Confused by a reference to “ASC2 emoticons” on a podcast, until I eventually realised that they must think the two “I”s at the end of “ASCII” are Roman numerals.
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My suggestion to Starmer and the UK government: forget mainlining artificial intelligence, and try to find enough of the real thing to recognise when you’re being played by snake oil salesmen into funnelling a new torrent of taxpayers’ money into US billionaires’ pockets.
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What is it with people who insist on calling an Apple Mac a MAC, in all caps? Do they think it’s an acronym? What do they think it stands for? Is it just because they’re used to talking about MAC addresses?
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I’ve always found the US decision that companies count as people bizarre, but maybe it would make sense if they were actually treated like people.
Oh, your company stole some money? broke a regulation? Negligently caused injury or death? Right, off to “prison” with you. All operations frozen until you’re “released” (except maybe you keep paying employees and creditors until you run out of assets).
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A significant part of my first day back at work wasted tracking down a bunch of obscure test failures indirectly caused by an environment variable I’d set in my shell profile while experimenting with something unrelated before Christmas, ie long enough ago that it didn’t trigger my “OK, that didn’t happen before – what have I changed recently?” reflexes. Computers, eh?
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Well, I suppose the time has come to power up my work laptop for the first time in a fortnight.
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I’d consider myself an anti-monarchist, but even so I’m not sure Charles’s coronation costing each person in the country about a quid really counts as “obscene”.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/21/obscene-anger-after-cost-of-king-charless-coronation-revealed
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There’s someone at the door!
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Someone just showed a slide saying training should be about the “guide at the side”, not the “sage on the stage”, and is it wrong that my brain immediately went to “I wonder if they had to quickly abandon an initial idea of “… at the front’”?
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I see Strava have jumped on the bandwagon of adding nonsense AI features to their product. Today it said “Excellent parkrun with a faster pace than your recent 30-day average, showing steady fitness improvements.” – despite the fact that (with a race tomorrow) I jogged round chatting, and finished seven minutes slower than last week (and that my heart rate was higher than usual for the pace, because I seem to have a cold, which you’d think would point to decreasing fitness).
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Also, it turns out you can expand escape sequences (but not variables) in single-quoted strings by prefixing with a dollar:
$ echo 'foo\nbar$baz'
foo\nbar$baz
$ echo $'foo\nbar$baz'
foo
bar$baz
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I’ve been using Unix/Linux for 30-odd years (admittedly a bit less for bash), and I only found out today that as well as “<<EOF” style heredocs, you can do
$ command <<< 'some input'
instead of
$ echo 'some input' | command
Did everyone else already know this?
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