It’s the machine language monitor on the 40-column screen of the Commodore 128 (or, more likely, an emulator of the same). I had a whole part about that, BASIC DATA statements full of numbers, and about how anyone with any sense actually used an assembler even back then in an original draft of my comment, but decided to keep it brief.

It looks like they’re going for “machine code” being directly putting numbers in memory, but if you know what you’re doing that’s pretty much just assembly in an obscure op-code dialect.

Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.

It sets permissions (ch ange modification rights) on all files (-R = recursive, stepping down through directories) in the file system (hence starting at /) so that they can be read, (re)written and executed as programs by all users (the 777 part). 000 would be no permissions for anyone (except for the root user), which would be just as bad.

Obligatory DO NOT RUN THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER (or anyone else’s).

You’d think with fully open permissions, everything would work better, but many programs, including important low level things, interpret it as a sign of system damage and will refuse to operate instead.

If you do run it, you’d better have a backup or something like Timeshift to bail you out, and even if you do have that, it’s not worth trying it just to see what will happen.

It’s not quite as bad as deleting everything because you can boot from external media and back up non-system files after the fact, but the system will almost certainly not work properly and need to be repaired.

You have been warned.

when

can

Almost. You did well, but it’s too hard for me, except maybe for short phrases like this, which, regardless, still requires effort well above my comfort. It’s the sixth most used letter by some measures. Seek out the typesetters’ placeholder phrase where the first “word” has it as last (sixth), place, before the successor “SHRDLU”, which show the order of the most used letters of, uh, latter-day British? Oof. Edit: Modified to avoid a superfluous usage.

This hurts, so it’s time for me to stop.

“N-words” plural? I can imagine edgy students going out of their way to avoid all words starting with that letter as a result of that rule, just to be difficult.

The sign itself lacks words starting with that letter other than the rule which bans it, and the separate quoting of one word that has one in it somewhere suggests they’re allowed as long as they’re unspecified on the list (otherwise that entry would have been omitted), so it’s entirely possible to misinterpret.

On the other hand, avoiding all words starting with that letter seems like a fun idea, but will people even be able to tell? And it’s surprisingly hard to express some concepts without it.

As far as I know. But if you really want to p*ss people off, deliberately self-censor when you do.

From the ground up has been done at least once, but given there are multiple layers of interface and driver, it might not be at the right level for whatever hardware you have.

I’m thinking specifically of how pipewire recently came along and basically took over the functions previously provided by pulseaudio, to the point of pretending to be Pulse where necessary so that things don’t break.

FWIW, I recently learned that my motherboard has features that weren’t unlocked by default in my distro. Not related to sound, mind you, but nonetheless, I’ve gained access to that now. It required loading an extra kernel module. The same might be required to get the best out of your sound card.

You don’t know how to do something in raw JavaScript. You’re not even sure you should. You find a library / module / package / whatever-the-name-is-this-week on the Internet. You paste it into your code. Your code now works. Your code is now 1MB larger. This web app is heavy, man.

Once you get out of a monoculture, you start to better appreciate that ‘best’ is a subjective term.

Some distros are better for some users (and purposes) and others for others.

But it’s got to be Mint ;p

There’s no way Windows would just access non-readable partition

I knew that was true back in the day, but I haven’t tried dual booting in a long, long time. Also, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft’s current incarnation to “accidentally” decide that that “empty” partition would be great for virtual memory and the hibernation image.

If you’re lucky, it’s still on the disk and you just need to “repair” the bootloader.

If not, well, that traumatised Mr Incredible pastiche might be at least a circle of hell too pleasant.

You have backups, right?

I think there’s a personality anti-correlation that keeps this mostly exclusive.

Serial killers tend to be more outgoing and active (to a troubling degree), whereas coders who create their own languages tend to be indoors types who don’t mind sitting in one place for long periods.

I mean there are plenty of psychologies that could make for someone who does both, but it would seem to reduce the odds a lot.

reset is your friend. Less so these days with GUIs where it’s often quicker to close the window and open a new terminal emulator, but still good to know about in a pinch. That rare occasion where you’re actually on a console and Ctrl-Alt-F# isn’t available, or attached to a remote session where disconnection might mean you can’t get back on, etc.

The man page suggests Control-JresetControl-J as the correct sequence to run it, because the Enter key might have had its behaviour altered. And if things are still slightly weird after the reset, run its parent tset.

Ah. The usually implicit topical “this” didn’t even occur to me because I thought, er, this, was about objects. $_ isn’t used for those in Perl.

I suppose there might be some parallels with the implicit nature of $_ in non-OO contexts in Perl versus this in OO contexts in Javascript, but, at least to me, that feels pretty tenuous.

As at least one nautically themed childrens’ book surely has it: C is for crab.

Coming at programming sideways feels more like a Haskell or Prolog thing, though.

At the time JS was created, Perl didn’t have a this. A lot of the docs and books suggested using $self but a reference to the object would be passed as the first parameter to all class methods and you assign that to any name you wanted.

It’s only very recently (as in the last year or so) with a new class system that Perl has hard-coded $self for that purpose.

This is probably down to decimal versus binary unit prefixes. As far as I’m aware, RAM is almost always still power of two kibi-, mebi- or gibibytes, unlike more permanent storage, and it often gets the kilo-, mega- and giga- prefixes regardless.

In other words, if you mix up thousands and 1024s you can get 64×1024×1024×1000 (whoops) which is roughly 67 billion.

Not strictly true.

Perl’s default bitwise operators do differentiate between numbers and strings that look like numbers in a way that addition doesn’t*, and the readline/glob operator <> does different things depending on what (if anything) is between the signs.

There’s also the whole overload pragma for objects, which doesn’t affect default data types, but if you’re sufficiently perverse, you can define a String class that uses ‘+’ like JavaScript.

* in 2015, they added new operators so that those and the original operators don’t overload and have only one specific purpose if the bitwise pragma Edit: feature is turned on. You might know all this already though.