ttj - Tom Jones

  Tried renting car.  Got asked to identify squares with bicyles.  Attempted.  Got asked to identify more squares with bicycles.  Gave up and decided to use something else instead.

I seem to have already written this article: < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/11/copy-and-paste-keeps-getting-worse.html >. Copy and paste failures happen all the time, but I've just had another case.  I was trying to copy a bit of text out of a terminal emulator running a shell and into a web editor.  I selected the text.  Middle clicked in blogger's editor in web page in chromium.  It pasted in a picture that was previously in the clipboard / in the other clipboard.  Since it's just a shell running in a terminal, there was no other way to ask for it to copy.  I tried ctrl-v in the browser editor: same result.  So I tried middle-clicking in emacs's scratch buffer.  That pasted in the right text.  Then selected the text and did ctrl-w, which is an emacs thing.  Now I can ctrl-v in the browser editor, and the right text is pasted.  Conclusion: the browser or blogger editor is probably handling middle-click itself, and pas...

Something like this: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main contrib non-free-firmware deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main contrib non-free-firmware deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free-firmware deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free-firmware

Firefox on Debian is unusable because it allocates memory until the computer grinds to a halt, no matter how much memory the machine has. Chromium is better on memory, but has plenty of its own annoyances, which seem to be getting worse. The search engine is hardcoded to DuckDuckGo.  There is no way to add multiple search engines as search engines.  You can add a site search with shortcut, so that you just have to type "g foo" to google, which isn't too bad.  You do this with Site search -> Add.  The form is really weird. But you can eventually enter Name as google, Shortcut as "g", and URL as "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s". For changing the default, we are out of luck.  The help under "Search engines" says "You can also change your default search engine here".  But if I click on the pen hieroglyph, the URL of duckduckgo is greyed-out and not editable.  The "Search engines" list has one item and can not be added t...

I asked Copilot, a so-called "AI" with a voice interface, when the release of Debian 13 could be expected. Copilot said mid 2027, because Debian is on a two year release cycle.  I asked it what the current released version of Debian is.  It said 12.  When was that released?  2023.  I asked again about Debian 13, and it said it should be expected around June 2025.  I pointed out that it had just said 2027, and it said yes, my mistake.  I then pointed out that since June 2025 is now in the past, and Debian 13 hasn't been released, Debian 13 can not be expected in June 2025.  Again, it admitted its mistake, and said it will probably be later this summer.  I already knew that.  Copilot makes these kinds of basic mistakes all the time. I then asked whether it had sight of the debian-developers mailing list, and whether there were any clues on there about how long to go until release.  It said it could see the list, but there weren't real...

A dark age is a period for which historians have little in the way of written records, and for which they are thus unable to do much history.  People sometimes speculate on whether we are currently in a dark age.  At first glance, we may appear to have written records, and enough of them will probably be durable enough.  But what if they are gobbledegook, due to confusion around pronouns? In the pictured example, I found 7 sentences containing multiple pronouns, including possessive pronouns.  In 3 of them, the author takes schismatic perspectives within the sentence, coming out with such howlers as "You can now set a password for my yallo account".  But they are not talking about their yallo account.  They are talking about my yallo account, and from their perspective, talking to me, they should say "your".  Again, this is an aspect of language that two-year-olds should be able to master.