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.

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex

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.

Whoa. What distro is it that puts everything in /bin, or at least, practically nothing in /usr/bin?

I use a Debian that actually symlinks /bin to /usr/bin so that they’re one and the same (annoying some purists), but even on systems where they are (or were) used for separate purposes, I thought that each had a significant number of commands in them.

(To paraphrase man hier, /bin is for necessary tools and /usr/bin is for those that are nice to have.)

Dangit. I always forget about env. Yes, that ought to work.

I know you’re joking but:

\sl or command sl.

I’d say “check your shell documentation” but they’re both almost impossible to search for. They both work in Bash. Both skip aliases and shell functions and go straight to shell builtins or things in the $PATH.

There’s also /usr/bin/sl but you knew that.

Prediction: Dude will have a book out about how to survive it in the next 12. Or he’s aiming to receive a bonus from someone he knows who’s already writing one.

Because the UK government still subscribes to the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and therefore any support for Palestine is an anti-Semitic terrorist act.

I was once privy to a, shall we say, “heated discussion”, about whether eating traditionally pet breeds of animal was acceptable. One position said it was wrong no matter what.

Let’s call that ethical position 1.

Another said it’d be OK as long as those animals were bred specifically for the purpose, were treated well while alive and were never pets. Like farm animals are (theoretically) treated.

That’ll be slightly less ethical, position 2. Make a scale out of them. Draw a line between them and extend.

Feeding euthanised, previously healthy pets to wild animals is - in my opinion - at least position 3 on this scale. Make those wild animals captives and you’re headed off in the direction of 4.

I can’t say it’s wrong, but it ain’t right either.

Using a Debian is like being able to stay in bed in the morning. Heck, someone might even come by and change the sheets while you’re in REM and you’ll hardly even notice.

Everyone else is up and running about like headless chickens fighting dependency wars and system vulnerabilities and cutting themselves on that bleeding edge and you’re hugging xteddy in blissful slumber.

Speaking of which, has he been ported to Wayland?

Information entropy. You need roughly as many syllables to explain the same concept with mono- or disyllabic English words as you do with a scientific polysyllable. Admittedly, some of it is “I know this word! See how smart I am!”, but another part is how much more fluid it is to say. “Monosyllabic” rolls off the tongue a lot more easily than “having only one sound”.

(The funny answer here would have been “No.”)

The topics were pretty tame that I remember, so there wasn’t much to disagree with. I was just being… uh. Florid? Verbose? Sesquipedalian?

It might be a neurodivergent trait; the need to use the right word to communicate exactly the right meaning even if it runs to several syllables.

It might lose a few people, but I’ve got to say what I mean.

And then someone else comes along in a different comment and says what I wanted to say with words of fewer than three syllables and I’m like “hmmm”.

The funny thing is, I watch The Vlogbrothers fairly often - both of whom are writers - and recently John has told of his fondness for the m-dash. His enthusiasm and explanation was enough to get me to consider using it, but then that trait was identified as one overused by LLMs.

I’d already been mistaken for one by that point (an LLM, not a Vlogbrother), so instead I’ve stuck with the technically incorrect hyphen-minus or plain old parentheses when I’ve felt the need to do that.

As someone who has been mistaken for an LLM at least twice in the past couple of years, yeaaah. Sometimes I write like that. The LLMs learned from people like me. I can only hope it was smarter, more productive people with the same sort of writing style and not from anything I’ve produced… although it would explain a thing or two.

D*ck measuring contest.

The same used to be said of newspapers (and still ought to be). That is, it’s funny how accurate and informative they appear to be until the topic changes to something about which you have intimate knowledge.

The logical leap to generalise from that is impossible for far too many people and is also an easy trap for those who can make it.

Permit me to repeat what I said the last time this reprobate’s picture was posted:

Which ventriloquist did this nightmare escape from?