grue
@grue@lemmy.world
- Comment on True of mine but he more than made up for it 4 days ago:
How do you avoid accidentally buying the same thing twice?
- Comment on Yes I know it doesn't work like that 4 days ago:
Ordinarily, sure, but we’re talking about hot salt water, which is definitely less corrosive.
Oh wait.
- Comment on Ġ̵̻ͅį̴̹̜̼̙͍͋̈̕m̷̦͎͈̎̄̄̿̈ṁ̶̭̫͓̞̻̾̂̚ë̶͚́̍̀͆ ̴̻͗̈́̿̂̚͝f̴̧̳̝͓̫̆̍͌͠u̸̧̖̠̗͔̽̽̾ȇ̶̝̠̎̔l̵̡͙͔̀́̃́̓͘,̵̠̜̽͛ ̴͙̜͇͚̥̜̑͛͐̓͆͒ḡ̸̮͝͠ḯ̸͍̩͛͗̍͝ṁ̶̛͎̖̭̖̓̃͑̃ḿ̵̫̇e̸͈͕̍̍͒ ̸̧̣̣̣̹̺͌̃ẇ̴̤̳͇̪̝̑̈́̏̚i̶͖͒̒r̶̢̪̙͉̭̥̂̐e̵̞̳̻̍͘ 5 days ago:
“I’ll make my own wire! With ions! And plasma!”
- Comment on Why do US airports have a lot more jet bridges than EU airports? 5 days ago:
Maybe something to do with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance? Europe tolerates a lot less accessibility by necessity since they have so many older buildings, so maybe that translates over into having more tolerance for stairs when boarding planes?
- Comment on Why do some website logins have the username and password entry on different pages? 1 week ago:
login ceremony
What pretentious asshole came up with that bit of jargon?
- Comment on Industrial Strength Shitpost 1 week ago:
Look, I’m not saying I admit anything, but if I, for one, were to do some naked woodworking, I’d be extra careful about it.
- Comment on Is audiophile bullshit cheating? 1 week ago:
From catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
- Comment on 🤏🤏🤏 2 weeks ago:
How is that a sequel? It’s not even by the same author.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked? 2 weeks ago:
Not just software, online updates. Even things that were computerized used to have a lot more QA effort put into them when fixing a bug meant having to physically ship a new product revision, or at least a new disk.
- Comment on Skyrim on Switch 2 ships with severe input lag and a huge 53GB file size despite being capped at 30FPS 2 weeks ago:
Prior to my GPU reaching the age where it overheats easily
That’s not some sort of natural aging process; that’s you failing to do maintenance. Clean out the dust and/or replace the thermal paste.
- Comment on don't tell the cable company about the splitter 2 weeks ago:
Flat CRTs were probably even heavier than curved ones because the glass has to be thicker to hold vacuum with a less structurally-efficient shape.
- Comment on Ohio Politician says he wants Governor to approve bill allowing minors to work later 2 weeks ago:
For it to get vetoed it had to have passed through the legislature, which means the problem is way bigger than just that one fuckwad.
- Comment on What's going on with Quentin Tarantino? 3 weeks ago:
Of the movies you listed, Hackers is the only one I’ve seen. Hack the planet!
- Comment on Latitudes 3 weeks ago:
🎵 Portami a casa, vie di campagna 🎶
- Comment on Why isint lemmy more popular? 3 weeks ago:
Lack of marketing.
- Comment on Exclusive: jury in anti-genocide activist 'terrorism' trial 'told to ignore international law' 4 weeks ago:
You can’t not have jury nullification without destroying the right to trial by jury. Either the jury has the power to decide or it doesn’t.
- Comment on Freaky ass bird 4 weeks ago:
I saw it in Morrowind.
- Comment on Rush hour traffic in Utrecht, Netherlands 4 weeks ago:
Ebikes are less important when you don’t have hills to deal with.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
bash is copyleft. zsh is permissive. Therefore, bash is superior.
- Comment on 🧠 🧠 🧠 5 weeks ago:
This also changes through the lifespan. For infants it’s more like 60% of caloric intake
And for 79-year-olds it’s apparently more like 0% of caloric intake.
- Comment on Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser 5 weeks ago:
I definitely own Diablo and I definitely used Win2K, but I didn’t go out of my way to buy a weird special version of it. This leads me to believe the normal Windows 95 version would work on NT as well.
- Comment on Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser 5 weeks ago:
I distinctly remember running most, if not all, of my games on Windows 2000 (not ME). I mean, yeah, NT 4 was pretty hopeless for gaming, but 2000 was better.
- Comment on Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser 5 weeks ago:
Me, a Windows 2000 user:
- Comment on New Orleans ballot for clerk of criminal court runoff election today. Large boxes are city propositions. Tiny box in the top left corner is for the actual runoff...🔎 1 month ago:
The real !mildlyinfuriating part is the implication that the propositions are less important than the election of people.
- Comment on Native Americans? 1 month ago:
Most people in Argentina and Uruguay are white, and the (indigenous + indigenous-mixed) majorities in some of the other countries aren’t necessarily big enough to be considered “virtually all,” especially when you consider that there are folks with African ancestry there as well.
- Comment on Not impressed 1 month ago:
Nah, phylogenetically speaking, all descendants of fish must also be fish, by definition. Therefore, “being cold blooded” cannot also be a criterion (not that it would work anyway since tuna are warm blooded, BTW, and nobody would argue tuna aren’t fish).
The “living wholly in water” criterion actually works, though: land-fish (e.g. humans) live inside a bag of water that we carry with us.
- Comment on Not impressed 1 month ago:
Of course there’s such a thing as a fish! A fish is any swimming vertebrate (or its descendant), such as a tuna, or a duck, or a human.
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 1 month ago:
I don’t think that was Gabe “hating” Microsoft; I think it was him recognizing that the Windows Store/appx stuff that Windows 8 pushed was a threat to his business model.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 month ago:
I know Jeff does raspi stuff.
Then why’d you ask if he’s not a fan of ARM? Were you unaware that Raspberry Pis use ARM CPUs?
I’m not trying to defend the guy or dispute you, BTW; I’m just still confused about why you’d say that.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 month ago:
Well, that’s unfortunate re: Jeff, but it’s still weird to me that the other commenter would be aware of that about him (which you mention having to dig through a decade of blog posts and old tweets to find), without at some point also finding out that he’s ‘the Raspberry Pi guy.’
It’s like knowing that Hitler was a vegetarian but somehow not knowing that he was the dictator of Germany who started WWII – it just doesn’t make sense for a fact to be that isolated from its context.
