Malgas

Love Demetri Martin.

But the real story is weirder: the color is named after the fruit. Prior to the 16th century it was “yellow-red”.

Also carrots were not commonly orange when oranges arrived in Europe. The carrots we’re used to were hybridized from the earlier yellow, red, and purple varieties in the late 18th century.

When public officials tamper with elections, it’s election fraud.

My favorite version was when Michael used it: “It’s a human insult. It’s devastating. You’re devastated right now.”

That’s not the half of it:

Shit in, shit out. That’s AI.

“On two occasions I have been asked, – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

—Charles Babbage, on his analytical engine, 1864

Don’t dumb down the gameplay systems

Bethesda design challenge: impossible.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Do you also believe that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy just because the name says so?

I used to use a system that was perfectly happy to let you use a semicolon when setting the password, but then login would fail if you did.

Depends on the distro. Some have a configuration setting to allow unfree software or not, others have separate repos.

A similar argument is what finally caused the value of the vi family of editors to click in my brain:

They are designed to be fully functional over even the shittiest possible* remote connection. You can’t always count on ctrl, alt, or even the arrow keys being transmitted in a way that is understood by the remote machine.

*Well, I guess the worst possible terminal would be something like an actual teletype, and in that case you’d probably want to fall back to ed or its descendants. To save paper, if nothing else.

In fact Diyonisius Exiguus made some errors when counting back to establish the anno Domini date system and as such Jesus would likely have been born between 4 and 8 BC.

There’s a board game called History of the World that does something like this, where score is tracked per player, but you play as a new civilization every turn. (And, depending on the draw, may wind up fighting against your previous civ.)

It’s a good game, but, yeah, it’s hard to imagine that working in something like Civilization.

Yeah I’ve definitely heard “up to [amount] or more” used in advertising. Which is just completely meaningless.

apropos is also helpful if you want to do something but don’t know what the relevant tools are.

It’s not a measure of efficiency per se, but efficiency is a limiting factor:

In order for a solar panel to put out 1000x more power, the baseline you’re comparing it to must be at most 0.1% efficient, because otherwise the new thing would have greater than 100% efficiency and that isn’t possible.

And that’s a purely thermodynamic argument. The actual limit for solar efficiency is likely less.

No, it’s the national symbol of Ukraine.

Fascists love to try to co-opt national symbolism, and sometimes they succeed, but ceding ownership of a 1000 year old symbol (it was used as a seal in Kievan Rus) because some assholes adopted it in 1993 is just letting the fascists win.

One thing I always liked about slashdot is the ability to tag votes with things like “funny” or “informative”.

If not, that would go some way to explaining why they seem to be so fascinated by them.

Indeed, friend citizen. Would you like some Bouncy Bubble Beverage?