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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Gentoo is quite happy to allow you to copy your world file and config files from one system to another, then just issue emerge --emptytree world and take a couple of days’ vacation somewhere while the system rebuilds itself as specified. That’s been an option for as long as I’ve been using it, so at least 20 years. Other than the speed, the only issue is that you have to know where to find all the config files, of which there may be many distributed across /etc and ~ (and maybe other places if you’re really unlucky).

    (Figuring out how to word the emerge command so that it downloads as many binary packages as possible to shorten the wait is left to the interest of the reader.)





  • When you order something, do you express where you want it sent in coordinates or as an address? You can’t assume that the device’s coordinates at the time the order is made correspond to where the order is supposed to be sent, even if the device gives coordinates. Plus, they’re either not precise enough (could encompass the yard of the house next door, or just the snowbank at the edge of the property) or too precise (“drop this in the center of the roof because that’s where the coordinates are”). You’d need software capable of parsing building layouts well enough to figure out where the main entryway is and leave the parcel there, or you’d have to require that people interested in receiving deliveries by drone put a beacon where they want the drone to drop stuff.

    Beacons are the simplest solution, but they immediately put Amazon in a position where most people won’t care enough to set them up.



  • That’s because Perl doesn’t do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.


  • That’s still help text, even if it isn’t very helpful. I was installing to an older laptop recently that had no help for most BIOS options at all, plus I found a forum post on the manufacturer’s website indicating that even they had no documentation for those settings. (Naturally, it was made by HP.)



  • Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you’ll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don’t think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.

    This issue, as with any business, is “can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?” If it does make real inroads, it’ll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.