Have been using Linux since Slackware in the early 90s, both for work and at home - been through a lot of distros since then.

Currently use Debian on my servers and VMs, and CachyOS (with KDE Plasma) on my main desktop. I like the bleeding edge of Arch for my desktop, and find CachyOS to be a very sensible plug and play way to get into Arch (I tried to run Arch before, and also EndeavourOS, although that was a while back and not the smoothest experience for me - things might be more mature now, but CachyOS was the one that finally reached the point for me that allowed a full switch from Windows on the desktop to Linux)

Most of my servers run virtualized on Proxmox, which itself is Debian based though. I also run pfSense as my firewall/router which is FreeBSD based.

Think of how shitty and scam filled the early internet was. Did we abandon it because of how shitty it was at first, or did we develop it and tweak it to it’s full potential?

I have been on the internet since 1992, and the internet today is by far the shittiest and most scam infested it has ever been in my time (and I doubt it was worse in the 80s)

Few things make me more depressed than thinking about the evolution of the internet, from where it started to where it is today.

I don’t doubt AI will follow a similar path, except somehow it is already starting in a much worse place than the internet ever did, and the downside potential is far greater and terrifying.

Other countries took photos of the Apollo landing sites as well, including China.

The best ones so far were taken by the Indian Chandrayaan orbiters.

Really shows how deep this conspiracy goes ! :)

Perpetual bonds are an actual thing

Funny enough, the origin of that character is 姦 - which goes all the way back to the earliest forms of Chinese writing (the bronze inscriptions) and was a pictogram of 3 women together (see here), which represented “evil, treacherous, scheming, traitor, adulterer” and similar. 奸 was a later variant form with same meaning (the 干 was added as a phonetic component, and 3 女 were reduced to just 1), which was later adopted as the simplified form of traditional 姦.

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You can keep a short position for a long time, as long as you can maintain margin, which gets bigger if the stock price continues increasing, and pay margin interest - there is no set date when the short has to he closed, it’s indefinite. Sometimes the lender who loaned you the stock can ask for it back, and if you can’t locate any more shares to borrow to replace the returned shares, you might be forced to buy the shares back and close the short, but this is not common, at least during normal market conditions.

This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.

Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.

As an example the character for book (書) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and 者 on the bottom (the meaning of 者 is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but 者 in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)

When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn’t really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.

Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana

Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it’s polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)

So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.

Depends on the species

It’s the Infinite Improbability Drive though, not Probability, that makes no sense :)

+1 for MoCA

I switched from powerline to MoCA about 10 years ago, and it was a huge step up. Even though it’s half duplex, since MoCA version 2.5, there is enough total bandwidth available to sustain 1 Gbps in 2 directions simultaneously, so it is functionally almost equivalent to full duplex 1 gig Ethernet (except for few ms of extra latency)

Fun fact, California doesn’t mandate safety or roadworthiness inspections for personal vehicles at all - only emissions.

This was a bit of a surprise to me when I moved here, given CAs reputation.

To differentiate it from O - making 0 narrow is a common way to do that

Also, it’s the president of Slovakia, Peter Pellegrini…

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The #1 best show is Twin Peaks: The Return of course :)

For most citrus the pith has no flavor at all, definitely not bitter. Most people object to the texture and blandness/lack of flavor, which I can understand. I have a bunch of citrus trees in my yard, and learned to not mind the pith, mainly due to laziness (I eat a lot of oranges) - and it’s a good source of fiber.

Western diet is actually notoriously low on fiber and high in sugar, and the citrus pith is also high in vitamin C.

So for many people eating the pith would actually be a healthier choice - in the context of their low fiber/high sugar diet.

I first got on the Internet just as the shift from :-) to :) was happening, only geezers still used :-) and :) was the hip new thing…

photography might be an area where digital hasn’t caught up, since film’s resolution is down to the molecular level

Film resolution is limited by the size of the silver halide crystals that make up the light sensitive layer of the film. Crystals can come in different sizes, but their sensitivity to light depends on their size - generally you need pretty large crystals for usable photographic film, somewhere between 0.1 and 10 microns (depending on the film ISO rating) - about 3-5 orders of magnitude larger than what you would consider molecular scale.

When the film is developed the crystals are visible as film grain limiting the resolution in some ways similar to pixel size of a digital camera (although there are differences, since the crystal size is not completely uniform but rather has a specific distribution, creating a more random effect than the regular pixel grid of digital cameras)

The pixel sizes on modern high resolution digital camera sensors are actually similar, down to 0.5 micron. It’s hard to make an exact comparison, but I have seen estimates that you need a full frame digital sensor of somewhere between 10 to 50 megapixels to equal the resolution of 35mm ISO 100 film.

And modern sensors are much more light sensitive than film, which allows you to shoot more optimally and give you more flexibility (less exposure time, potentially higher f-stop with better lens resolution, lower ISO, less light, etc.) and therefore achieve potentially better results in more conditions. Add to that the hassle and costs of working with film, and most professional photo work is now done in digital as well. Film is generally only used for stylistic purposes, by purists who are not satisfied with digital simulation.