Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 43 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • None of Northern Ireland, England, or Scotland are countries

    This is false. Every single one of those is a country. They’re considered constituent countries of the larger country.

    Even Wales remains a country despite the fact that, for certain royal and administrative purposes, it counts as part of England. That’s why there’s no dragon or other Welsh indication on the Union flag, to the rightful annoyance of the Welsh, when there are English, Irish and Scottish flags blended into it.

    Further proof they’re all countries - not that this is strictly necessary - is that they each have their own parliaments.



  • With open source it’s either someone incredibly dedicated to doing things for other people (unicorns), someone being paid by a company to do it (workhorses. Some might have a horn, it’s hard to tell. Or the company’s the unicorn), or it’s someone with programming knowledge who also needs and wants to use the software they’re writing (hobbyists).

    Outside of the horse analogues, you probably need to look at the demographics of the users of said software and put the programmer somewhere within that bell curve. As to precisely where, I’d guess not at the low end as they’ve had to gain at least some programming experience along with the knowledge of the topic the software is about.

    For the unicorns and the paid devs, well, they could be anyone.

    There are bound to be systemic skews not accounted for here. More men tend to go into programming than women, for example, or at least that used to be the case.


  • Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.

    Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that’s rare, and it’s mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.

    Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.


  • If the “kit” says it’s “one size fits all” or similar wording, check the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it for things that are likely to vary.

    Otherwise, you’ll probably need to take measurements or, if you’re lucky, there’ll be make and model numbers on the existing parts that you can use to get replacements or new internal parts.

    If you’re really unlucky, you have a bizarre but genius-designed toilet made by a now out-of-business manufacturer who found novel and unique ways around patents and lawsuits and you’d be better off replacing the whole thing.



  • Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

    By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.


  • William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

    I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

    Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

    If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

    Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

    Anne would be f**king hilarious.

    But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.





  • One possibility is that you have a fairly common username part and a similarly common domain like, say, gmail.

    There’s nothing stopping a spammer from taking existing addresses and word lists, then taking them apart and putting them together in different ways to make up completely new addresses to send spam to. It doesn’t matter if 99% of the addresses they make up don’t exist because they’re only interested in the 1% of the 1% of successes who will fall for their scam. They don’t even get the rejections because the From address is usually bogus too.

    e.g. I bet whoever owns john dot smith at gmail gets a huge amount of spam whether he’s in any databases or not.