.

(a redirect to a picture of a duck)

A translation into Latin doesn’t seem to scan with the tune (caveat: translation software used)… So she was singing in English? In Germany? During Latin class?

Yep. That’s definitely without a care in the world.

Did she do “If you’re happy and you know it” for an encore?

I heard the kids are putting a space before the exclamation mark to tone down its immediacy:

See you there !

versus

See you there!

I’m old. I guess it works, but then I’m of the “ellipsis isn’t necessarily ominous” generation, so what I think might be completely wrong…

Explain please. All the ones I see in the image are shaped like four adjoined letter L’s which is the same way around that the Nazis used. Or are you referring to the fact that most of them aren’t stood on a corner, diamond-wise?

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to bring the court case forward, and when he inevitably doesn’t turn up (not that he would have if everything ran to the original timetable), make the finding in absentia, presumably “guilty” but at least worse than it would be if he’d bothered to turn up, and then…

Sanctions? Heck. What else do we have to hold him to account? An ever bigger tariffs war? Forcibly close US embassies and consulates? Seize US assets?

It’d be a fine line to prevent the Big (cutter of) Cheese from bugging out and declaring war.

Because LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition

Interesting. LMDE seems to be more like MS Windows in that things like kernel updates insist on a reboot, and certain other things are easiest restarted with a reboot too, for example, X.Org changes.

I’m sure there’s still a way to bootstrap a new kernel on the bare metal without needing to reboot, likewise for restarting X.Org, but I foresee problems with any programs and daemons that were children of the original processes. For example, convincing them not to exit when their parent does and then getting them to play nice under a new session.

I mean, I guess you could just not update, or have a long period where they’re unnecessary and that’d work too. That could well be what this meme is getting at. Can confirm sessions (caveat: with standby and hibernate) that have lasted well over a month.

But this all raises the question: Does anyone actually not reboot when system changes happen, and what’s the workflow for bootstrapping without rebooting there?

In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.

Any where stress doesn’t affect me negatively.

People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.

Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.

Then other “undesirables” depending on who isn’t liked by whoever’s in charge.

And then the goalposts for what’s desirable will start to move.

And the scope won’t just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn’t have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.

Who’s next to be blocked?

I mean, now that the infrastructure and policies are in place, it’s only a matter of time.

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage, discovering what Technical Support would be dealing with a century or more later.