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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Trumpism is a cult. Plain and simple. This is cult behavior.

    I realize that’s very dismissive, but in this case I think that’s a good thing. You could spend years debunking their every claim, anti-fact, and bad faith argument–and there’s a time and a place for those discussions–but there’s no need to burden your mind with the mountain of their nonsense. You don’t have to read the whole Time Cube page to determine that its author isn’t worth listening to for astrophysical insights.



  • I love getting years of good service from old computers, but I do want to add something: old laptop means old battery, and if they’re not producing the same form factor anymore, then even a replacement battery will probably be old stock that’s been degrading for years. Unfortunately I don’t know what company’s models have the best longevity here in terms of battery form factor.



  • Woah there chief! Lemme tell everyone a little story…

    Back when I was on Reddit, I followed any and all Trump news (and especially Jan 6 investigation news) on an unhealthily regular basis. These kinds of Eeyore comments were extremely common and usually voted up to pepper through the top ⅓ of all the ‘best’ comments. It got so bad that some subreddits explicitly banned them, though it didn’t really end the practice.

    Then Russia invaded Ukraine. All the disparaging comments ceased immediately. The frequency absolutely fell off a cliff, because all those comments were being served up to us by Russian bots. Russia wants nothing more than to further destabilize the US as well as any other democratic institution.

    I’m not saying this comment right here is a Russian bot, but it’s definitely doing a Russian bot’s job by trying to undermine any confidence we might have in the concepts of justice or democracy.


  • I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I’d heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that’ll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

    I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.










  • Okay so, it’s common for people to talk about distant stars as appearing one way because the light takes (mi|bi)illions of years to get to us, and that makes perfect sense to me… But when they go on to say that, for instance, Betelgeuse has already gone supernova but we won’t see it until the light gets to us…

    According to the principle of the relativity of simultaneity, since the speed of light is the speed of causality, wouldn’t it be a bit more accurate (though definitely more confusing to the public) to say that the stars actually are as we observe them, but that the star is far enough away that traveling to it, even instantly, would basically require significant time travel forward? I guess it would just be a different way to talk about “the present” in relativistic terms, which is only difficult because our languages never evolved to handle the concept.

    What you think?