palordrolap

Reminds me of a TV ad, older than this comic, for a frosted cereal (probably not the first one that comes to mind) and the adult about to consume them has the inner dialogue “What about fat?!” “Wimp!”

(I always heard it as “Wamp!”, so to this day I’m not completely sure if it was an early example of a spoken sad trombone, but “Wimp!” is more likely.)

They don’t make ads like that any more.

This has bell curve meme vibes. I’m just not sure what the middle guy would be saying.

“I don’t have a life or a job”

“FR me too”

“I thought you were a therapist”

~head shrunk into shoulders, sweating~

Had to check. It looks like the comic actually only ceased production last year after the passing of the (second) artist.

Chris Browne took on Hägar after his father Dik - who drew the linked comic - died, but today I learned that Chris died last year.

As an extra kicker, I also learned that his brother Chance died a couple of months back. He didn’t draw Hägar but had taken on another of their father’s strips, Hi and Lois.

My denial about getting older can only take so much of this.

Reminds me of that time in a pub restaurant where I ordered the Cumberland sausage (plus mash, etc.). When it arrived it looked not entirely dissimilar. Thankfully, when I cut into it, it was indeed sausage, not a snail. Or anything else.

(Must have tasted OK because I don’t remember hating it.)

This hen laid a cannon?! That might be worth more than a goose that lays golden eggs to a warring king.

Is it still the norm to go to the dev’s office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we’re doing, tell them we’re shipping their machine to the client because it’s the only one that the code runs on?

And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

I’m assuming that this response from 4o isn’t real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.

My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.

Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.

Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

Someone else points out that Python’s native bool is a subtype of int, so adding a bool to an int (or performing other mixed operations) is not an error, which might then go on to cause a hard-to-catch semantic/mathematical error.

I am assuming that trying to add a NumPy bool_ to an int causes a compilation error at best and a run-time warning, or traceable program crash at worst.

Ridiculous.

I think I like it.

… which is probably what my mother thought when she first set eyes on me, tbh.

had he
at any point in the episode
consumed mushrooms

80 characters

Two hours and no-one’s challenged this? People must be asleep.

(This is not that challenge. Only pointing out that someone usually has by now.)

Well I found a good quality version of the original on Imgur: https://imgur.com/WK1g3xd

… but I can’t find a good quality version of this particular “Billionaires” modification. (That’s assuming it’s as badly pixelated for everyone else as it is for me anyway.)

It worked… or it will work? for Jeffrey Sinclair and Delenn. Just don’t think too hard about which one of them did it / has done it / will do it first.

And the closest thing to a moth wasn’t either of those.

Implemented as “Maleness” with options: TRUE, FALSE, FILE_NOT_FOUND

One of the few cases where this implementation of a boolean is almost a good idea.

I used to be an adventurer like you but then I

aged several decades without realising.

Comparing audio cassettes to modern high-density tape storage is pretty much the same comparison as an 8-bit computer with a modern 64-bit server, or, say, a hamster with a human.

Basically the same thing, but the differences are somewhat notable.

512KB? At the risk of going all Four Yorkshiremen, that sounds luxurious.

Floppy disks held 170KB if you were lucky to have a drive. The PET line, like many 8-bit computers, used a cassette tape drive (yes, those things that preceded CDs for holding and playing music). Capacity depended on the length of the tape. And it took ages to load.

The PET was fancy because it had a built-in cassette drive. That’s what you can see to the left of the keyboard in the picture.

Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there’s a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it’s very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn’t put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

</old man rant>