palordrolap

Knee-leeks and spear-leeks. Delicious.

I did think about this, but I imagined that the Russians would find some way to fly mostly over populated areas on purpose so that shooting them down would risk a fireball falling on innocent civilians.

Escort flights might be a better choice, but I can see that turning into a multi-jet dogfight over innocent civilians instead, with a risk of multiple fireballs.

On the one hand, Hungary has remained somewhat different from its neighbours because it’s surrounded by mountains and hard to get in or out of by land so it would seem a safe bet for a swap, but on the other, it’s the 21st century and mountains aren’t so much of an obstacle any more. Would we really want to give Putin an airstrip in the middle of Europe?

It would be foolish to assume Putin’s expansionist plans are limited to Ukraine. It’s just that Ukraine is proving a bit more difficult than he expected and he’s had to concentrate his efforts there.

The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren’t needed.

As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.

I still backup my files the most basic way, that is, create an archive locally, connect external storage and copy it there. Then disconnect external storage. The archive is made onto a separate internal drive and I keep the most recent one there, so I don’t even need the external one for minor accidents.

I think only once in the last decade or so have I wanted (but never needed) to pull something back from external, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

The main downside to this method is that it doesn’t de-duplicate, so keeping several takes a lot more space that it would do otherwise.

Sometimes a person’s brain is only capable of operating in a conversation mode. Full, natural language sentences. Or sentence fragments (like these), I guess.

Then there’s the fact that some people can’t discern the line between the artificial and the real, or else are able to ignore it where they can see it because the LLM makes that easy.

I occasionally bounce ideas off free LLMs and I’ve been mostly conversational when I’ve done so, but I’m aware of things like 1) it’s a crutch 2) they’re mostly wrong about a lot of things and 3) any praise they give is invalid, so I’m not yet into the trap of thinking they’re people.

… but I still feel kind of bad if I drop a conversation when I’m done with it without saying goodbye.

For me it’s not about trusting the hotpatching; I know it can work. What I don’t trust is my own ability to not only do it properly but also to do it in less time than it takes to carefully close all my programs, reboot and then get them all started again. And so, reboot.

And to save making another comment elsewhere: About a week. It would have been longer, but I was having a configuration issue and a reboot seemed like a good idea at the time.

If by “too late” you mean “too late to get popular, rich or famous”, well sure, it’s going to be a lot harder now that there are enormous channels that got there first and where people are used to going for content, but if you have something that people want, there’s a chance people will find you eventually.

But that’s still not to say you’ll be big and famous. There are streamers who have been streaming for years who get only a handful of viewers every time they do. And yet they still do it because they love it.

On the other hand, there are many, many people who started streaming but quit because they had to make a living and their time was better spent elsewhere. Streaming only works as a career for, I want to say, the top few percent. (I don’t actually know the figures, but I’d be surprised to learn it was a big number.)

As for equipment, I’ve looked in on smaller channels streaming on Twitch. Not all of them have good stuff. No transitions. No Vtuber avatar. No mic. No webcam. Just raw, live game footage and maybe a little interacting in the chat. Upgrades can happen later.

But if by “too late” you mean that no-one should even think about starting doing streams ever because it’s all been done, or someone’s already doing it, then no, of course not. The day it’ll be too late will be the day all the streaming services shut down.

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Could work. The guy who currently performs Kermit’s voice is better at singing than talking. (Or that was the case previously. He might have improved since I last consumed Muppet media).

I assume this is like one of those “one lies, the other tells the truth” things and a narcissist would answer “no”. If I saw the QI episode, I’ve long since forgotten what was said about it.

FWIW, my response would be “oh god I hope not”, all the while fretting that I’ve been writing a lot of comments from the first person with lots of "I"s these days, which is a bit self-centred. I don’t have the brain power to rewrite. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Another, slightly more cruel one is to find a perfectionist who thinks that perfectionism is an imperfection and ask them if they’re a perfectionist. A therapist accidentally short-circuited my brain with that one.)

“Sugar free” on things that are mostly sugar because the serving size given isn’t great enough to overcome a rounding down to zero.

This is pretty smart for the left guy. He’s usually down at the level of “HTML is a programming language” or “What’s a programming language?”.

That said, the first one of those isn’t mutually exclusive with what he says in the meme.

Relevant stand-up routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJXl1gPW0Fc

Caution: If you lean Trumpwards politically, this isn’t for you.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

Almost but not quite the same energy: https://www.buttersafe.com/2008/10/23/the-detour/

I feel like the demon in the Buttersafe comic was equally and unexpectedly benign and got the guy to his kitchen.

VLC.

But then I’m one of those strange people who doesn’t listen to music much, so maybe I’m missing a trick.

I think the point is when it came to secular things pertaining to Christmas, the church would have said “No”, and the state would have gone along with that, even if most people weren’t religious.

The same happens everywhere, regardless of religion or how prominent it is. If you attempt to do something that the elders of a religion say are offensive to that religion, the state will discourage it, and so people don’t bother in the first place.

In Britain, especially from the 1970s to 2000s, there was always a race to be the #1 charting song at Christmas, and songs with a Christmas theme often won out, even if they were otherwise secular pop songs. This means that over the years, we’ve ended up with probably a hundred of them ranging in quality from terrible to great.

America have followed suit. Or else, they might argue they started it with songs like “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells”.

This is largely down to the more permissive secular and Protestant Christian societies where irreverence is tolerated if not encouraged.

The Catholic and Orthodox churches are less tolerant of those sorts of things, so people in countries with heavy influence from those churches - like yourself - won’t have had anything like it.

The French word is more akin to the English C word, at least etymologically, which makes me wonder how high it ranks in terms of French profanities.

I think most English speakers know where the B word falls with respect to the C word (and say, something like the worst racial slur), but I have no idea where on that scale the French word falls.

Either way, I’ve definitely heard both English translations be called misogynistic, and I think that would qualify those words for “slur” status. I can’t imagine the French word is thought of any differently.