Not the “trickle down” that we were promised, but at least this trickle down is real?

I mean, vigorous physical exercise is one of the most mentally relaxing activities, in a way (at least for me). Go for a 100km bike ride in hilly terrain, push yourself on the climbs, and just kind of let your mind wander. It’s not edible-and-David-Attenborough relaxing, but it is relaxing in its own way.

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

When they talk about being the party of Lincoln this isn’t what I had in mind…

Scully and Mulder would not put up with this shit.

Sounds like the opposite reasoning may have some truth:

“Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.”

Nah just give them the .tex source and let them deal with it.

I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.

You discounted space dust.

No I didn’t — it would thermalize and radiate.

This is not my paradox, and it’s not really a paradox at all, as the big bang model explains it nicely. There are many nice articles on the topic of you’d like to read more about it.

Yes. But why is there an absence of light?

If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)

So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.

This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox

Olbers’s paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux’s paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.

The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.

Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It’s about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly — it’s just euphemisms and insinuation. And it’s hilarious IMHO.

I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn’t let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.

(Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I’m just trying to answer the question…)

To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.

But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.

I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.

We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.

It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).

I just wish we’d have neither inflation nor deflation.

Some tech has followed this pattern. For example: entry level Mac laptop in ~2000 was the iBook, priced at $1599 ($3k+ in today’s dollars). The current entry level Mac laptop (M4 Air) starts at $999 — cheaper in absolute dollars, and way cheaper in relative dollars.

(Macs are just an example since Apple doesn’t have a very extensive product list, so there’s only one “entry level” laptop to choose from. And yes it’s fair to ask if the relative specs have just gotten worse, but I think this is also the opposite — the iBook was iirc criticized as being underpowered, whereas the M4 Air is afaik well regarded.)

I am the Walrus?

Interesting, TIL — thanks!

Books has become e-books.

To some extent — but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.

Cashless requires power all the way from PoS to wherever the servers live.

Edit: see below