Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I’m here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Reminds me of a TV ad, older than this comic, for a frosted cereal (probably not the first one that comes to mind) and the adult about to consume them has the inner dialogue “What about fat?!” “Wimp!”

    (I always heard it as “Wamp!”, so to this day I’m not completely sure if it was an early example of a spoken sad trombone, but “Wimp!” is more likely.)

    They don’t make ads like that any more.





  • It’s not about whether it works, it’s about proving that they’re keeping pace with the trends in technology that they’re not directly driving.

    They’re afraid that if they don’t give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that’s what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that’s what will happen.

    AI funding is so far up it’s own backside I’m not sure they’ll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.


  • Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

    Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.


  • Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

    Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

    … and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.



  • Had to check. It looks like the comic actually only ceased production last year after the passing of the (second) artist.

    Chris Browne took on Hägar after his father Dik - who drew the linked comic - died, but today I learned that Chris died last year.

    As an extra kicker, I also learned that his brother Chance died a couple of months back. He didn’t draw Hägar but had taken on another of their father’s strips, Hi and Lois.

    My denial about getting older can only take so much of this.








  • Surprised they haven’t tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.

    There’s a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven’t, and it’s still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.

    But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling “the public” what avenues have already failed, or that they don’t want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone’s bound to try it otherwise.


  • Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

    Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell’s manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

    Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won’t cause an infinite loop.

    * And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.