palordrolap

The problem with the implicit size comparison in the Crocodile Dundee reference is that Australian spider size is inversely proportional to their actual danger.

Wait until you learn what the other seven parts of a byte are called when the first one is called a bit.

In most cases, the smoke is magic smoke.

Curious. I must be a filthy casual with the one desktop PC. There is at least one other PC here, but it’s out of action.

It could do with plugging in at some point to see if it still works, but I see no benefit in making that permanent.

You must be on an old or LTS Debian. The -/ flag was added in the 8.0 release of nano in mid-2024. https://packages.debian.org/stable/editors/ lists 8.4 as the current version for Debian 13 / trixie.

Asking nano to use the modern keybinds by default is akin to insisting that Emacs run in evil mode by default. If you really must have it do that, set up a shell alias or put something in your .nanorc.

Also, nano has syntax highlighting. No LSP though. It’s an editor, not an IDE.

Maybe that explains the size difference I was talking about elsewhere.

To flog this dead horse just a bit longer, micro is nearly seven times the size of nano, and Apple are clearly doing it wrong. Pointing an old name at a new thing is fine as long as there’s backward compatibility, but a new name at an old thing that doesn’t support the same features is a disservice to the old thing, the new thing and the user.

Then you want nano -/ which uses the modern key bindings. They’ve been in nano for a while now.

For historical reasons, it doesn’t use them by default.

What extra features do you think it ought to have?

nano has supported syntax highlighting for a good long while, and for the Debian package at least, comes with a bunch of predefined languages in /usr/share/nano/*.nanorc.

I wouldn’t recommend it for large projects, but I’ve created and edited shell and Perl scripts with it plenty of times.

nano -x may be more to your liking then. Or nano -0 if you like being terrified.

Hints: Ctrl+X still works to quit. Alt-Z and Alt-X toggle the title and the help respectively.

You can also use the toggles in regular nano to hide one or the other if you’re bothered by them.

This tracks. If you think about it, any meal that might otherwise be the fourth method has transcended into being at least one of the other three.

Yeah, I’ve actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.

There have been other occasions where I’ve been able to replace something like average = sum / count; if average > y with if sum > count * y, when it’s not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.

But when a division can’t be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.

The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.

It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.

The kernel library for integrating telecommunications operations and their requirements into the system? I think there was a patch for that in my update manager last week.

(With thanks to Red Dwarf for providing a template for this one.)

Computer: “…and the correct horse battery staple I rode in on?!”

On the one hand, each and every one of those has at least one pronounceable name, but on the other, I think these masks are for natural language, conversational AI prompt generation, so there’d be little to no need for any of them.

You’ve got to remember that this is being marketed towards bosses and C-levels who haven’t written a line of code in their lives, or have completely forgotten how, much preferring to tell people what they want and then expecting it to magically appear in front of them as soon as possible.

So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.

I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.

But I’ll give you a true one.

At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.

The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.

So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.

Many things could have gone wrong…

…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.

No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.

Well, I’m not going to downvote, but something in my brain is screaming “lossy compression!” and so you might say I’m at least wary.

Unupvote is doubleplus ungood.