AnyOldName3

With energy prices in the UK being what they are, it’s only raw potatoes that are cheaper than bread. At least toast toasts quickly, so isn’t that energy-intensive compared with boiling a pan of water.

I dug up a manual for the Windows 3.1 SDK, and it turns out that it had the same GetVersion function with the same return value as the Windows 2000 SDK, and it’s just that the live MSDN docs pretend that Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows, so show that as the earliest version that every function that came from an older version of Windows. http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/microsoft/windows_3.1/Microsoft_Windows_3.1_SDK_1992/PC28914-0492_Windows_3.1_SDK_Getting_Started_199204.pdf page 31.

I then looked at a manual for the Windows 1.03 SDK, and it, too, has a matching GetVersion function.

The only change to GetVersion over the entire history of Windows is that at some point it switched from returning a sixteen bit value with eight bits for the major version and eight bits for the minor version to a 32-bit value with bits split between major, build number and minor versions, and then later on, GetVersionEx was added to return those numbers as members of a struct instead. There has never been a version of Windows where string comparisons of the display name were appropriate or recommended by Microsoft.

If you’re checking for Windows 9 in order to disable features, which is what the jump straight to ten was supposed to protect against (when running a 16-bit binary for 3.1/95 on 32-bit Windows 10, it lies and says it’s Windows 98), then you’re using at least the Windows 2000 SDK, which provided GetVersion, which includes the build and revision numbers in its return value, and the revision number was increased over 7000 times by updates to Windows 2000.

There was a function that would give you a monotonically-increasing build number that you could compare against the build that any given feature was added in that people should have used, but there was also a function that gave you the name of the OS, and lots of people just checked if that contained a 9. The documentation explicitly said not to do that because it might stop working, but the documentation has never stopped people using the wrong function.

In the 40s there was a lot more polar ice stopping ships getting there, and far fewer long-range bombers, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. If the US went to war against Russia or China (instead of siding with them against Europe), Greenland would see a lot more action in its immediate vicinity. That’s why the preexisting deal lets the US station effectively as much of their military there as they’d like.

It’s not exactly a rootkit - if you just don’t agree to the UAC prompt while it’s installing, it’ll refuse to install rather than doing the thing that makes it definitionally a rootkit and managing to gain admin access without the user’s permission - but the game does still require kernel-level anti-cheat.

It never went away. They just figured out how to make it subtle so it could be active all the time instead of just when the computer wasn’t working properly. Do you really feel like you’re using trauma-free software day-to-day?

Generally when you see people advocate for not having to pay for things like that, it’s because they want to do away with currency and the concept that a living is something that needs to be earned rather than something everyone gets as a basic right. Plenty of people make art, including games, without a profit motive, so it’s not unreasonable to think that enough games would be made if everyone had way more free time and games were all made for free.

It’s not so much about time (although I have played a couple of things that would take a ridiculously long time to save or load), it’s about the number of chances to make a mistake. If you only save ten values, it’s really easy for a programmer to verify that they’ve got everything right, but if they save ten million, there are a million times more opportunities for mistakes to sneak in and it’s much harder to notice each mistake, let alone fix it.

Fallout 4 is a bit of an odd duck here as the save format for the BGS games is basically just another ESM file, so reuses all the same serialisation and deserialisation mechanisms. Most games don’t have multiple places the game data can come from and a way to combine them as they’ve not got an engine designed with this kind of modding in mind, so there’s nothing to reuse in this way for saves. Given the general standards of engineering from that studio, if they didn’t have this as a core feature of their custom engine for nearly three decades, and instead had to come up with something from scratch, they’d absolutely mess it up or have to simplify the saving system.

Sometimes, political ideologies aren’t the same thing as the word used to name them would suggest.

It’s not the ‘Linux on’ subsystem, it’s the ‘Linux on Windows’ subsystem, so it’d have to be Linux on Windows Windows Subsystem, which would be silly. It can’t have a colon in it as some command-line tools take a subsystem as an argument, and traditionally, Windows command-line tools have used colons the same way Unix has used equals, i.e. to separate an argument name from its value, and parsing that gets harder when you’re expecting colons in the value, too.

Windows has subsystems. They’re called Windows Subsystems. This one’s for Linux. However you slice it, the initialism has to have WS in it.

The kids name the monsters after things they’ve recently encountered in D&D, and coincidentally, the monsters tend to have some powers in common with the D&D enemies even if their physical form is way off.

Downstream packagers are under no obligation not to do dumb things that break things for users and make the users blame the upstream developers.

apt was mentioned, so this might actually be Debian’s problem. Python doesn’t support being installed without its standard library, but (unless they’ve decided to stop being dumb since I last checked) Debian’s python package only contains part of the standard library, and the rest is split into other optional packages. If you find software that says its only dependency is python, on Debian-derived distros, it might not work without installing extra packages, and if the software’s maintainer doesn’t use Debian and know about this, then their installation instructions won’t cover it.

But all the interesting people are in the computer, the same place as the bad stuff is.

And the context was a sentence that was correct if you used OED sense 1, or MW sense 1, but you decided to parse it as MW sense 2b and then complain that the sentence was incorrect.

OED:

1. totally or partially resistant to a particular infectious disease or pathogen.
2. protected or exempt, especially from an obligation or the effects of something.

Merriam Webster

1. : not susceptible or responsive

   especially: having a high degree of resistance to a disease

2. a: produced by, involved in, or concerned with immunity or an immune response

   b: having or producing antibodies or lymphocytes capable of reacting with a specific antigen

3. a: marked by protection

   b: free, exempt

So unless you pretend that MW’s 2b sense is the only valid one, the immunity is immunity.

If you have a sample of HIV at 37°C in blood, but with all the immune cells removed, it’ll still all become inert after around a week simply due to chemical reactions with other components of blood etc… It’s pretty comparable to a population of animals - if you take away their ability to reproduce, they’ll die of old age when left for long enough even if you’re not actively killing them.

Edit: fat-fingered the save button while previewing the formatting

• this is a shitpost community, not a biotech publication, so immune here means the dictionary definition, not any domain-specific technical jargon, otherwise people can’t make shitposts about diplomatic immunity
• lacking the receptor that HIV uses to hijack the regular immune response in order to reproduce means the regular immune response destroys it
• even in a normal person, after exposure, a lot of HIV gets destroyed by other parts of the immune system, often enough to eliminate it before an infection gains a foothold. Once an infection takes hold, it outbreeds the immune response as it’s the part best equipped to deal with a large viral load that it interferes with.
• if you’ve got the virus in your body, but due to the lack of the receptor, it can’t reproduce, then it doesn’t remain viable for very long as each viron accumulates damage over time, and ceases to function once it’s too badly damaged. People carrying a disease have enough viral reproduction going on to balance out the virus being destroyed.

There’s a pretty good reason to think it’s not going to improve much. The size of models and amount of compute and training data required to create them is increasing much faster than their performance is increasing, and they’re already putting serious strain on the world’s ability to build and power computers, and the world’s ability to get human-written text into training sets (hence why so many sites are having to deploy things like Anubis to keep themselves functioning). The levers AI companies have access to are already pulled as far as they can go, and so the slowing of improvement can only increase, and the returns can only diminish faster.