The change of the meaning of the G in GPU from “graphics” to “general” is even less well documented and used than the “V” of DVD changing from “video” to “versatile”.

Indeed it only occurred to me what it must have changed to and to go looking to confirm after seeing your comment.

And frankly they ought to have changed the name to something like “MPPU” if they wanted it to stick (massively parallel).

This had me going down the rabbit hole of the other compression algorithm that has had my interest for a long time: Arithmetic coding.

It looks like all the patents on that have expired… sooo, original bzip resurrection when?

Bad news: It’s one like the one with the evil grin and steepled hands from the meme.

It’s still poor taste to glorify past transgressions, no matter whether each have given as good (or bad) as they have to each other.

And the last thing Zelenskyy would want is for Poland to decide to ally with Russia. I’m sure Putin would love that. Another few million troops, and then no-one to defend Poland or Ukraine when they’ve both destroyed each other, so he can roll in and take control of both.

I think your reading of the situation is a little twisted, but I agree that Zelenskyy has made another poor choice here.

That is, the UPA weren’t Nazis, they were playing the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game and trying to take advantage of the destabilised political situation in Europe at the time.

What the UPA did, however, is not forgivable and Zelenskyy should have thought twice about invoking that memory.

Did you hear about the wooden car with wooden wheels, wooden mechanicals and a wooden engine?

It wooden go.

Here I was expecting a graphics demo to blow our collective minds but instead I got a story about a local LLM for cheap. It is <current year>. I should have known better.

Were I the author / tech cobbler here, I’d be concerned that too much time with an LLM, local or otherwise, might erode or dull my apparently fairly sharp reasoning and tech skills. (Clarification: Not my sharpness, theirs. I’m a potato.)

Other thoughts: For a minute I thought this whole thing was a tribute to, or a troll in the manner of, that one Redditor that always spun their stories around to being about their dad beating them with jumper cables.

Also, my old PC developed an issue like the warm reboot problem, except with the network interface. I couldn’t just restart, I had to power off and back on. I never did bother to find out whether it was early signs of hardware failure or whether it was an old hardware / newer kernel mismatch.

Anything that isn’t encrypted at the message level will be accessible in plaintext at some point on a mail provider’s hardware.

Secure protocols only ensure that mail gets to the mail provider and leaves again without someone else reading the message on the wire. On the server, there is no such protection.

Take a look at any mail message’s headers for Received. Any server that added a header, and maybe a few others besides, had full access to the plain text of the whole message.

A good provider might have encrypted volumes in case a server is stolen, but while those volumes are live, messages on there are effectively plain text.

This is an unavoidable fact.

For many years, I had access to hundreds if not thousands of customer mailboxes but neither I nor my colleagues had any need or desire to go snooping, and I expect we would have been sued out of existence had we done so, contracts or otherwise.

The closest I ever got was when trying to help a customer determine what was happening to messages being sent from a third party. I was able to confirm that messages from that third party were indeed landing in the mailbox (literally grepping for the From: header in newly arrived messages) and then confirming that the message had been collected by something outside our network.

Then we had to go through the usual customer-side troubleshooting, like other things that might be picking up the mail, junk mail collection systems, message rules and so on.

A few customers were uncomfortable as and when they realised we were able to see all their mail. They got an abridged version of the above and were told about the benefits of things like PGP or having their own mail server to reduce the chance for snooping.

Y’know, this might explain the plot of Charlie the Unicorn 3

(If you’ve somehow missed these, you might want to start with the first one, but I dunno, I’m not your magical liopleurodon dad.)

How do you dock things to it?

On Babylon 5, the docking was done through an opening in the centre, along the axis of rotation, so ships wishing to dock only needed to match rotation and the station would appear to be, well, stationary.

That said, the defence fighters launched from the exterior walls of the station, so I assume they had to constantly adjust in order to re-dock there, assuming they didn’t also return through the mid-port.

Zaphod survived because

Someone ought to create the Total Perspective Vortex and plug every single billionaire into it.

Good point. I should have realised.

Meanwhile in the Known Issues: “Entering Exclusive fullscreen mode crashes the game on Wayland”

You’d think they’d fix something like that before making the game Wayland-first.

Low effort. Boooo.

Mint all the way for me. Mint’s based on Ubuntu unless you’re adventurous and choose LMDE which is based on Debian instead (Ubuntu is also based on Debian, so it cuts out the middleman.)

And the Cinnamon desktop, which is the default, is very Windows-like and native to Mint. Perfect for refugees. I was one when my Win 7 SSD died and I thought that that was a perfect time to switch.

I can’t speak to Fedora (I still haven’t forgiven Red Hat for what they did to CentOS), but Mint has honest-to-goodness old-school forums where you can ask for help if you get stuck.

Edit: typo

So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.

I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.

But I’ll give you a true one.

At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.

The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.

So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.

Many things could have gone wrong…

…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.

No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.

Depending on local laws, income and other assets obtained by a benefactor within a certain amount of time (perhaps up to a decade) before death may be subject to inheritance tax or higher inheritance tax rates before being passed to beneficiaries.

And if the parents don’t declare it, then the beneficiary will have the same “bag of cash” problem but a few years down the line, because the government has no idea where it came from.

Edit: Put a benefactor where I should have put beneficiary.

You might want to check out Tommy Edison on YouTube. Great fella. Blind since birth. Has answered most of the questions anyone has ever had for a blind person in his many videos. I don’t know him, per se, but I do know of him, so I hope that counts.

I seem to remember that he thinks of vision as being like a superpower, being able to know that someone or something is over at a distance without having to directly interact.

Well at least you didn’t invoke she who must not be named.