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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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Pro tip: Flexing leg and feet muscles can cause the body to steal back that blood flow and cause things to settle down.

    That said, there’s an art to doing that without looking like you’re doing something weird. Only you know what’s too weird for you, and then aim not to go past half way to that, just in case. Subtlety is key, and when you think you’re being subtle, you probably still need to dial it back a notch.

    Mental arithmetic or something else unrelated to the situation that moves blood flow to the main brain can also work. Silent brain games on your phone. Sudoku maybe.

    Good luck.






  • I mean, you could start almost at the very top.

    Skip hydrogen which is an obvious need and we’re right at something that’s not particularly helpful with either the creation or the sustenance of life. Helium has advanced use in MRI machines, and is fun in party balloons and squeaky voice tricks, but we got by for millennia without any of that. Relatively harmless otherwise, but not necessary.

    Lithium? It does find itself in biological places often in place of more important things like sodium or potassium, but it’s neither necessary nor completely worthless, I guess.

    My vote, though, for the worst of the top of the periodic table: Beryllium. Toxic. No biological function except to cause problems. Helps make pretty crystals, but the same is true of lots of less harmful elements. In that sense then, completely worthless.





  • Interesting. A quick search around finds someone confusing a bot into selling them a Chevy Tahoe for $1 at the end of last year.

    Can’t tell whether that one went to court. I can see an argument that a reasonable person ought to think that something was wrong with the bot or the deal, especially since they deliberately confused the bot, making a strong case in favour of the dealership.

    Now, if they’d haggled it down to half price without being quite so obvious, that might have made an interesting court case.


  • NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.

    If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.

    That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.


  • This has already been tried in at least one court.

    There was that story a while back about the guy who was told by an airline’s AI help-desk bot that he would get a ticket refund if turned out he was unable to fly, only for the airline to say they had no such policy when he came to claim.

    He had screenshots and said he wouldn’t have bought the tickets in the first place if he had been told the correct policy. The AI basically hallucinated a policy, and the airline was ultimately found liable. Guy got his refund.

    And the airline took down the bot.


  • I think they thought they could be the “true Tesla” to rival the “Edison” thief or mangler of ideas that the company named Tesla is or, at least appears to be*.

    Ironically, that seems to have been the only truly good idea they’ve had.

    * For legal reasons this is a hypothetical opinion I believe, in some form, might have belonged to the founder(s) of Nikola Motor, and says nothing of my own disappointment opinion.