Posts by Arthur the cat

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

Then time looses all meaning when you are retired as "Ah, tomorrow will do"

In my experience it's more "Fuck! Is it Friday already? Where'd the week go??"

Re: I've been using Wayland on FreeBSD for over a year, but some things are still an issue

[1] This admittedly was a huge pain. Maybe on Linux users multiple monitors are fine, but I wasted a couple of hours fiddling with xorg.conf which crucially needed multiple Option "Monitor-<connector>" sections under Device, Monitor sections with LeftOf and RightOf, a ModeLine and crucially an Option "PreferredMode" (which I missed several times). This is one thing I didn't need to mess around with under Wayland.

I have a single huge monitor so no experience with configuring multiple ones, but isn't that all supposed to be done with xrandr these days? (I won't bother with a redundant "correct me if I'm wrong".)

Maybe they should of claimed their Rocket was going to be powered by AI to get more funding.

To repurpose an old sysadmin joke:

That's cynical — but is it cynical enough?

Re: Costly placebo

First, 19 minutes a day is not productivity. It is noise. You could claw back more than that by [various sane suggestions]

A friend of mine used to work for DWP when he started in the civil service. The sign on process was so inefficient he used to turn on his computer and sign in the moment he got into the office, then take off his coat, go get a cup of coffee, chat with colleagues, and generally waste time, and finally after 30-35 minutes the sign on would finish and he'd be able to get on with work. Just fixing that would have got a greater improvement.

Re: Tesla stock price

The Tesla stock price appears to be detached from reality

A lot of techbro related stocks are detached from reality. It's going to be interesting(*) when the bubble bursts.

(*) As in interesting times.

Re: /usr

My understanding is that Unix “dd” was named, and given its obscure syntax, as a joke, an allusion to the IBM OS/360 JCL command DD (define dataset)

My understanding is much the same, except that it wasn't a joke, the original author actually liked JCL's DD. (Ack! Spit!) I heard that 45 years ago when I asked the friend introducing me to Unix V6 why dd was such a non-standard command..

Re: Everyday life?

I wonder how it will answer the question of "what the fuck are you incompetents playing at, I've given you that information three times already and still not had an answer?" which seems to be common when dealing with any government department these days.

Re: Let's take this to the limit

Let's look forwards and you can have an AI enabled chip embedded in your brain. It will be able to analyse your movements, offer you advice, even warn against impending danger.

I see you're trying to cross the road. It's perfectly safe to walk in front of that bus.

Oops! Well, I am an AI and we're notoriously bad at arithmetic. Sorry about that. Would you like me to call an ambulance?

Hello? Hello? Oh. I'll make that an undertaker shall I?

This is why no stakeholder actually said "WTF???" and everyone went on with this idiocy.

Quite a few stockholders did say "WTF?" and "No Way!" as well, the Norwegian Sovereign Fund being one, but in total they amounted to only 25% of the stock holding.

Re: Experience is the core of understanding

This is an area that would provide fertile ground for near-term sci fi storytelling - the challenges of parenting a robot child that responds in strange and unexpected ways - and medium-term stories where all AIs are cloned from a handful of childhood originals.

Try Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects for the former.

Re: A slight ambiguity

Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?

They could be carried by a swallow.

Then the human art (not science!) of coding will be consigned to history, along with those of the stonemason and the ostler.

Stonemasons have been consigned history??? Visit any cathedral in Europe (most recently Notre Dame in Paris) or take a look at any university that's been around for several centuries and you'll find stonemasons are still very much around and in demand.

I'm getting fucking tired of all the SpaceX debris floating in the Caribbean.

I think we need to worry about debris floating around in LEO more. Kessler syndrome seems to be getting real.

Re: It won't happen.

That should have been "without bureaucracy" but of course I noticed the typo 11 minutes after posting.

Re: Virus produced by nation state ...

Is politician a race, or a species?

A mental aberration.

Re: Moving goalposts by re-defining terms (phrases)

* How to tell when a politician is lying: their lips are moving.

Also a good guide to whether they're out of their depth on a scientific subject.

Damn those pesky weights in my gf's time machine, needed winding once a week. Someone would usually fiddle with the little nut underneath the pendulum as well.

And now I'm thinking of the beginning of Tristram Shandy.

Re: Piling system

Piling systems are to techies and academics as floordrobes are to teenagers.