Well shoot. I was holding out for a change of heart from him because I really resonated with his comics back in the day.

Unfortunately, it seems he only ever had sympathy for those whose misfortunes he shared and never came around on that.

I still think they should have bumped the version to 26. They have a yearly release schedule for version bumps, at least two other major pieces of software have already done this and it would have skipped any potential confusion with Windows 11.

They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.

… but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

FOMO and FOOPMO

(Fear of other people missing out (on what they have to say.))

Uh. You should keep your hands to yourself - regardless of intent - unless the job explicitly requires it or there’s some kind of danger to life or limb.

Someone that “needs cheering up” does not qualify.

If you think there needs to be an exception, ask for consent. “But then it wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise!” Wrong. You have no idea how the person will react, and they might even pretend to like it for the sake of decorum. Just don’t.

And remember, even if you do get consent one time, it does not imply consent going forward.

“If I find out you’ve been watching AI slop, there will be consequences. And don’t think hiding it from me will make sure I don’t find out. Watching slop makes people stupid in a very particular way, and you can’t stop yourself from catching stupid from it, so I’ll be able to tell.”

It’s up to you what “consequences” means in this instance. You could even reveal that the consequence was the stupidity they developed along the way, and now they have to live with that.

(By all means, modify this message to be less cold and more kind and loving. I am not good at that sort of thing.)

That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.

I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.

… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!

No. You’re right. I’ll never completely understand until my bank account goes negative. Or I have no bank account. And I have to go a day or more without eating.

But I do have anxiety. And a very limited income. My grocery shop spend for two weeks now is about the same price as I paid for one week, fifteen years ago. I have to budget every little thing.

So while I can’t fully understand, I have more understanding than you think I do, and it’s not just me that needs to be careful about ignorance.

Non-uniformed police that don’t identify are not police.

As such you can call (uniformed) police on them.

If they say they know that ICE are operating in that area, ask how you can know that the people you’re reporting are actually ICE and not impostors that turned up after the real ICE left.

The plural of “axis” is “axes”, pronounced “AX-ease”.

This was a long time ago. I think the replacement card I got was the first I got that had a chip in it.

Or I’m misremembering and it was the chip on the card that was acting strangely. Either way, the card was basically worn out.

There’s a hybrid BBC / Commodore 8-bit computer I’d like to have seen, for sure.

IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet.

But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.

I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.

Not strictly true.

If you have a card long enough (several years between issue and expiry, say) and you use it often enough, the magnetic strip can start to fade and transactions can fail. More and more often. Edit: It might have been a chip problem rather than a magnetic strip problem. I can’t remember now, but it makes no real difference to the story.

And sometimes there might be weeks with no trouble and then you’ll get that one card reader that’s particularly finicky and there’s a cold sweat moment as you realise you don’t have enough cash. “Try it again. It’s done this before.” Please work. Pleeease.

This usually happened to me in the supermarket, so that scene from InnerSpace was playing on loop in my head.

After the third or fourth time, I called the bank and they sent me a new one ASAP.

Surprisingly wholesome for Cyanide & Happiness, tbh.

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

6 bit, 6 bit, 7 bit? Huh. Only 5, 6, and 6, is needed for 24-hr binary-coded-sexagesimal… ohh. It’s binary-coded-decimal-coded-sexagesimal.

15:43:25 in the last panel. Or about a quarter to four in the afternoon.

I suppose the 5,6,6 BCS option would need a lot more mental effort.

If 1) you’re smart or practised enough to be able to generate what you’re asking the AI to do for yourself, 2) you’re able to take what the AI generates and debug, check and correct it using non-AI tools like your own brain, 3) you’re sure this whole AI-inclusive process will save time and money, and 4) you’re sure using AI as a crutch won’t cause you brain-rot in the long term, go nuts.

Caveat: Those last two are tricky traps. You can be sure and wrong.

Otherwise, grab the documentation or a bunch of examples and start hacking and crafting. Leave the AI alone. Maybe ask it a question about something that isn’t clear, but on no account trust it. It might have developed the same confusion that you have for precisely the same reasons.

So anyway, Linus clearly fits 1 and 2, and believes 3 and 4 or else he wouldn’t be using an AI. Let’s just hope he hasn’t fallen into the traps.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?