palordrolap

⊃))⁠・⁠▽⁠・(⁠(⊂

Yes it does bother me a little that the letters in the latter half of my username can’t be written backwards. (Well, some can, and the p can become a q, but then it’s not a p any more.)

The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

Bon appetit

“Uh, Boss, our customers are sending us the invoices for their RAM purchases.”

“Just a heads up that we’ll be shipping your machine to the client, since it’s the only machine on Earth known to support the software. You’re getting the spare machine out of the basement. Super fast Cyrix processor. Looks like it boots to Windows 11 release 3, but they’ve written it 3.11 for some reason.”

O((2⁽ⁿ2))!) or bust.

YFW you realise Grandpa isn’t wearing a tie.

Easy there, Vincent.

“The largest non-impossible ordinal that is less than the number of infinities there are.”

Pizza Man reminds me of Pumpkin from Baman and Piderman.

If Python has anything like Perl’s source code filters, then anything’s up for grabs, but Perl is kind of weird in a way that Python was specifically designed not to be. Or at least Python 1 was. Things may have changed in the intervening couple of decades.

If it’s just plain overloading, then whitespace is probably off the table. Spaces, even required spaces, aren’t so much syntax as they are structure. You could argue that the curly braces of some other languages are more syntactic than Python’s whitespace, because it’s actually Python’s magic colon and the first unindented line (lack of whitespace!) that serve that specific syntactic purpose.

Examples of Perl’s source code filters range from turning a program into binary representation of the syntax tree and still having it be executable, to new syntax, to writing programs entirely in Latin or something that looks almost but not entirely unlike it, anyway.

As a child I had two consecutive duck toys. I know the later one was called Duck-Duck, but the name of the first one is lost to time, much as the toy itself was. Duck-Duck on the other hand, met a fiery end, which is disturbingly fitting for this comic.

I’m sorry, Duck-Duck. You deserved better.

Was going to say that I don’t have the energy to be passionate about anything these days, but then I realised I’m quite happy - almost passionate, you might say - to turn that dispassion towards large organisations like Microsoft.

Buy our products!

“No.”

It isn’t just JavaScript (or Java which uses the “Hashmap” name).

There are, of course, languages that don’t have an equivalent structure, but for those that are sufficiently popular, it’s almost certain that someone has written a library that emulates associative arrays and then fairly certain that that library, in turn, has been used in production somewhere.

File this under “If it’s stupid but it works…”

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…?

They’re not planning to sue everyone who tries to use their undeserved perk? These people have no idea how to run a business.

/s

(I shouldn’t need that second line, and yet…)

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 was mainly thinking in terms of its use as a cheap bulking agent in food rather than as a nutritional supplement. If I tried a straight supplement, I fear Violet Beauregarde’s transformation would have nothing on what would happen.

Fun fact: In a hilarious misuse of the #! script interpreter mechanism, on Linux (and similar operating systems), if you put #!/bin/cat as the first line of a file and make it executable, it’ll dump itself to the current output channel when called by name.

Which is basically what you’re describing.

See also: Perl, which will try to interpret almost anything as legitimate code if you don’t tell it not to.

“I used to be able to Google like you, but then they changed what Google was and now what I can do doesn’t work, and what you have to do seems weird and scary to me.”