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

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

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

Should have gone for something like “Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex.”

Parses weird, but look at that acronym.

“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.

Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

(Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)

YFW you realise Grandpa isn’t wearing a tie.

Easy there, Vincent.

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.”

Do you mean the Aether mod that recently got updated or something else?

Installing mods to Java Minecraft can be a chore regardless of the ecosystem. And usually it’s a third party mod loader that adds a new version to the default launcher config, not something provided by Mojang.

That said, Aether is a Forge mod and I haven’t used Forge in a few years at this point, so maybe things are different now, or I’m only remembering the way that the rival Fabric ecosystem works instead.

It was (and may still be) possible to make an older version of Pocket Edition run on Linux through unofficial shenanigans, but the official launcher says “Not playable on this device”.

minecraft.net also explicitly says: “Minecraft: Java Edition runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Minecraft: Bedrock Edition runs on Windows. Deluxe Collection content only runs on Minecraft: Bedrock Edition on Windows.”

Other unofficial shenanigans that may or may not work include but are not limited to: Running under a VM, running under something like Wine.

So, yes, technically it runs, but Microsoft are pretty clear that it’s not supposed to.

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…?

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.