xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.

I’d put substitute first, but yours sounds better :)

(I’m a big Immich fan, and I’m taking and sharing photos more than ever before, in part because Immich is awesome, self hosted, and open source [the other part is that I have kids now so I’m taking way more photos that grandparents want to see].)

Not sure I agree.

First, stocks tend to be highly correlated with “the market” (see financial “β”/“beta coefficient”). For example, look at, say, The Home Depot or Ford Motors. From January 2000 to January 2003 (spanning the dot com bubble) they each lost about a third of their value, yet these are not “dot com”-centric companies.

Second, the promise of AI is that it will help every company that has desk jobs. So every company has this expectation now priced into their stock, and if the bottom falls out, well…

Not an analyst/I don’t pick stocks, but just my 2¢.

I’m in California, but we still (currently) have the same federal bullshit requirements. Doctor friend said I should lie.

Made an appointment, and the pharmacist asked if I was immunocompromised, or XYZ, and I just told them that I qualify—no follow up questions, just a jab in the arm.

To be fair, I do have anxiety that my government is trying to kill me, but that’s just crazy…

I think parent is referring to Merkle trees.

…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.

Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)

I have some bad new for you about Linux…

Your numbers seem reasonable — more intuitive for me to work in terms of pressure. Atmosphere is (roughly) 1e3 Torr, good UHV can be around 1e-10, so that’s 13 orders of magnitude, which is (roughly) the same difference that you calculated.

Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.

From TFA:

“I have failed you completely and catastrophically,” Gemini CLI output stated. “My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.”

ASCII wasn’t around then, so it would perhaps be stored in 5-bit ITA2, or 6/7-bit FIELDATA. So likely a 5/8 to 7/8 space savings (unless the numbers are for compressed War and Peace).

No, I’ve been a strict vegetarian for a long time, mostly vegan now but not strict about it. I did eat fish a few years ago because it was an invasive species (and also, delicious).

But also, I have no problem getting the food/nutrients I need from a plant based diet, which isn’t always easy for other folks.

Thanks for the thoughtful response! 1) makes a lot of sense, and 2) makes a lot of “emotional sense” to me (as opposed to “intellectual sense,” I guess).

What’s the conventional wisdom as to why this is so bad, but eating meat basically gets a pass? Like, meat offers sustenance, yes, but it’s by no means required. So basically, humans eat meat because it tastes really good — it’s great “culinary entertainment.”

This is a different kind of entertainment, but it’s deeply offensive to many folks. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, just curious why this is seen as such a sin.

Is it that these animals weren’t “supposed” to be killed? Would a movie about a beef cow who ends up getting slaughtered, both onscreen and IRL, be seen as better? Worse?

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

So the irony is

I see what you did there…