palordrolap

Well there was a game on the C64 called Quake Minus One…

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.

Some Linux packages have WebKit as a dependency and that often has something called MiniBrowser installed as, well, precisely what it says it is. Not sure if it’s available on Windows, but it’s OK in a pinch.

There are a few other lesser known browsers, not in the main families, that are currently in development too.

Important: The article mentions that they are being replaced not that the SAC is being done away with completely.

On the other hand:

Twitch declined to comment on whether the [new council members] would be paid.

The text I replaced there is “ambassadors”, that is, Twitch ambassadors, people given a title that means nothing outside of Twitch, but is the only payment these people will be getting, outside, perhaps, a sense of pride and accomplishment.

I never said that the way they’ve gone about it is the best way to have gone about it.

Frankly, I’m not even sure what that would be, only that this ain’t it.

This has bell curve meme vibes. I’m just not sure what the middle guy would be saying.

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.

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.

“I don’t have a life or a job”

“FR me too”

“I thought you were a therapist”

~head shrunk into shoulders, sweating~

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.

Reminds me of that time in a pub restaurant where I ordered the Cumberland sausage (plus mash, etc.). When it arrived it looked not entirely dissimilar. Thankfully, when I cut into it, it was indeed sausage, not a snail. Or anything else.

(Must have tasted OK because I don’t remember hating it.)

Ah! So you’re a waffle man! Wanna buy a waffle iron?

Let me guess: I’ll buy a toaster because my old one died but then I’ll get ads for new toasters constantly. You bought one, you must want another. And another. And another. Why aren’t you buying more toasters. You bought one. Buy another! Buy twenty!! People who bought toasters also bought microwaves and kettles. Do you want a toaster? Does anyone want any toast?

Ay, there’s the rub. Almost no-one’s going to pay for the top-notch system, and will instead go for the lowest bidder.

This hen laid a cannon?! That might be worth more than a goose that lays golden eggs to a warring king.

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.

Is it still the norm to go to the dev’s office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we’re doing, tell them we’re shipping their machine to the client because it’s the only one that the code runs on?

And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

I’m assuming that this response from 4o isn’t real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.

My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.

Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.

They probably want to avoid anything that sounds like it might be Jewish, so Aaron is out. This is not because of direct anti-Semitism, but because of the fear of it. Avoiding such words avoids the subject entirely. (Ironically, the Semitic origins of the word “Alphabet” aren’t as obvious.)

Aardvark is too alien and weird. Also, C-levels are deathly afraid of varking too aard.

Abacus might have been a better choice, but it doesn’t come with the infuriatingly tantalising closeness of one or two letters’ distance.

The main reason for the name is that it sorts before both Amazon and Apple in the Big Tech directory. It’s literally as petty as that. They obviously chose a word that was related to searching within that criterion, but still.