The change of the meaning of the G in GPU from “graphics” to “general” is even less well documented and used than the “V” of DVD changing from “video” to “versatile”.

Indeed it only occurred to me what it must have changed to and to go looking to confirm after seeing your comment.

And frankly they ought to have changed the name to something like “MPPU” if they wanted it to stick (massively parallel).

This had me going down the rabbit hole of the other compression algorithm that has had my interest for a long time: Arithmetic coding.

It looks like all the patents on that have expired… sooo, original bzip resurrection when?

Bad news: It’s one like the one with the evil grin and steepled hands from the meme.

Here I was expecting a graphics demo to blow our collective minds but instead I got a story about a local LLM for cheap. It is <current year>. I should have known better.

Were I the author / tech cobbler here, I’d be concerned that too much time with an LLM, local or otherwise, might erode or dull my apparently fairly sharp reasoning and tech skills. (Clarification: Not my sharpness, theirs. I’m a potato.)

Other thoughts: For a minute I thought this whole thing was a tribute to, or a troll in the manner of, that one Redditor that always spun their stories around to being about their dad beating them with jumper cables.

Also, my old PC developed an issue like the warm reboot problem, except with the network interface. I couldn’t just restart, I had to power off and back on. I never did bother to find out whether it was early signs of hardware failure or whether it was an old hardware / newer kernel mismatch.

Anything that isn’t encrypted at the message level will be accessible in plaintext at some point on a mail provider’s hardware.

Secure protocols only ensure that mail gets to the mail provider and leaves again without someone else reading the message on the wire. On the server, there is no such protection.

Take a look at any mail message’s headers for Received. Any server that added a header, and maybe a few others besides, had full access to the plain text of the whole message.

A good provider might have encrypted volumes in case a server is stolen, but while those volumes are live, messages on there are effectively plain text.

This is an unavoidable fact.

For many years, I had access to hundreds if not thousands of customer mailboxes but neither I nor my colleagues had any need or desire to go snooping, and I expect we would have been sued out of existence had we done so, contracts or otherwise.

The closest I ever got was when trying to help a customer determine what was happening to messages being sent from a third party. I was able to confirm that messages from that third party were indeed landing in the mailbox (literally grepping for the From: header in newly arrived messages) and then confirming that the message had been collected by something outside our network.

Then we had to go through the usual customer-side troubleshooting, like other things that might be picking up the mail, junk mail collection systems, message rules and so on.

A few customers were uncomfortable as and when they realised we were able to see all their mail. They got an abridged version of the above and were told about the benefits of things like PGP or having their own mail server to reduce the chance for snooping.

Y’know, this might explain the plot of Charlie the Unicorn 3

(If you’ve somehow missed these, you might want to start with the first one, but I dunno, I’m not your magical liopleurodon dad.)

Zaphod survived because

Someone ought to create the Total Perspective Vortex and plug every single billionaire into it.

Good point. I should have realised.

Meanwhile in the Known Issues: “Entering Exclusive fullscreen mode crashes the game on Wayland”

You’d think they’d fix something like that before making the game Wayland-first.

So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.

I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.

But I’ll give you a true one.

At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.

The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.

So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.

Many things could have gone wrong…

…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.

No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.

Well at least you didn’t invoke she who must not be named.

Could be worse. You could interpret the message as a declaration of war from your enemies in the next star system, fight a bloody interstellar war, learn that they thought the message came from you, join forces, locate the origin, get there to wage war and be eaten by a small dog.

IYKYK.

Well, I’m not going to downvote, but something in my brain is screaming “lossy compression!” and so you might say I’m at least wary.

There was a The Real Ghostbusters comic back in the day that featured an alien ghost. It wasn’t a clown pirate at the same time, but it did look kind of funny.

The proton packs didn’t work on it and, my memory is more hazy at this point, I think Egon said something about it registering as living matter, like somehow protoplasm and ectoplasm were reversed wherever it came from. I do remember that it figured out enough English to be able to spell out “SNED ME OME” (sic?), which I presume they managed to do. I don’t remember exactly how.

I realise this is only tangentially related to the comic, but this has lived rent free in my head for nearly four decades, so it’s cathartic to give it an airing.

“Desert” can also mean “deserted”, which is what the word in “desert island” means. It’s basically a fossilised older usage of the word that no-one uses on its own any more.

Candy bar wrapper from the counter top after the owner forgot to put it in the garbage. Forbidden chocolate flavour with very little danger of poisoning.

Which is not to say the dog knows this. It would have had the candy bar too given half a chance.

I still think Win2K was the true peak. Everything since has been clown shoes and bloat.

… but I have to admit that my Mint Cinnamon customisation looks a whole lot more 7 than it does 2K.

Mimi, I hate to tell you, but this is a sign of getting old.

As far as I know, from all the way over here on the other side of the planet, it’s not actually the large ones you have to be afraid of.

Huntsmans, like the pictured spider, are relatively harmless, maybe a little bit stupid, and the biggest danger is the chaos you’ll cause freaking out about the size of the thing and then trying to relocate it elsewhere.

It’s the small ones like the redback that you have to watch out for. I have heard that they like hiding under toilet seats and in shoes.