I wish that they’d had a startup screen that said “it’s now dangerous to turn off your computer”.

A few years ago we were discussing how some companies were trying 4-day weeks and someone said that they’d like to try four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour.

They could not imagine that it meant working fewer hours.

It’s probably that a designer would have to ask a programmer to create scripting features to make a train work.

Or the could get the job done by using what they had instead of having to wait for someone else to write new code.

Reminds me of this.

https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-3-metro-trains-were-powered-by-running-npcs-apparently/

“Minus 400 lines of code created today.”

“I did a programming… at the program factory.”

AKA heisenbug.

Observing it changes the outcome.

There are probably some that you can’t see.

The UK also has the off-by-one floor numbering.

Also a nursery rhyme with the line “four and twenty blackbirds”!

It’s basically emacs incremental search.

Ctrl-r, l ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r. To get ls.

The fun thing is that you can create a file named “-rf *” and hope an admin tried to delete it!

I have

if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ] ; then
    eval $(ssh-agent -s)
fi

At the end of .bashrc and

AddKeysToAgent yes

In .ssh/config so that it auto-adds keys I unlock.

You would have done well with this kind of thinking in the mid-80s when you needed to fit code and data into maybe 16k!

As long as you were happy to rewrite it in Z80 or 6502.

Another alternative is arithmetic encoding. For instance, if you only needed to store A-Z and space, you code those as 0-26, then multiply each char by 1, 27, 27^2, 26^3 etc, the add them.

To unpack them, divide by 27 repeatedly, the remainder each time is each character. It’s simply covering numbers to base-27.

It wouldn’t make much difference from using 5 bits per char for a short run, though, but could be efficient for longer strings, or if encoding a smaller set of characters.

Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).

The video that started this clippy campaign mentioned that. The message is that those sort of transgressions seem so minor compared to what companies bot only do, but get away with now

Clippy was hated at the time, but an annoying useless assistant that doesn’t send anything to the Internet, let alone your personal data, seems like a dream now.

BASIC uses (used?) it to declare variables. (I don’t know if earlier languages did.)

Not that that’s a reason for other languages to copy it.

Web browser? “app”. Web page? “app”. Dialog box? “app”. Phone app that’s just a thin shell for the web site? “appapp”.

I think I heard “applet” being mentioned for embedded java or something in the early 2000s. I don’t know if that’s connected.

Well storing that would only take half a bit.