merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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merc,

I would bet that the people of the time saw themselves as very civilized for not simply wiping the native population out.

Like, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad just 250 years before the European ships started arriving in the Americas: “Most of the residents were massacred during and after the siege, with civilian casualty figures ranging in the hundreds of thousands.” The end of the Mongol period was when Timur / Timurlane resulting in the deaths of 20 million people. That’s just a century before the Europeans started conquering the new world.

Maybe the Europeans of the 1500s to 1800s thought of themselves as kind and enlightened in that they made treaties with the natives instead of just massacring them. Maybe they thought of themselves as exceptionally kind because they actually assigned land to the natives, instead of simply taking all the land for themselves.

Instead of thinking of the European colonial forces as an especially brutal and rapacious group, maybe it’s better to think of that entire time period as brutal.

Also, as an aside, the natives are always portrayed as being peaceful, gentle people who are victims of the awful Europeans. But, we know that they were fighting amongst themselves before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans found native villages surrounded by palisades. There were already native groups who had been driven off their land by other native groups. They were massacred, but that was more a function of diseases and technology, rather than a difference in character.

merc,

I like this bit at the end:

As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds.

merc,

For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that you should only ever optimize for the next sucker colleague who might need to read and edit your code. If you ever optimize for speed, it needs to be done with massive benchmarking / profiling support to ensure that the changes you make are worth it. This is especially true with modern compilers / interpreters that try to use clever techniques to optimize your code either on the fly, or before making the executable.

merc,

It’s 2023, Star Trek is in the 2360s. This Miles is a great-great-great…great-grandfather of the Miles we know and love.

The name Miles was passed on through the generations, and his son (Miles) started the family’s naval tradition:

www.flickr.com/photos/…/photolist-bKy47B

merc,

Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.

merc,

Yes, but no.

A quantum Santa could deliver presents to every house simultaneously if nothing observed his passage. On the other hand, at some point the wave function will collapse, like say when people check what presents are under the tree. When the wave function collapses, the probabilities all go away and there’s a single answer, so he could deliver presents to one and only one house.

merc,

There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.

merc,

Simplify that to “Piracy isn’t stealing”. Copyright infringement (so-called piracy) is very different from stealing.

Sure, if “buying” isn’t permanent despite assurance it was at the time, then copyright infringement is even more justified. But, copyright infringement isn’t and has never been stealing.

merc,

A key difference:

If you rely too much on PornHub, you’re never going to get fucked.

If you rely too much on GitHub, you’re eventually going to get fucked.

merc,

Git is a DVCS. GitHub is a place where DVCS repositories are hosted. There are many other places where DVCS repositories can be hosted, but GitHub is the most famous one… Porn is a type of content. PornHub is a place where porn is hosted. There are many other places where porn can be hosted, but PornHub is the most famous one. It’s a pretty good analogy.

merc,

That looks quiet and positively spacious compared to the last open office environment I did time in.

Imagine that same space but 4 people between the column and the window instead of just 2. Then make the space 3x as long. Then reduce the space between the backs of the chairs by 50%.

Even though everyone in the space was doing individual programming / sysadmin work, the space was extremely loud just from a few spontaneous conversations between people working on the same thing together. Everyone wore headphones nearly all the time, only taking them off if they needed to talk / shout to the people near them about something. Often, if you needed to talk with someone sitting 4 desks away, the easiest way to do it was over IM.

merc,

This makes me wonder what would happen if you took the content off some celebrity-focused website like say TMZ but changed the formatting to make it look like New York Times articles.

Like, the “gravitas” of the NY Times politics section with content like “Guess Whose Shirtless Selfie!”

merc,

It’s not theft though. When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.

It’s just copyright infringement. Since copyright is an artificial temporary monopoly granted by the government, it’s pretty different from “theft”.

merc,

MacOS is still Unix under the hood, and has been since they adapted NeXTSTEP.

Maybe it’s just because I’m fundamentally more of a console user than a windowing-system user, but to me a Unix-based OS is always going to be a winner compared to Windows.

