palordrolap

Where’s “here”? I’m in the UK and only discovered that there had been a specific saying, in (Soviet) Russia, about (contemporaneous) China, very recently. Maybe it was a joke I wasn’t privy to or heard but was too young to appreciate at the time.

(As to how I discovered it recently: I had been looking for a name or “law” for the concept of constantly making vague or empty threats - it’s kind of like crying wolf, but not - and somehow ended up the Wikipedia article on “China’s final warning”.)

There used to be a joke in Russia called “China’s final warning” because of the hundreds of times China used to threaten a “final warning” to whoever it perceived (correctly or otherwise) as encroaching on its politics or territories, and then promptly did absolutely nothing.

The joke is in danger of defecting and getting a new name.

If dealing with a small bunch of nutters was so easy, the Troubles wouldn’t have been quite so troubling, now, would they?

This would just be the same thing but with a different bunch of nutters.

I have to wonder if the potential for accidentally falling out of a window goes any way into affecting the way he approaches certain debts.

Within reason.

You could try your luck and see how much you can get away with before someone notices, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Nah, they’ll just make life more difficult for any employees who take bathroom breaks, if not find some “clearly unrelated” excuse to outright fire them.

That’s a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It’s not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What’s one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I’d be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it’s illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they’re thinking of adding that at some point.

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.

Given that magic eye pictures are basically a certain convolution of a repetitive source image (or random noise) and a depth map, it ought to be possible for an AI, if not a standard procedural algorithm, to at least attempt to “factor out” the source and map from the result image.

Whether that even counts as seeing and whether this guy’s neural network could do this, or maybe “see” in some other way is open to question. But I’m guessing it’s a no.

Yeah, that’ll go great when the car is suddenly driving 14 miles down the driveway of the house I lived at as a child - a driveway that is walkable in less than a minute - before entering the garage which is a large house that slightly resembles a place I used to work and has a view over a clock tower that may or may not be larger when you look at it from a different angle and I think I’ll nap in this bed that’s here.

Now tell me: Where is the car relative to its position when that five-second-long dream sequence began, and will that pedestrian ever walk again?

“But I did nothing wrong” – the boy who dared challenge Putin’s ideology.

Look, kid, if you speak out against things Poots says are OK, you’re going to prison, simple as.

Gotta be a mindless yes-man automaton, or suffer the consequences. Get any idea of independent thought out of your head and consider yourself lucky you weren’t standing near any windows.

If that’s what I think it is, we use “skid marks” as a euphemism in English too.

Oddly enough, the lack of air pressure in a vacuum would have the effect of trying to turn a regular cow into a sphere.

(Do not do this. Not even if the cow is already dead. Thanks.)

He dies.

That’s an unusual take on it. That would definitely have been recorded somewhere as a miraculous recovery. Usually it’s written that the time travelling assassin fails in such a way that no-one notices, and if they do have some kind of effect, generally ends up being the cause of the history they were taught rather than the changer of it.

Any tool someone invents will be used to train an AI to circumvent that tool.

In fact that’s how a lot of AI training is done in the first place.

Because you touch y… wait no. That doesn’t work here.

Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine…

OK, yeah, you’ll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it “Son of sticky keys.”

There will be no other way to get to those settings.

That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there’s no chance they’ll implement it.

If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they’d do it.

There will be those - I suspect - who believe they are above speaking Russian, because they were “raised speaking the language of the greatest country on Earth”, and they will believe that the Russians will just accept that for the same reasons, because, obviously Russians know that Americans are better than them.

This mindset is very familiar to me. I’m British.

That won’t provide a future workforce for the rich and/or powerful in an nationalist society though.

Can’t be a shepherd if you don’t have sheep.

My money’s on Microsoft Frontpage