I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .

That’s kind of an insult to the parrot, isn’t it?

Between “One too many nulls” and “The tests are larger . . .” in the beginning, then moving up one notch for each day you’ve been wrestling with it.

Eh, I’m sure we can overrun it just by gluing sufficient instances of Factory to the end of the classname.

And Perl.

Pretty sure the US allows individual states to set the ages. In Canada, it’s provinces that set it. Lowest age I’ve ever heard of was 12 (for limited permits to move farm machinery along back roads in Saskatchewan, although that was decades ago and it might not still be a thing). I had a full and unrestricted license at 16, but the rules have changed since then.

I will have to remember not to use that command anymore. 'Scuse me while I clean up the hairball . . .

The author of the article can’t even be bothered to keep his server up-to-date (my first attempt at viewing the article bounced me with a warning that suggests he only has obsolete crypto protocols available for SSL—why bother with SSL at all, then?). He’s quite correct that this initiative is going to come to nothing.

There are currently only four web rendering engines that could be considered remotely usable as daily drivers: WebKit, its fork Blink, and Gecko, with its fork Goanna. WebKit and Blink both have major corporate backing (Apple and Google respectively). Gecko has the Mozilla Foundation paying the major bills. Even Pale Moon’s Goanna has multiple people working on it (and since it’s my daily driver, I know it has persistent issues with a few sites that have to be papered over with extensions). And the rendering engine is not the only thing you need for a browser, just the largest single part. A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

Half-pull the lever so that the points get stuck midway between the two tracks. That should derail the trolley. Someone could conceivably still get hurt, but it improves everyone’s chances.

(What? You mean it isn’t a literal trolley that has to obey the laws of physics? Damn.)

It isn’t weird, just sloppy: QT6 seems to be handling this specific tag incorrectly when it presents with HTML void element syntax as defined in section 8.1.2.1 of the HTML 5 standard, which specifies that the slash is allowed but optional. It’s hard to say whether this actually constitutes a QT bug without checking the documentation to see whether it really wants HTML or XHTML, since XHTML does require the slash.

On the one hand, security is good in the general case, and github has a right to set whatever (legal) conditions they want for the use of their services.

On the gripping hand, for the kind of stuff I’ve put on github in the past? Not worth even a tiny bit of additional friction, especially when I hate git to begin with. I’ve been procrastinating for a while now about moving or deleting existing repositories. Should get on it, I guess.

(There are also certain details of how they’ve executed their security upgrade, which locked some maintainers out of their projects at one point, that I don’t like, and which has reduced my already low trust in them.)

Hey, now. It is possible to write readable Perl code—it’s just less interesting that way. 😜

If you go with one of the more new-user-friendly distros that includes a graphical frontend with administration tools, you shouldn’t have to spend much time with the command line. If you ever have to resort to it to fix a slippery problem (the kind that under Windows would have everyone telling you to reinstall), you’ll almost certainly be copy-and-pasting commands from somewhere else. You certainly don’t have to worry about memorizing 150 different commands—I’m not sure I know that many, and I’ve been using a command-line-oriented Linux distro as my primary OS for almost twenty years!

And deletion on Usenet was effectively impossible. So? “Be conservative in what you send” (RFC 1855) remains good advice nearly thirty years later.

Hit their message board and wiki. Love’s community is pretty patient with beginners. You can also look into any of the tutorials listed on awesome-love2D.

As for level-making, love has a library for loading maps made in Tiled. Or you can go old-school and stuff a grid of ASCII characters in a file then map them to graphical tiles.

Games can be written in literally anything—if that’s your primary interest, you might want to look into Lua and Love2D, or Python and pygame (as has already been suggested). Both Lua and Python are good beginner’s languages—Lua because it’s small but versatile, Python because it’s popular for that purpose and has good tutorials.

C# . . . isn’t a bad language, but it’s a bit bloated, so I wouldn’t choose it for a beginner—save it for when you’re proficient and looking for a second or third language. Other languages I would not start with would include Javascript and PHP (because both have hidden inconsistencies that can trip you up), Perl (I love it, but it looks like line noise half the time), and C and C++ (manual memory management, which makes a lot more work for you with no real benefits unless you’re writing an OS kernel or something).

What you need to do is learn to think like a programmer, regardless of language. Anyone who’s been programming for ten years or so will have gone through several languages as their needs change.

Lynx doesn’t support Javascript. Links ( http://links.twibright.com/ ) is marginally more usable, but still has no Javascript, and I wouldn’t want it as a daily driver either. Text-mode browsers just can’t handle Web 2.0 (although, to be honest, I’m not that fond of Web 2.0).

The other thing I would advise is reading RFC 1855: Netiquette, section 3.0 (One-to-many communication) and 3.1.3 (NetNews guidelines), as anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me who gets hung up on things like quoting protocol.

Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.

As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.

Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.

90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.

If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).