palordrolap

You do realise that even though it’s not one of the official Mint variants, it’s still possible to install Gnome on Mint with minimal fuss?

There are people that still install and run KDE and that hasn’t been a Mint variant for some time now.

Or are you saying that Gnome should be the default variant because it’s “modern”?

The monkey’s paw curled a finger when they took off in that direction. Most old Linux/X applications will run fine under any window manager / desktop environment and, by and large, inherit the look and feel of that environment. Modern Gnome apps say “no” to that and look like Gnome apps wherever they are.

Since the Mint team are forking Gnome apps precisely to avoid that behaviour, I’d say Mint isn’t going to adopt Gnome proper any time soon, but as I said, you can install it if you really want.

Bad news for you: Spez loves Elon and his business ethos.

You remember how at one point Elon was beloved among nerds? A lot of that was fomented on Reddit, and a few haven’t grown out of it yet.

The Chinese AI paradox: Either it will be allowed to criticise the CCP and be ultimately shut down by the CCP because such criticism is not allowed, or it will not, hence being untrusted by anyone who is not a fan of the CCP.

You might be thinking of lzip rather than lz4. Both compress, but the former is meant for high compression whereas the latter is meant for speed. Neither are particularly good at dealing with highly redundant data though, if my testing is anything to go by.

Either way, none of those are installed as standard in my distro. xz (which is lzma based) is installed as standard but, like lzip, is slow, and zstd is still pretty new to some distros, so the recipient could conceivably not have that installed either.

bzip2 is ancient and almost always available at this point, which is why I figured it would be the best option to stand in for gzip.

As it turns out, the question was one of data streams not files, and as at least one other person pointed out, brotli is often available for streams where bzip2 isn’t. That’s also not installed by default as a command line tool, but it may well be that the recipient, while attempting to emulate a browser, might have actually installed it.

They didn’t put it by one. They allege that they thought that since there were no studies in the same vein, it therefore ought to be acceptable, conveniently ignoring the fact that a lot of things that hadn’t been experimented on for the first time were later widely decried as things that never should have happened.

I’d call them weasels, but that would be unfair to actual weasels.

The article writer kind of complains that they’re having to serve a 10MB file, which is the result of the gzip compression. If that’s a problem, they could switch to bzip2. It’s available pretty much everywhere that gzip is available and it packs the 10GB down to 7506 bytes.

That’s not a typo. bzip2 is way better with highly redundant data.

You want a website and software that does Lemmy and Mastodon at the same time? That’d be kbin / mbin.

In part because of the kbin creator’s real world struggles, it hasn’t really taken off quite as well as Lemmy has, but its successor mbin is in use in a few places. I’m currently on fedia.io which is an mbin instance, for example.

Ehh. Old 8-bit machines had no trouble with the veritable Gordian knots written by kids in their bedrooms back in the day, so any chip’s gonna be fine.

That’s not to say this chip wouldn’t run it better…

Paired with the recent change that Oscar award judges are no longer allowed to skip parts of the media they’re reviewing (because apparently that was a thing), the number of AI slop movies is going to be absolutely gruelling for them to wade through.

One possible outcome is that this means AI kills the Oscars… but it’s more likely to get that watch-all rule rolled back.

And either way, it would probably mean that we’ll never see another 2001: A Space Odyssey again because a bunch of that movie looks like AI slop.

… I just realised this means that AI-generated movies could well end up being trained - accidentally or on purpose - to determine what would generate the most Oscars by exploiting underlying psychology that exists only in the sort of people who are employed as Oscar judges, but which somehow manages to mostly exclude everyone else.

That said, many people disagree with the Oscar nominations and awards anyway, so whether that makes any real difference is probably moot.

Henrietta Lacks hasn’t managed it yet. Look her up. It’s at least as bad as this if not more so.

“Yet” being the operative word here. There’s a disease in dogs that started in some very similar circumstances (although happening in nature rather than from a science accident). One slip-up from an immunocompromised tech with just the right genetic make-up and it begins.

If you approach people and tell them you’re normal, they won’t believe you. Something similar applies to saying you’re human on the Internet.

Hello, yes, I am a human.

Suspicious, isn’t it?

The cynic in me wants to know: Once purchased, will it, and any media it might contain at any time, be under the sole control of the purchaser?

If not, it’s definitely not worth buying.

Perl was originally designed to carry on regardless, and that remains its blessing and curse, a bit like JavaScript which came later.

Unlike JavaScript, if you really want it to throw a warning or even bail out completely at compiling such constructs (at least some of the time, like this one) it’s pretty easy to turn that on rather than resort to an entirely different language.

use warnings; at the top of a program and it will punt a warning to STDERR as it carries merrily along.

Make that use warnings FATAL => "syntax"; and things that are technically valid but semantically weird like this will throw the error early and also prevent the program from running in the first place.

Well, you see, Perl’s length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn’t been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

A case of “don’t order fries if your meal already comes with them or you’ll end up with too many fries”.

As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

* You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.

Nerd here. That’s soft-light Rimmer. He didn’t get the hard-light drive until they met Legion in season 6.

The only things he could physically interact until then were other holographic things provided by Holly or whatever his light bee was programmed to supply.

E-e-except where the script writers made a mistake. At one point he was able to smell something burning which definitely shouldn’t have been possible. Unless Holly simulated it for him anyway. That sort of shenanigan would be right up Holly’s alley now that I think about it.

(For the uninitiated, Holly is the sarcastic and dry witted AI in charge of supervising all ship computer operations. And he’s allegedly senile after 3 million years in deep space. Allegedly.)

Per screenshots of the “skeet” = As can be understood from screenshots of the post, also known as a “skeet”

as folks on the butterfly app = (a name that) users of Bluesky

are wont to call their posts… = like to call their posts…

“Skeet” being a combination of “sky” and “tweet”, which I hope you can figure out the origins of, and also a somewhat dirty word that the owners of Bluesky would really prefer people didn’t use as the non-generic name for posts on their platform, but is also disturbingly accurate if you compare the conceptually similar word “disseminate” for the spreading of information.

I should probably have separated the above into two sentences somewhere.

Old school gamer here. Headline should definitely say Quake II.

There might not seem to be much difference to a casual observer, but from that standpoint there’s not much difference between either and any other FPS. Even Minecraft to some extent.

Speaking of which, the Minecraft equivalent to this had all the same problems outlined in other comments here. Interesting as a proof of concept, but there are almost certainly better ways of using AI.

How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.

Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.

Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.

And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.

There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.

Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.

Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.