palordrolap

Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there’s no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.

As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can’t have been that strong in the first place.

Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that’s even possible to control in the first place.

I’m surprised that got through the vetting process, which I thought existed in most places.

Here in the UK, potentially offensive plates are altered or just plain skipped. There was a sitcom in the '90s that used one such “illegal” plate as an end-of-episode visual punchline, which had, up to that point, only been referred to as a “pornographic number plate”. There’s no way it would have made it onto the road in reality. P one five five OLE as I recall.

To give you some idea of how stringent it is here, back in 2007, one region had one of their region codes temporarily changed to TN from SN so that their plates wouldn’t start with “SN07”, i.e. “snot”. Something similar almost certainly happened in 2017 for the SH region code, but I don’t remember any news stories about that.

If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.

Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?

If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.

Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.

How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.

Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.

FWIW, I’ve a relative who dislikes fish, but who often makes an exception for local fish & chips. Locally the preference is for haddock which is what’s generally served, and what that relative gets.

The same relative is less fond of cod, so I guess the advice there, if any, is if you try cod and don’t like it, try haddock. Or vice versa.

How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.

Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.

Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.

And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.

There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.

Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.

Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.

I tend to use right shift for pretty much everything. The arrow glyph has worn off the key I use it so much.

Important factors:

1. British English keyboards, like the one I have, tend to be ISO, with a larger shift key on the right. Bigger target. Easier to hit.

2. I have at least a couple of passwords that each have at least one shifted character from the left side of the keyboard and it’s much easier to use both hands when I need to type those.

3. It might even go back to the fact that most of my early typing was on a Commodore 64C and the positions of surrounding keys. Hitting shift-lock or run/stop by mistake would have been a nuisance. Caps lock isn’t quite as annoying because it’s not a literal mechanical toggle, but even so, the right shift avoids that particular error.

You think admins will be affected by this? Doubtful.

You’ll be lucky if it lets you block him in the first place, but it probably won’t have the required effect.

My roof and my walls are not the same thing, but if demolish my walls, will my roof hover there magically?

You completely skipped the part about what you’re buying and selling. That’s not suspicious at all.

Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they’ll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can’t be bought?

“So what, people can run with the last good codebase!”

Sure, until there’s a critical bug that Google don’t publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

And don’t say “that’ll never happen”. Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?

IMO, this needs a different name. It’s too similar to “Saidit”, one of sites that sprang up as a refuge for the edgier (or sicker) content that Reddit wanted rid of about 10 years ago, and unlike Voat, it’s still live.

If you’re one of the right-wing trolls and/or edgelords who used to hop between Reddit and 4chan back in the day, it might be the place for you. Otherwise, probably best to steer clear.

Either way, steering clear of similar names might be a good idea.

Ah, the old Ben Shapiro logic. If you don’t want your house that’s at risk of flooding, don’t worry, simply sell it! Someone’s bound to give you a good price for it!

This whole situation reminds me of this joke: Two guys out hunting in the wilds somewhere. One of them falls ill and collapses. The other can’t rouse him.

He grabs his phone or radio and calls for help. “My friend collapsed. I think he’s dead!”

The responder says “Well, first we need to make sure if he’s actually dead.”

“Just a minute…” BANG!

“OK, now what?”

Somewhere around here I have an old (1970’s Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; “did be” do be pretty weird, after all.

The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

I’d like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don’t seem to be able to find it right now.

My parents’ house never had and still doesn’t have Internet. I was the one with the computer desk and it had a Commodore 64C and a 13" portable colour TV on it originally.

It finally became an Internet desk at some point in the mid '00s when I got my own place.

I’m still using it right now… and kind of afraid that if I mention its age, it will spontaneously fall apart.

Let’s just say that it’s older than Google.

Thanks for your concern. I’m getting by.

Did you ever have a crazy friend who hated you for weeks because of something you said or did in one of their dreams? How about if they could have ticketed you for that?

On and off, I’ve found myself watching Uyen Ninh’s shorts on YouTube. Her and German Flatmate / Boyfriend / Fiance have something like that dynamic going on in those videos, maybe in real life too. That’s what, or rather who, sprang to mind when I saw this post, for whatever that’s worth.

The focus has been more about their cultural differences (she’s Vietnamese), and the absurdities therein, presented with love and humour. Or else it’s the more “relatable” content that might apply to anyone, but the dynamic is definitely there.

Mediocre at best, and I lack the mental fortitude to work at much of anything these days, so wherever I’m at, I’m not going to improve much.

Some people relish the feeling of swimming through molasses* for the next hit of progress dopamine, or they don’t get that feeling at all, but that’s what happens to me and it basically short-circuits something in my brain. It’s bad enough that I struggled to write the last part of that sentence, and it’s happening while I’m proofreading this as well.

* or treacle if the unintended concept of small mammal anatomy bothers you.