ErroneousBosh

I really wish MUDs were still a thing.

About 15 years ago, for a while I ran a MUD over AX.25, because MUDs aren't nerdy enough on their own, and amateur radio - even packet radio - isn't nerdy enough on its own.

All three of us that used it found it pretty entertaining.

if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.

Meat Is Murder but Fish Is Justifiable Homicide.

I noticed that :-)

(I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).

Why weren't you taking them off before?

I find the pseudo-ness of the RNG infinitely resourceful in that regard

I can't remember how the ORIC BASIC does it but a cool property of LFSRs as PRNGs is that if you pick the right taps and length they must cycle through every possible number from 1 to (2^length)-1 exactly once, excluding zero. That's how the Wolfenstein "Fizzle Fade" effect worked - set up an LFSR long enough that every possible pixel can be visited once, with a few left over, and then throw away any that don't fit.

This is exactly how we used to do machine code on the Sinclair ZX81, too, where there was no way to declare a block of memory as "off limits" to BASIC, and no DATA statements like in the later (and much bigger) ZX Spectrum BASIC.

Then you'd do "RANDOMISE USR 16514" to start it. Actually USR was interesting because it would pass back the contents of BC when your machine code routine returned to BASIC.

l33t h4xx0r5

All the roadies round here are at best Lib Dem and often Reform or Alba types.

There's a guy in my town who makes a point of deliberately riding his bike *at* cars to prove some sort of a point about how dangerous cars are for bikes, because they should be able to stop if he swerves into oncoming traffic with a metre clearance. Same guy is also vehemently opposed to spending "his" taxes on sports grounds, playgrounds, or improving walking and cycling infrastructure because everyone should be riding racing bikes on the road.

One day he's going to get a physics lesson he'll remember for the rest of his life.

I would love a Reevo, they're so shit :-D

But then I would also import a Pontiac Aztek and park it beside a Fiat Multipla.

It's almost like replacing one pair of small low-friction bearings with 40 or so of them is a bad idea.

I was just thinking, I'm surprised they haven't started making ludicrously expensive road bikes with like 9-spoke wheels and oval carbon-fibre frame tubes, and not just bluetooth gears but brakes too because it saves a gram off the frame weight.

The overlap between Tesla arseholes and roadie arseholes is probably considerable.

No, Preston, the yellow lambswool jumper that cost as much as a second-hand Fiat is not making you faster. Take it off, you look like a tit.

I feel like most of us could knock this up out of ply with a handsaw and a drill, and 3D print some covers to go over it, in about an afternoon.

Or, you know, spend a tenner on a used one off Facebook Marketplace and a fiver on a tin of spray paint to make it all cool and custom.

Yes, I know. I own some.

They were going to revolutionise absolutely everything to do with computing in just a couple of years, some 40 years ago.

I've been hearing the same thing about quantum computing for about as long.

I will take "Post Quantum Cryptography" seriously when I can buy a quantum microprocessor off the shelf.

It's a pain in the arse to run vehicles on methane (CNG) because it has to be stored at around 250 bar (or, 3600psi in Old People Units), and it's really not very energy-dense so you need a lot of it.

Again though flaring it off in a gas turbine to generate electricity and heat would be ultimately less harmful than just letting it out into the air.

By contrast the tank in an LPG vehicle is at around 8 bar, not a hell of a lot more than the pressure in a truck's tyres. On my old Range Rover the LPG tank is considerably less spicy than the air suspension tank at 15 bar, which is getting into "this can injure you" territory.

by 2050 when, my bet, there still won't be any remotely viable QCs

I hate to be that guy, but I'm 52 now and I've been hearing about how Quantum Computing is going to revolutionise everything in the next two years, since I was in primary school and ZX81s were state-of-the-art.

At least a couple of manufacturers offered a practical and afforable(-ish) transputer-based system in the 80s that you could have actually gone out and bought.

There are people sitting in jail because they couldn't decrypt the "random noise" on their computers.

No, there isn't.

