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.)











  • Not all con states want to secede from the union, but then again they’re not islands, so that one’s hard to gauge.

    Also, most con politicians here were very invested in remaining in Europe right up until we weren’t. The promise of a referendum was a hail Mary to try to win the votes of a particular contingent of voters. They got the votes, but never expected the referendum to go the way it did. Leopard, meet face.

    Now they’re having to pretend it was the intention all along. Make the best of it, etc.

    There’s also an argument to be made that her stance on climate change was entirely because of the desire to hurt the workers of the fossil fuel industry, especially one in particular, which outweighed all other priorities.

    The Israel thing I don’t know too much about, but I can be virtually certain it wasn’t about protecting the people of Lebanon from a bully.



  • It only needs to happen once. One bad day. One day when the brain isn’t operating at full capacity, but absolutely has to. One day out of a couple of thousand at a deeply critical time. And something gives.

    Are you the sort of person who falls asleep in front of the TV? There are millions of people like that. There might even be a billion. Sure, some will think “I’ll just close my eyes a sec”, but there are others who don’t make a conscious choice about anything and find themselves waking up, unaware of when they fell asleep.

    Forgetting something - even a baby - is a lapse like that. That’s all it is. Just one tiny little lapse. We are not 100% in control of what goes on in our own heads.

    “It won’t happen to me” / “It couldn’t possibly have happened to me.” is the height of hubris.

    As for making decisions like “Some people should not be allowed to be parents.”, who’s doing the allowing there? Because that’s a horribly slippery slope. And frankly if Darwinism hasn’t got it out of the gene pool at this point, it might well be all of us with the same fatal flaw… which I think is the point I was making earlier.