palordrolap

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.

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.

these thing ARE related

And domestic moggies are related to lions, but if you have to pick a fight, you’re not picking the lion.

A telephone call generally involves many minutes and many words, which many people find a drain on mental resources. Holding a door, while an interaction, is not a verbal conversation nor is it particularly lengthy.

Meow.

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.

If you think about it, that’s following the rule on the footpath that would otherwise be there. That edge would be towards traffic, it’s just reduced to zero width.

There literally-literally is.

And to over-egg that particular pudding point, word doubling might be a common thing in “simpler” languages and, ahem, pooh-poohed in “complex” ones, but that second “literally” restores the original meaning.

For now.

Until some bright spark starts using “literally literally” to mean “figuratively” anyway.

✅ “What did you do that for?”

✅ “Why did you do that?”

🚫 “Why did you do that for?”

…

⁉️ “Wherefore did you that?”

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.

An excellent dude played by George Carlin.

But the internet seems to suggest it’s an AI that first debuted in Amazon’s mobile app. Maybe it’s been released onto the main website or maybe just the main .com or something. (I’m in .co.uk land, and try not to use Amazon unless I absolutely have to.)

From the article I skimmed, there is - or was back in March - no way to save or export conversations had with it, which seems like a red flag to me.

“All you need to do is this thing that I can do and if I can do it, so can anyone else.”

said the paraplegic to the quadriplegic.

Unfortunately there is art to knowing when one should not get in the ditch and try and instead leave it to an expert.

Home electrical is one such murky area, for example. Replacing a bulb? Get in the metaphorical ditch. Installing a fusebox? Call an expert. This much is clear. Replacing a light switch? Ah. Now there’s a problem.

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.

I’d prefer the “ain’t nobody got time for that” woman for Mint (and so speaking about the more hands-on distros), but I can’t say the existing image isn’t accurate.

… not that I can say that it is accurate either. And the demographic in the Threadiverse allegedly has a heavy skew towards that picture, Mint or not, so it might be counterproductive to run a poll here.

They can correlate that information with your other browsing habits and start to form a picture about the sort of person who shares your interests, regardless of how bizarre those might be.

It’s not an exact science because everyone is different, but once they have that picture they can start pushing the buttons of one person like and derive some conclusions about how the rest of that cohort, including you, will react.

They don’t even have to be successful all of the time. Just more than would be expected from random chance.

A stone in the right place can divert the mightiest of rivers.

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.

Then the embodiment of psychological trauma shows up and yeets Cupid into the Sun.

You may imagine that, as perhaps was intended, Helios intervenes and Cupid survives, but it’s too late for lover boy and his intended’s sense of sanity and well-being.