That would just be dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/path/to/device

Concealing an encrypted volume jacks suspicion way up; whatever pickle you were going to be in if you just kept an encrypted DMG on your desktop, you're trebly in now.

Time to bust out the old "Can't tell if this MP3 is a steganographically important encrypted file or just a Nurse With Wound EP" trick then.

because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.

Or we can't get it clean enough to use as say cooking gas or aerosol propellant.

Stick it in cars, they'll burn any old shite and emit water and carbon dioxide - two terrible greenhouse gases, for sure, but you'll extract useful work from it instead of literally just heating the atmosphere for the fun of it.

If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

Can you suggest an alternative?

Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production?

Yes and no. Oil is cracked down for lots of different things, but one of the things that people are really aiming for is ethane which can be used to make industrial ethanol, and a lot of plastics.

What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.

You need very clean propane or butane for things like cooking stoves, but you can run car engines on it just fine because they're so much less picky, and the exhaust gases are far cleaner than engines run on heavier fractions like oh maybe octane. This is why things like warehouse forklifts run on gas instead of diesel or petrol - you don't die if you breathe in the fumes, because there's no unburnt fuel or carbon monoxide, because it runs as lean as a vegan's dog.

I keep getting people saying they think my posts are AI-generated because I use hyphens in sentences (not M-dashes though, I can never remember the compose key for it), and because I use the term "load bearing" in a pisstakey way - like for instance, "yet another instance of load-bearing idiocy by management".

I have to admit since VSCode seems to be regularly re-enabling the Cocaine Parrot Autocomplete my views on LLMs and coding has softened a little.

I'll temper that slightly by saying it's mostly out of morbid curiosity because the things that the Dreaming Piracy Robot comes up with are frequently wildly incorrect code, but it's interesting to think about how it might have got there.

And then I think, well, maybe Special Needs Wintermute has a point. Maybe there's a different way to think about it that I've missed.

And then I just change it back to what I wanted in the first place.

Oh right so this is for the case where you say "I have given you an exactly known length of data to buzz round a million times, you don't needs to bounds check every time"?

Like, I have a hardcoded 1024-byte buffer, my loop is hardcoded so its index increases modulo 1024, it can never run off the end any more than you can overtake your own bike chain?

Every truck that passes you (or that you pass) will suck you right in if your tow vehicle isn't heavy enough or you don't have good enough grip

You'd think you'd ever see some evidence of this happening and right now at the height of Tourist Season you'd expect to see the roads littered with smashed caravans, but no - it does not appear to happen.

and you can pull a huge one with ANY car, you don’t need truck, just modified mirrors

So pretty much like everywhere outside the US?

Here in the UK it's not uncommon to pull a 1500kg caravan with a bog standard Ford Focus, without any problems at all, and well over two tonnes on a twin-axle one with something like a Volvo V60.

People come from all over Europe to holiday here with their caravans, and are towing them at "realistic Autobahn speeds" behind perfectly ordinary cars.

It just seems to be the US where you need a 7.5 tonner to pull a trailer the size of a suitcase.

So, what you're saying is, we should be preventing shitty drivers from operating 40-tonne lorries?

This was constantly writing to the SD card. It was the only storage on the device.

Rebooting it was a big deal though, so that rarely happened.

Pinsetters scare the everloving fuck out of me.

I did a bit of work for a bowling alley 30 years ago. The guy that had just bought it wanted their 1970s computers brought up to the spec of the 1990s ;-) He'd retired from an incredibly well-paying job offshore so was well and truly familiar with working on large electrical machinery on oil platforms.

Day one - before he even turned the main incomer breaker on in his new bowling alley - the very first thing he did was sit everyone down in the dark and silent cafe and explain the idea behind and importance of LOTO. He didn't want to see anyone near any of the machinery without it locked out and tagged out, ever, for any reason, not even near it. As I recall the phrase "never work in this industry again" was used several times.

It just appears to be a pretty standard Sandisk SD card.

So? That's nothing.

A "minimal" Ubuntu 24.04 install is <quickly does df -h on a fresh install> around 2GB, so I'm not sure what you posted is correct or maybe just a typo.