Source: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/einblick/single/news/wie-viele-ameisen-gibt-es-eigentlich-1/

But how many ants are there? […] “According to our estimates, the global ant population is 20 x 10¹⁵ – that is, 20 quadrillion animals. […]”

Divided by 8 billion yields the 2.5 million per person.

I think, she’s just showing an example of the aesthetic that we would now call “cottagecore”, even though it would not have been called that back then. Lots of trends did not have a name when they were their most popular…

Good question. My best guess is that the buttons have become less important, because:

• they try to auto-detect where a signal comes,
• they have better defaults, so you don’t really need to change settings, and
• even monitor brightness can partially be controlled by the OS.

But yeah, I got a new monitor at work, and instead of buttons, it has a joystick on the backside. Now the monitor’s menu pops up every so often, I’m guessing because something shook the joystick just enough to trigger it.
When I saw that joystick for the first time, I wondered how long it’ll take before it breaks, but it’s broken on day 1, so that’s great. 🫠

Your surface area doesn’t decrease from you having a higher speed. In fact, because humans are quite vertical objects, moving them fast along the horizontal axis means they actually have a somewhat higher chance of crossing paths with something dropping vertically.

This is the same for rain, by the way. But since moving at a higher speed typically means you get to your destination sooner and spend less time outside of a house, it’s still generally a good idea to go fast.

No idea, but I have not yet heard of a computer science department going exclusively for Apple…

Probably varies a lot between countries and universities. In my university, you were better off, if you were on Linux. But I’ve heard horror stories from the US before, where Windows was mandatory…

If you enjoy pinball, this one is decent: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.dozingcatsoftware.bouncy

Not what you’re looking for, but perhaps also interesting, there’s a comic written in CSS: https://comicss.art/

I’m weirdly deeply invested, like I’ve got decent headphones, I’ve composed songs before, I’ve played two instruments, and like someone else posted, I’ve also implemented my own music player program.

But man, I struggle with feeling it as art. I don’t know, if that’s a case of music-maker being snobby about everyone else’s music, while being too critical of their own music. Maybe my expectations are just too high.
Like, I’m trying to create lyric-less music where I feel a meaning. And at times, I’m amazed that I can evoke the sense of snowfall. But at many other times, it just sounds paperthin to me, and I still haven’t managed to really portray a deeper meaning.

Maybe I’m just frustrated, because poems come more naturally to me (and yes, I am dense for not adding lyrics to my songs 🫠).

Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃

Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.

I find that it’s mainly frustrating to those learning German at an advanced level, since using a wrong article immediately exposes you as a non-native speaker. Because yeah, as the others said, it hardly ever happens that native speakers use a wrong article…

I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.

Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons of smokes and mirrors hacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.

Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…

There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃

Yeah, I just thought that’s called “dry shampoo”, but not sure where I got that idea from. Might’ve just been a brainfart. 😅

Huh, I thought, dry shampoo is a bar soap with additives. Sounds like it’s pretty much the polar opposite…

The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:

allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.

There’s a store in the next town, which has only organic foods. Rather expensive to shop there, but I still go there more often than I need to, just because everyone’s friendly and relaxed.

Yeah, if I ever catch a calm hour in the store, I’ll actually look through the aisles and check out products I wouldn’t normally buy. If the store is busy, I grab the usual and flee as quickly as possible.

Still works well as a concept for PeerTube…

Ah, thanks, I hadn’t read that far. It says this:

A 1941 Commerce Department survey found no significant expansion of retail sales due to the change.

With this as source: https://www.nytimes.com/1941/05/21/archives/thanksgiving-goes-back-to-old-date-in-42-president-says-change-did.html