Personally, I’d look very closely at any records this returns and verify that they are normal. A previous developer could have left some sort of backdoor or other nasty surprise in the code/database such could only be tripped with a very specific condition.

Alternatively, consider the context around this code. What is done with those records? Maybe there is a very specific bug elsewhere in the code or in a front end tied to this database. Sure, the right solution was to fix that other bug. But, that may not have been an option. So, this strange bit of code “solved” the problem and was then promptly forgotten.

Also never been a fan of Biden (but voted for him, and will again, if I have to). You’re falling into a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Yes, anyone chosen to replace Biden would be a gamble. But, Biden is a losing horse. The right time to replace him was last year. But, just because we missed that opportunity doesn’t mean we should throw good time after bad. He should be replaced before things get so late it literally cannot be done.

This wasn’t some otherwise strong candidate, who just had a bad day. Biden is already struggling in polling. While the economy hasn’t been fantastic, it’s good enough that he should be crushing Trump. Even in 2016, Clinton was polling ahead of Trump and still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Biden isn’t winning. He’s maybe tied and maybe losing in current polling. Trump had already proven that he can be convicted in court and not lose support. There’s just not much left to hurt Trump. And Biden doesn’t seem to have anything left to gain support. Things are not going to get better for Biden.

Biden is losing this race. It’s time to follow the rats off the ship, before we’re trying to escape a ship on the bottom of the ocean.

My apologies, I was not familiar with the difference. I’m going to have to test this when I am back at my system. Looking at the docs, it does seem to be experimental in Linux. But it seems odd that it would turn off automagically.

That’s interesting. I’ve not had that sort of issue. On my phone (Android), my son’s laptop (Windows) and my desktop (Arch Linux) the NextCloud clients all sync perfectly and run at start up. Granted, knowing that the Linux landscape is fractured, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if the client had issues on some flavors of Linux.

Don’t know why you’d put it in a rock though.

It’s a good way to get attention. It’s working right now. It may have also been useful for increasing his bank account with the money of morons.

If you are willing to self-host, I’ve found Nextcloud integrates well in Linux. I had been using it before I made the switch and it worked out just fine afterwards. I originally set it up to have a cloud-sync option for my phone, which didn’t mean passing everything through Google first. But, it also proved to be a handy way to sync files on my desktop as well.
It just shows up as another folder on my system and Libre Office is happy to work on files from there (with some permissions fiddling due to flatpak).

Every new “feature” I hear about in Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11, the happier I am that I switched to Linux. It’s been mostly smooth and games have just worked. Though I know that much of that is because of Proton.

Ya. When I read that the Trump campaign agreed to that, I was absolutely shocked. Either Trump is going to run away or he’s counting on screaming loud enough to be picked up by Biden’s mic. Or, maybe he’s just so high on his own shit that he really believes he won’t come off as a poo flinging orangutan.

Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.

It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.

This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.

They really buried the lede on this one. Sure, Embrace paid back a bunch of money using proceeds from the sale of Take-Two. That’s pretty normal business. But:

The company is also moving €900 million of its debt into tabletop publisher Asmodee as part of its plans to split into three separate entities.

It sounds like they are about to jettison the rest of their debt using Asmodee. Embracer will walk away with whatever money they have made and Asmodee will end up being crushed under most of the debt Embrace used to make that money. Vulture capitalism at it’s finest.

I actually didn’t know that about the game, I just linked to the articled to provide details. Given the time the game was written, I suspect it was to make the music a bit more complicated. Game “Music” at the time could leave something to be desired. I played a lot of games with just a PC Speaker, which means that all of the sounds were mostly just different beeps. However, we also didn’t know any better at the time and just enjoyed it for what it was.

I’ll throw out one from my youth that I think would be really good to see updated:
Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. It was a very early space RPG which was way ahead of it’s time. Something like the recent Heat Signature kinda reminds me of it, though it lacks the scope and depth of combat.

While Chism may be a worthless leech, he isn’t completely wrong. Valve’s ownership of Steam does put it in a privileged position, which could be abused in a lot of anti-competitive ways. The fact that it isn’t doing that is really only because GabeN isn’t the same type of leech which Chism is. He’s what a lot of people seem to want, a benevolent dictator. That said, when he finally kicks the bucket, or gets tired and sells the company, the future direction of Steam would be an open question. There may be a very good argument for Valve to be put under the microscope of the FTC for possible anti-trust breakup.

Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.

It’s down to the expected use case.
If you have some reason to want portability, like you travel for work or expect to want to game at a place other than you home, then a laptop is likely the right choice.
If you only expect to game at home and don’t have a need to constantly move your system around, a desktop is usually a better “bang for the buck”.

Personally, I don’t travel and don’t have a need to move my gaming rig around. I also like having the ability to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. So, I have a desktop. This particular PC of Theseus has been going for a decade and a half now and shows no sign of stopping.

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology…

Ya, that reputation is taking a big hit right now.

I just kinda “fell” into IT. In terms of college, I hold an Associates Degree in Math/Science from a community college; so, slightly more than nothing, but only just. I was very lucky in that my father spent an insane amount of money in the early 80’s to buy a computer and then turned me loose on it. I was doing simple programming in GW-Basic by the time I was a teenager and got pretty good at making boot disks to play games. I just became that kid who “knew computers”. After leaving college, a friend of mine convinced me to put a resume in at the company he worked for. They needed a computer tech and I fit the bill. From there it was a long sequence of job hops every 3-5 years until I ended up as a sysadmin dealing with mostly Windows systems, Active Directory, Exchange and SQL. Plus, anything else which just needed someone to “figure it out”. That eventually landed me at a gig working as a sysadmin at a US FedGov site (which is why I got my CISSP). There I often worked closely with the cybersecurity team, as they would need stuff done on the domain, and I would get it done. When they had an opening on their team, they did everything short of drag me into the office to apply for that spot. I worked in cybersecurity for that site until a bit after the COVID pandemic when I got a message on LinkedIn about a “FULLY REMOTE” (yes, the message put that all in caps) position. I was curious and applied. I now work from home, reading other peoples’ email and trying to keep the network secure for a Fortune 500 company.

The best advice I can offer is: keep learning and never be afraid to just try.
A lot of my career is based around “oh shit, it’s broke. Here sylver_dragon, you figure it out.” I loved logic puzzles as a kid and now I basically do them for a living. I would also recommend nurturing professional relationships and don’t burn bridges you don’t need to. That friend, who got me my first IT job was also pivotal, about a decade later, in getting me to apply to a different company he worked for at the time. When I put my resume in, it passed through the hands of several different people, people whom I had worked with at that first job. Between my performance and them knowing what type of person I was, everyone one of them said, “yup, hire this guy”. Having good working relationships now can pay a lot of dividends in the future.

Alcohol, a common cause of and response to children.

This appears to be the bill.
The House vote had 3 Nays (surprise, surprise, all Republicans)

• Foxx
• Massie
• McClintock

The Senate passed it via Unanimous Consent. So, no roll call vote.

Congratulations, you have now arrived at the Trough of Disillusionment:

It remains to be seen if we can ever climb the Slope of Enlightenment and arrive at reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs. I personally believe it’s possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle “AI” in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy. LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation. When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn’t as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.