Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates 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 but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

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

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.

    But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

    The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

    (The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)





  • Deleting snapshots shouldn’t destroy the system as far as I know. It might confuse Timeshift later down the line if that deletion was done outside of Timeshift’s interface, but they’re supposed to be entirely separate.

    Timeshift creates a directory called “timeshift” in the root of whatever partition it’s configured to use. It should create at least one copy of every file, but it does then create hard links to save space between snapshots where files would otherwise be identical. Those links shouldn’t be to (or from) live system files though.

    Now, if someone was to bypass Timeshift and manually move files of the timeshift directory back into a live system or manually link live system locations into a snapshot, that might lead to the problem you experienced. Not sure if that’s what’s happened.

    It’s worth noting that I have Timeshift set to create its directory in a separate partition on a different physical drive, so if it was broken in some way, it would struggle to mess up. Hard links across partition boundaries are a lot harder to achieve if not impossible, so it would stop someone (or something) trying to bypass Timeshift, or at the very least give them pause for thought. And it would provide some protection against Timeshift doing something silly as well.

    Another way I suspect this could happen is if Timeshift’s own copy as well as all hard links to it in all snapshots were manually deleted before a restore was attempted. Can’t restore from what doesn’t exist, and so the system would remain broken.













  • To be fair, quite a lot of work was done to ensure that things didn’t go wrong when the year changed over, and some things still did go wrong (and still do if you know where to poke), but thankfully there weren’t any globally affecting ones. Mitigations were in place in plenty of time. I can’t recall any specific tragedies, but I would be surprised if there wasn’t a handful of those.

    More humorously, many, many websites started the new year with their auto-generated year showing as 19100, because no-one thought to fix that.

    32-bit time / the 2038 problem is a similar kind of deal and steady work has been under way probably since Y2K was cleared.

    So yeah, we do need to get ahead of the technology (AI this time) like we do with everything else, but we shouldn’t get too worked up about it because the experts have things under control.

    Right…?



  • palordrolap@kbin.runtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldBe nice
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    2 months ago

    Listen, we’ve had some absolute monsters who were, regrettably, human almost manage that feat. There’s no reason not to assume that a robot of similar mindset might not actually manage to do it.

    “Run it better than we do” is then laid bare as the subjective nightmare it really is. Sure, some people will like it, but we have a name for those: Masochists.


  • I’d suggest “Spicious Linux”, but it’s a 5/10 pun at best, and too similar to “specious” which means “sounds legit but isn’t”; not necessarily a good look.

    “Opus” borrows letters and sounds good, but speaking of sounds, it’s the name of a sound codec, so maybe not a good choice.

    “Abstruse” has similar problems to “specious”…

    “ChameleOS” is the name of a dragon in a game.

    I figure if I run through all the bad ideas here, only good ones will be left… but that might well be specious.