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[scriver]

Yeah sorry meth

I'm gonna go out on a limb here because we're both non-native speakers and I'm guessing you got caught British English in school as well... So yeah my English is basically British school English as taught by teachers of differing ability to actually talk like an Englishman rather than a Swede (including one Polish woman who had studied English in France before we moved to Sweden and spoke with a mix of glut lower class English with French drift), then influenced by a massive amount of American English media so I'm probably more American now than British, and all of this of course layered over me breaking into my own broad Swedish accent at any or all times.

And I'm guessing your experience may be similar?

[methylatedspirit]

Because I brought it up in passing a page ago, I wanna ask: What dialect does my English most closely resemble?

It doesn’t. Dialects don’t translate well via text, ken?

Shot myself in the foot with that one, huh?

I'm paraphrasing Dave Gorman here; it's like those dumb Yahoo Answers questions like "How many seconds in a minute?" or "Can I safely look at a picture of the sun?". It's a question where if a kid asked it in a classroom, the teacher would ask how'd they gotten to such a ludicrous question, because the question hasn't been fully formed. Of course, this isn't a classroom, this is a secluded corner of the Internet, so I guess y'all can start riffing on it now.

Yeah sorry meth

I'm gonna go out on a limb here because we're both non-native speakers and I'm guessing you got caught British English in school as well... So yeah my English is basically British school English as taught by teachers of differing ability to actually talk like an Englishman rather than a Swede (including one Polish woman who had studied English in France before we moved to Sweden and spoke with a mix of glut lower class English with French drift), then influenced by a massive amount of American English media so I'm probably more American now than British, and all of this of course layered over me breaking into my own broad Swedish accent at any or all times.

And I'm guessing your experience may be similar?

I mean, I consume almost entirely English media, I understand almost all of it, I think in English, I'd consider myself to be a native English speaker. It just so happened that I live somewhere where English is supposed to be a second language. I have no clue how I got here. My parents are both locals, my grandparents too. Like, I guess I was just so enthusiastic about computers (and computing is an English-dominated field as far as language goes) that I skipped over learning the language that was supposed to be my native one.

But of course, living somewhere where people don't produce much, if any, English-language media, I ended up absorbing a lot of the culture of places that do speak English through the media I consume and the people I talk to. I think the bias is quite strongly on American and British media, though I'm not actually sure which one I'm locking on to. I certainly type in American English, using most of its conventions, but then I use "nor", which is mainly a British thing. My goal is "compatibility first, standards compliance third". I wouldn't be surprised if I sound (insofar as accent/dialect can be inferred over a text-only channel) like no place in particular.

The people who have heard my voice (i.e. none of you, and I intend to keep it that way for now) say I sound very American. No strong localized accent, but definitely 'general American'. I avoid evaluating my own accent (as I do with most everything else external presentation-wise about myself), so I suppose that's true. I can't tell.

[hector13]

It’s not a stuoid question to ask, it’s just not one that can be answered on the interwebs. You could speak in a particular dialect (I’m Scottish, so Scots is my jam, though rarely get to indulge in it given my locale) it just won’t translate to text, unless you go the Irvine Welsh route and just spell everything phonetically the way you’d say it.

[methylatedspirit]

It’s not a stuoid question to ask, it’s just not one that can be answered on the interwebs.

The stupid version would be if I asked this on Yahoo Answers, come to think of it.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but for the one person who doesn't know, Yahoo Answers is gone. It's all gone. It's a shame I can't ask that question as a joke now, a little troll if you will. Quora, maybe, but 70% of the time, it's a bunch of galaxy-brained people who come up with "intellectual" answers to questions that don't exactly merit that treatment. Stupid is funny, pretentious less so.

[EuchreJack]

Yeah sorry meth

I'm gonna go out on a limb here because we're both non-native speakers and I'm guessing you got caught British English in school as well... So yeah my English is basically British school English as taught by teachers of differing ability to actually talk like an Englishman rather than a Swede (including one Polish woman who had studied English in France before we moved to Sweden and spoke with a mix of glut lower class English with French drift), then influenced by a massive amount of American English media so I'm probably more American now than British, and all of this of course layered over me breaking into my own broad Swedish accent at any or all times.

And I'm guessing your experience may be similar?

I mean, I consume almost entirely English media, I understand almost all of it, I think in English, I'd consider myself to be a native English speaker. It just so happened that I live somewhere where English is supposed to be a second language. I have no clue how I got here. My parents are both locals, my grandparents too. Like, I guess I was just so enthusiastic about computers (and computing is an English-dominated field as far as language goes) that I skipped over learning the language that was supposed to be my native one.

But of course, living somewhere where people don't produce much, if any, English-language media, I ended up absorbing a lot of the culture of places that do speak English through the media I consume and the people I talk to. I think the bias is quite strongly on American and British media, though I'm not actually sure which one I'm locking on to. I certainly type in American English, using most of its conventions, but then I use "nor", which is mainly a British thing. My goal is "compatibility first, standards compliance third". I wouldn't be surprised if I sound (insofar as accent/dialect can be inferred over a text-only channel) like no place in particular.

The people who have heard my voice (i.e. none of you, and I intend to keep it that way for now) say I sound very American. No strong localized accent, but definitely 'general American'. I avoid evaluating my own accent (as I do with most everything else external presentation-wise about myself), so I suppose that's true. I can't tell.

