People surprised: 0.

DON’T BE FOOLED! This post was made by the cat! It wants narrower TV stands so it can knock them over easier when its owner forgets to feed it!

Depends if the door was in the rear.

The bisexual folks don’t want any confusion over what the “B” means.

Except the ones that aren’t.

Oh, I’ve got no complaints about the article or even its title. Few people learn Perl or Raku these days so it would be surprising for most people.

I thought it was interesting myself - Perl’s my go-to scripting language but I never used Raku. I might consider it next time I have a non-trivial scripting project.

I’m not sure why that’s surprising. Raku started out as Perl 6. Perl was designed primarily for use in a shell environment. Convenience features like the arguments to MAIN bit are in line with Perl philosophy.

Man, I really need to sit down and learn to carve. That lid is beautiful.

Have you tried burping and jumping up and down?

A lot smaller?

It’s can’t in the sense of “I can’t eat another bite.” Yes, until your stomach bursts and you die, you can eat another bite, but everyone understands what you mean.

I can’t watch YouTube with ads. The “without forcing myself” is implied.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

It’s difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you’d have them on a battery backup.

Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They’re pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.

I don’t see it as irrational. You’re thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can’t be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what’s to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.

I don’t think it’s so much “security by obscurity” as it’s an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won’t put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It’s a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it’s ever discovered, you take the money and run.

I see this sort of thing all the time.

There’s a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won’t run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there’s nothing wrong with it.

Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we’ve seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.

Alarm systems are no surprise. That part of the industry is full of proprietary one-vendor solutions. Want your Honeywell device to integrate into your building SCADA? Someone’s going to pay a lot of money to make that happen.

I can’t see Lucious Malfoy without being reminded of the Sluggy Freelance parody, where the Harry stand-in keeps calling him “Luscious.”

Emacs has org-mode. It’s similar to markdown, with a ton of extra functionality and the ability to export very nice documents in other formats like LaTeX, HTML, and OpenDocument. When read as plain text it’s clear and easy to read.

It’ll also act as a personal planner, a TODO list wrangler, format tables with spreadsheet capabilities, and a whole lot more. It’s basically Emacs’ killer app.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.