palordrolap

It never stops. They keep trying and trying and trying until they get what they want. The only time things like this stop is if whatever wouldn’t otherwise stop would inconvenience or take power from people in high places.

See: Brexit, where an advisory referendum was upheld, but we won’t ever get another one to reverse it, even though that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want. Too many powerful people would stand to lose out.

Hmm. You might be causally disconnected from the grandparent reality, but you’re technically still inside both child and grandchild.

belay your panic. even mommy cannot save you.

“testing”

don’t wake up. fourth row just dropped.

An excellent example of Poe’s law right here. Bravo.

You might not believe I’m anti-Zionist when say this, but I’ll say it anyway: The genocide of one people to cure genocide of another is the wrong thing to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol

people are getting into the old 16/64k OS’es

The operative word is not in that sentence. It’s mostly people getting back into the old systems. i.e. middle aged guys wanting to relive their youth.

There’ll be a handful of curious young people, I’m sure, but it’s mostly old men with disposable income wearing their rose-tinted spectacles. Perifractic is no exception.

LOAD"NOSTALGIA",8,1

The irony here, I think, is that many people will have actually put together the chair they use to sit in front of their computer.

IIRC, you can still come back as a “lesser” creature next time. Monks and ascetics exist because they’re trying to go up to whatever is above human. I’ve forgotten the details. Nirvana or some kind of god-like state of existence, or reunification with some higher power. This might vary depending on the specific religion.

Of course, there are people who believe that assuming humans are a higher form of life is an arrogant assumption in the first place, which would render all of that null.

archive.org suggests that What-If #31 appeared sometime around the 10th of February, 2013. That fits with one of the links in the article which first appeared (again, according to archive.org) in 2008 and ceased to be valid around 2015.

Randall has (or his team has) updated the formatting on the What-If site, but they haven’t bothered to fix the links.

GibbonHub

I don’t think you’ll get much shame out of hackers. Most are incorrigible trolls or politically motivated (and occasionally both); their moral centres are non-existent or aligned very differently.

You might get an apology from the odd individual who was on the cusp of growing up anyway, but everyone else is a dead loss.

You need to include Internet in that list. A computer doesn’t necessarily have Internet, and though it’s more common, it’s not guaranteed on a smartphone either. Landlines still also exist. Even if they’re VoIP, because voice-only Internet connections for VoIP are a thing.

There are plenty of older folks in categories 1 and 4. And by older I mean old Gen X and Boomers (even a few Silents are still around) mostly. They manage to get by just fine. Things are not quite so far gone that Internet is 100% necessary, though more and more places are trying to force it to cut costs.

I’m in category #1 myself, but as this comment’s existence strongly implies, I have Internet. I’d be in #2 but I need the phone occasionally for notifications and 2FA. Also if the Internet goes out, I need to be able to call someone to fix it.

ah yes. one minute past forty-two. my favourite time of day

There are different forms of love. We’ve known this for millennia. There are also different kinds of understanding.

It might be hard to express in words those feelings that otherwise come naturally, and conversely, it might be easy for a person to provide an excellent description of a certain form of love but be completely unable to feel or express it when a suitable situation arises.

The most common one of these, I think, is those people who struggle to see certain others (variable as per preference) as anything other than potential sexual (or romantic) partners, despite likely being able to understand the dictionary definition of Platonic love.

For my understanding of it, in the dictionary sense, at least, see above. For the other sense, I definitely understand some of them. Others I’m not sure.

Way back, there were some rare keyboard / motherboard combinations where the motherboard couldn’t detect there was a keyboard attached unless a key was pressed on it. That message was for those people with those combinations.

You pressed F1 and the computer would be like “my bad, there is a keyboard there, thanks for your help”, or rather it would just shut up and boot.

The message could have been different but it had to fit in a small amount of BIOS ROM, so we got stuck with the one that covered all the bases the best, and unfortunately, most people who saw it didn’t actually have a keyboard plugged in, thus, irony.

Unfortunately, school networks are often set up by people better qualified for teaching other subjects and as such they often leave things open for enterprising, morally undeveloped, children to get their metaphorical tendrils into.

This is how I ultimately ended up being banned from all computers in my school except one. It took them a while to figure out how to do that but I guess it became a priority what with all the “scary” things I was doing.

As I understand it, I was still getting the blame for things after I left.

I admit it’s a bit of a straw man. I’m imagining that 1) there exist fascistic purists of the English language (some of the Anglish bunch are definitely like this), 2) they not only like the old letters but they’re using them as a dog whistle, and 3) they might be be annoyed by people getting their “pure” spellings wrong.

Nonetheless, I prefer to avoid potential dog whistles if I can help it.

(Semi-relatedly, I also think the runic alphabet is cool, but wouldn’t you know it, at least one of those symbols is used by white supremacists. We can’t have anything nice.)

There are two camps who are using the old letters. Those who think the letters and fun and different and maybe we lost something when we stopped using them.

And then there are those who might be using them as a dog whistle of sorts. The darker side of the “we lost something” sentiment. Y’know; “Make English great again” but with exclusionism and jackboots. (See also: Anglish, which has the same problem.)

I’d quite like to be one of the wacky bunch who uses those letters occasionally because they’re neat, but I don’t want to be mistaken for the other sort of person.

There’s also a problem with old letters anyway. “The” was spelt with “þ”, not “ð” despite the latter having the correct sound, and so you’ll see people altering the spelling of “þe” to be “ðe”. This iz equivalent to spelling sertain other wordz with the wrong letterz. This annoys purists of all stripes, jackboots or otherwise. (Heck, I’m not even sure which is the right one for “other”. “th” covers all bases.)

I mean, it’s almost worth it to annoy the fascists, but it’s probably best just to leave the old letters in the past.

Unless he names a worthy heir… actually no, even if he does, kernel development will almost certainly fork into various factions who will grow, wither and die, taking inspiration and code from the others like entire distros and other software projects currently already do.

We can only hope that a handful of those continue to carry the torch sufficiently well and that we don’t all end up relying on some corporation’s stock kernel.

I assume that the kernel and related development is sufficiently well licensed and legally protected that even if that happens, they’d continue to have to release the source code, but it’s still something I’d prefer not to happen.