• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • Starburst is the brand. The product you’re thinking of is Starburst Fruity Chews (formerly known as Opal Fruits), but they make other products. They used to make the best jelly beans, under the name Starburst Joosters, but they got discontinued. It looks like either they’re back, but under the much more boring name Starburst Jellybeans, or they’ve decided to make different jelly beans so given them a new name. Either way, they’re still not available in the UK, and people seem to be complaining that the recipe changed recently to make them worse, so the hope this thread gave me has been thoroughly dashed.



  • Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.



  • Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.



  • The Free Software movement was generally a leftist objection to the limitations on computer use that capitalism was causing, and the open source movement was a pro-corporate offshoot to try and make the obvious benefits more compatible with capitalism (which it’s been pretty successful at, even if it has reintroduced some of the problems Free Software was trying to stop in the first place). Anyone who’s making a distinction between the two at the minimum is recognising that capitalism is why we can’t have certain specific nice things, so it’s not a huge leap to blame it for other problems, too.

    As for a sensible middle ground, the Free Software movement designed its licences to work in the capitalist societies they operated in, so the incompatibility with corporate use has never been as big a deal as it’s been made out to be. Corporations can use copyleft-licenced software just fine as long as they’re not unreasonable about it. It’s totally fine for a corporation to use a GPL tool internally and even have an internal fork as long as they put the source code for their internal fork on the company’s file share so the employees using the tool can improve it if they get the urge. They can even sell products that depend on LGPL or MPL libraries if they make the source of the builds of those libraries they used available on their website or otherwise accessible to their customers (and use a DLL/.so/.dylib build of the library of it’s LGPL). These restrictions are all less of a pain than making an MIT-licenced clone of an existing project, but companies have opted to make clones instead. The only bonus this gives them is that they can make it proprietary again later, and it has the added risk that one of their competitors could make a proprietary fork with a killer feature they can charge for, which isn’t a nice risk. There are other benefits to investing in making your own clone of something, but they don’t depend on the license it uses.





  • There are already slats so the only hole you can get a fork into is the earth, unless you’ve already got something convincingly shaped like an earth pin in the earth hole to open the slats over the live and neutral. If you’re going to that much effort to zap yourself, the switch isn’t going to be much of a hurdle.

    I’d suspect that it’s largely because it’s more convenient to have a switch than to unplug things and plug them back in again, especially as our plugs are a nightmare to step on to the point that Americans complaining about stepping on lego seems comical to anyone who’s stepped on lego and a plug.


  • I’d hope that anyone online enough to become a Lemmy moderator would know better, but plenty of people think trolling means doing absolutely anything anyone might not be entirely happy with online. That definition seems to be the prevailing one on TV and radio news, so people who don’t engage with online culture would pick it up that way. That would cover things like posting a joke which was poorly received, whether it was just terrible or because it was offensive, and whether or not you knew it was potentially offensive.

    There’s also the matter of whether trolling is trying to intentionally provoke people specifically by pretending to be an idiot (and looking at Wikipedia, it’s sometimes as an attempt at humour rather than to provoke - e.g. Ken M isn’t trying to upset anyone, but is pretending to be an idiot or misinformed).

    So there are plenty of definitions of trolling going around, and it’s plausible that moderators might sometimes use one that’s wildly incompatible with your definition.


  • You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.


  • Even by crypto standards, Bitcoin Cash is dodgy. Its origins were a temporary hiccup in the Bitcoin network which forked the blockchain into two branches. As blockchains are designed to tolerate this, the network quickly decided that one branch was worse than the other, so everything switched to the good branch and Bitcoin continued chugging away and consuming enough power for a small country. However, a few people were cross about this because they had more Bitcoin on the dead branch, so manually configured their wallets and mining hardware to use that branch, and tried encouraging other people to do the same. That didn’t work. They then decided to provide a preconfigured wallet and mining software that would prefer the dead branch but claimed it was its own new cryptocurrency and everyone who had Bitcoin already would get some of the new one for free, and that was enough to get some people to sign up.







  • If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.