But, if you want to laugh at OSes, laugh at classic MacOS, where everything would grind to a halt if you clicked and held the mouse button.

merc,

I assume he doesn’t have access to it. He just knows there’s a camera pointing at the place where his bike was stolen, and that the police have access to the footage.

merc,

If you’re rich you can afford to gamble, lose and try again.

If you’re poor, you can gamble, win, and then have to spend your winnings helping out your family and community. Like, paying for the operation your uncle needs but couldn’t afford, or helping mom’s friend from church avoid losing her home.

This is a reason that a lot of poor-person owned businesses don’t grow. They may start strong, but then the business owner has trouble continuing to invest.

merc,

Words in scrabble should be things that people actually use outside scrabble. It’s fair if that makes some leeway for slang. It’s also fair if it means that some really obscure words that nobody really uses get in. But, this seems over the line because they’re taking words that nobody uses, and tacking on un-grammatical endings.

merc,

The atmosphere is made of rocket oxidizer, not fuel. Fuel would be something that reacts with oxygen: Hydrogen, Methane, etc.

merc,

We keep finding life on earth in places where we didn’t think life was possible. And yet, when we look at the stars we have the nerve to talk about there being a “goldilocks zone” for planets in other solar systems, like that’s the only way life could exist there.

I’m sure there’s life out there somewhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if carbon/water based life turns out to be a minority in the universe.

Yes, water is a simple compound made of some of the most common elements in the universe, so it’s reasonable to think other life might also evolve to use it. Carbon is also a really handy element for making complex molecules, and is also really common. But, it’s a failure of the imagination to think that life elsewhere has to follow the same basic chemistry as here on earth.

merc,

People seem to forget these days.

It’s not that they forget. You’re giving them too much credit. The reality is that being against many of the actions of a country is normal. People like Americans, like American movies, but are against many of the actions taken by the US military, the NSA, etc. People like Indians, but are against the actions of the Modi government. If you advocate against the policies of other governments you can get results. Your country can scale down its cooperation with them, or pressure them, or whatever. There’s always going to be some hatred of the country, hatred of the people of that country, hatred of the religion of the people of that country mixed in when the policies of any country are criticized. But, a reasonable person can focus on the main message.

By playing the “antisemitism” card, the Israelis who use it hope to insulate Israel from these normal kinds of criticisms. It’s really the only country that gets to play that kind of card, because it’s the only country founded in the immediate aftermath of a genocide, by the survivors of that genocide, and is the only place where Jews are a majority. They also get to pretend that any decision other than supporting Israel in everything it does is supporting the next genocide against Jews. The reality is that many of Israel’s actions are likely to encourage the next attempted genocide against Jews.

merc,

Some iron ore, a ton of clay, and instructions on how to make a furnace.

merc,

That’s by far the most disturbing thing about this post. The movie is 2.35:1. This looks even closer to square than 4:3. If you watched the movie with this framing you’d be missing more than half the movie.

merc,

What’s unsurprising is how strictly gun control is implemented on US military bases and navy ships.

If you live in barracks on-base and own a personal gun, if often has to be stored in the base’s firearm storage. The only people who can walk around armed are MPs or people on their way to/from authorized training. Even if you have a concealed carry permit for the state the base is in, you can’t conceal carry in the base. If you’re on your way to the base’s firing range and stop to get gas at the base’s gas station, you can’t leave your gun in your car while you go into the convenience store at the gas station unless your car is locked in your trunk. Often even a paintball gun has to be stored in the base armory.

Keep in mind these aren’t rules for random civilians. These are the rules for people who have already had to pass extensive firearms training courses.

It’s pretty insane that random untrained civilians have far fewer restrictions on guns than members of the military on a military base.

merc,

There’s no reason it shouldn’t work.

dy/dx is the same as (y1 - y2) / (x1 - x2) as the distance between the two points approaches zero. “dx” and “dy” aren’t very useful measurements on their own though.

merc,

North Korea’s GDP is on the order of 20 billion per year. Tiny for a country that size, but considering they don’t have to spend any of it on their population, that gives them a lot of bribe money.

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