Well, the people you're talking to have probably learned British English, so you're going to sound more American to them.  Americans would probably rate you as sounding a bit British, since it sounds like you've learned it in a semi-British way as opposed to wholly American way.  Good news? You'll probably sound like you've got a cool foreign accent anywhere!

[Frumple]

Happy thread tends to be on the first page of GD, yeah.

[methylatedspirit]

Happy thread's the one where it begins with a 4-character code encased in square brackets, then something odd, then it ends in "(Happy thread)" or some variation. The title gets changed very infrequently, but it does change, and it's an event each time it does.

[EuchreJack]

In case this..issues..drunkie makes EJ happy.

Is there thread about pets or for things that made you happy today?

Correct format link for Frumple's message

Point is that it contains both.  Personally, hearing about Vector's fish makes me happy.  Hearing about my fish makes me sad.

[methylatedspirit]

How would you give a computer dementia? I don't mean drowning a little Raspberry Pi (Zero) in saltwater and reading off the output from a remote debugger as it shits its brains out, but a virtual machine/programming language screwed up just subtly enough that it has the computer equivalent of dementia. I'm aware that it affects memory most, so that could be a matter of dynamically corrupting memory (including registers and cache), but surely there's other symptoms that can be emulated.

[Frumple]

I mean, here's a list of symptoms:

Symptoms include forgetfulness, limited social skills, and thinking abilities so impaired that it interferes with daily functioning.

Cognitive: mental decline, confusion in the evening hours, disorientation, inability to speak or understand language, making things up, mental confusion, or inability to recognize common things
Behavioral: irritability, personality changes, restlessness, lack of restraint, or wandering and getting lost
Mood: anxiety, loneliness, mood swings, or nervousness
Psychological: depression, hallucination, or paranoia
Muscular: inability to combine muscle movements or unsteady walking
Also common: memory loss, falling, jumbled speech, or sleep disorder

Can include hoarding/kleptomania/persistently relocating things with no rhyme or reason to behavioral; we currently have the toilet paper locked up in my room instead of stocking the bathrooms, because if they're in there my grandfather will move them to other rooms or just straight out the house, just as one example among many.

Most of those have some capability of being replicated with a computer. Among immediate system problems, you'd also need to cause it to disrupt any network it's connected to.

Note that there is absofuckinglutely nothing subtle about dementia once it's past the initial stages, though. Trying to imitate dementia symptoms that have notably developed would not be hard to notice.

e: But yeah, you'd have stuff like, say, occasionally opening a random text file when a program calls for a .dll, sporadically losing program associations (sometimes temporarily, sometimes not), stealing things from anything it's networked with, shutting off or starting up randomly, flagging random files as a virus threat, the list just keeps going and going and going. It's a fucking miserable condition that increasingly effects most things a person does until it fucks the brain so hard it can't figure out how to swallow anymore and the sufferer starves to death, if nothing else kills them first.

[methylatedspirit]

So randomly corrupt all memory and IO at random, occasionally return zeroes for memory reads (bonus points if you can figure out sequential reads and zero the whole chunk off), corrupt instructions being executed, introduce long chunks of NOPs into instructions (thus screwing up timing-sensitive IO), turn off memory protection (run entirely in Real Mode for x86), use an OS whose kernel doesn't check for errors (else the kernel would crash the system to protect data), and that's all I can think of.

There's gonna be the subtle art of not putting the virtual machine into an infinite loop or unrecoverable state too often while this hypothetical scenario unfolds, which isn't exactly always possible. There's the classic "restart" or "restore to initial state". I'm sure there's fancier things that could be done.

[wierd]

OK, I will take a stab at this:


Take a computer that runs a neural net simulation.  Put in some KNOWN bad RAM modules in a specific ram slot. If you dont have a bad ram module, put one under a strong Xray source for a few hours, and then use that.

The neural net simulation should have an error correction routine that bodges the data recovered from memory reads from this area, and amends it so that it passes consistency check, but does not actually correct the data.  It uses the bad RAM to store neuron synapse information for the neural net, and uses the known good ram (by using exclusive access based on memory base addresses) to do the error correction, and to host the simulation kernel. Early learning of the NN should be stored in good memory, and should be used to "Make sense" of the data stored in the bad memory.


Run the simulation.

Enjoy.

[methylatedspirit]

The neural net simulation should have an error correction routine that bodges the data recovered from memory reads from this area, and amends it so that it passes consistency check, but does not actually correct the data.

I dunno why, but this instantly reminded me of that time someone used AFL (american fuzzy lop, not to be confused with the rabbit breed) to feed random input into a JPEG parser, and it eventually learned to generate valid JPEGs through guided brute-force. I'm not saying "somehow fuzz the OS to get corrupt data to be accepted as valid", but I'd figured I point it out if it means anything. Use AFL++, if you're doing that.

[Kagus]

Do... Do some people refer to Canada geese as "Canadian ducks"? Someone was showing off some pictures of a walk they'd done and some of the wildlife seen on said walk, I commented on the geese, and they corrected me—saying that they're ducks. Specifically, Canadian ducks.


...and I feel like I'm losing my mind a little bit. Am I missing something?

[heydude6]

Canadian ducks are actually called Mallard ducks, but they aren't exclusive to Canada. Your friend is a fool. Our geese are very iconic and we call them as such. The closet thing we have to a Canadian duck is the Loon.

Spoiler: Mallard (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Loon (Warning! Large) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Canadian Goose (click to show/hide)