Some people genuinely do not understand the concept of GUI windows and how they work. They do not generate a full mental model of the desktop and the windows on it and only see the whole screen as one bewildering interface. They focus on what they do know in order to get by.

This may be especially true of people who learned their IT with small screens or low resolutions where running an application full screen (or as the only active application!) is required to get anything done.

Your colleague saw you click on part of the interface they were ignoring because they didn’t understand it and magic happened.

Do you consider yourself a virus?

Well, certain people do consider me to have some undesirable traits like ideas about getting our species off the planet, and if I didn’t exist, I’d generate considerably less CO₂.

Uncomfortable though it may be, the latter applies to everyone I’ve ever known, cared about or who has cared about me.

And it is inherent. The singular purpose of certain genes is to make more of the same gene, and they’ve gotten very good at it. Humans and viruses are both emergent phenomena.

But then, I suppose if we don’t leave, we don’t spread the disease elsewhere… so OK. You’re right. We should never ever leave…

And the only way to save the biosphere is to do something we’re completely incapable of. We’re screwed. Neat!

I don’t think that because the rich b-stards think that. I think that because I believe our species - regardless of race - has outgrown its environment. If I got this idea from somewhere else, it wasn’t from Musk or Bezos or others like them. It might even have come from watching Star Trek or reading sci-fi.

We’re like a virus or a cancer that will ultimately end up killing the host. Earth’s biosphere in this instance.

The correct course of action is to destroy the infection or cut it out.

And if you want what’s being cut out to survive afterwards, yes, you have a lot of work ahead of you before you do so to ensure its continued existence once it’s somewhere else.

We need to consider what it would take to get every single one of us off this planet and living somewhere else.

I’m actually of the opinion that humanity needs to get off this rock as soon as possible. The uncomfortable truth is that fewer humans would in fact help the environment, and none would be even better.

The problem is with how to implement that without it turning into murder.

Hence, we leave.

Good call. They unprinced Andrew, they can unlord Mandy.

Sure you can, but why fabricate evidence against someone when you can trick them into making real evidence?

The hard job of fabrication begins if and only if that fails.

I wouldn’t turn up to most job interviews with rainbow hair, oversize sunglasses and clown shoes. And if I dressed sensibly, I probably wouldn’t bring my teddy bear as a mascot if I expected to be taken seriously.

Emojis are in that sort of territory.

Know your audience. And if you don’t, or are trying to present to as wide an audience as possible, default to the safety of plain prose.

but three hundred twenty-seven otherwise

Depends on the dialect. That “and” is a requirement in British English.

Nah. He has other tricks. Sending in armed goons and cheating at golf are a couple of them.

I suppose you could go to the root of all these for the real lone trick: being a self-serving piece of [redacted]

Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

I was going to suggest gluing a thin, flat strip of metal around the edges, but yeah, anything stiff would serve the same purpose.

Seems to me that would make the true ethical choice to be to buy it from the second-hand shop and then burn it, robbing anyone else any chance of advertising that fashion.

Not a doctor, but that sounds like an OCD-type thing to me. I suspect most people do not feel the need to touch a control if it is already set as they want. Also, this might be in violation of rule 3 as a result.

Consider consulting with a doctor or psychologist or (cheaper) trying to get yourself out of this habit before it diversifies into a family of them (assuming it hasn’t already).

And Israel only need bring up that Australia did something similar with their own brown people a while back, so why can’t they do it right now?

“That was then, this is now.” is not the greatest of arguments.

Which is why I said we should leave that can at the back of the cupboard.

Tricky prospect. If they admit Australia on that criterion, they’d have no good reason to not admit Israel if they asked to join, and that’s a can of worms I don’t think Europe would want to open. Best leave that can at the back of the cupboard.

Now, if we could find some other criterion, I don’t see why not. Sticking it to Britain by accepting all of the Commonwealth except Britain could work as an argument, and might even be popular on the continent.

It would have to be couched in cleverer language, of course, for the sake of plausible deniability.

Be aware that a lot of distros will be switching from X11 to Wayland at some point in the not-too-distant future and these ancient tools will not work there.

People have tried to write equivalents (ydotool is one I’m aware of), but Wayland has intentionally been written to make doing such things difficult, for “security” reasons.

I will be grumpy until I can make my scripts work again, but that’s for future me to deal with.

There’s a Unix timestamp that ends with at least one of 42069 or 69420 within any 24 hour period. Often both.

They allow the user to script changes to, and pull information from, windows in the window manager. Like read, if not also set, a window’s title, change a window’s dimensions, move it around, send it to a different desktop, send keypresses, bring a window to the foreground, etc. etc.

Basically, anything the user can do with the mouse, keyboard or window manager via the GUI, and a little more besides, can be automated.

The two commands work slightly differently to each other and one can often do something the other can’t.

As an example, I have a script that resizes the active window to a 4:3 ratio at full vertical height on my 16:9 monitor. I’ve then bound that script to a keypress in the window manager. It’s a lot like having something halfway between window mode and maximised mode.

Couldn’t I do that with the mouse? Sure. But with the script I don’t have to gauge by eye and spend multiple mouse clicks and movements trying to get it just right.

Nah. It’s not, or wasn’t, Redshift. Nor is it a vision issue. I can have the emoji picker on screen at the same time as my comment and they’re definitely very different colours.

I think the picker uses images, but the on-screen text renderer in Firefox is using the Noto Color Emoji font as a substitution (because the text font doesn’t have emojis) and whatever Firefox has set as the default colours for the glyphs in it.

My picker clearly doesn’t know how to generate the right modifier sequences to change those, and I don’t think it’s worth mucking around with Unicode zero-width joiners and colour modifiers to try to figure it out.

You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?

This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.

And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.

They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.

Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.

I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.