I love EAS messages. The first part is actually three bursts of machine-readable data encoded as audio, and it’s completely incidental that it’s such a freaky sound.
There have been incidents of EAS-equipped devices triggering an alarm because an otherwise benign broadcast transmitted a valid EAS message without the short end-of-message bursts.
Take a look at the Pioneer spacecrafts’ plaques. NASA scientists have broken down our abstract expression of distance to language-agnostic universal constants. I refuse to believe that a space-faring civilization with friendly intentions wouldn’t do everything in its power to find a common language, no matter how far removed from their spoken language.
“Our communication happens through references to well-documented historical events and figures, but still uses the same vocabulary and grammar as the federation and most of the galaxy’s civilizations. Maybe we should share a short summary with the captain, to assist in establishing relations.”
“No! I wanna wrassle the monster like Darmok and Jalad!”
If anything, it is the bicycle. No taxes, no license, no expensive vendor-locked repairs, all features perpetually unlocked, basically all-terrain, runs on breakfast and determination.
I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I’m a sysadmin and I don’t think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.
Fuck Winget. It’s a GUI-only person’s idea of what a CLI package manager should be. The only positive value I can think of is that it’s better than not having one at all.
I manage about 500 Windows machines in a university. When teachers started complaining that they are unfamiliar with the paid version of an IDE, and we’d have to install the free community edition, I was delighted to learn that it was available through Winget. But privilege escalation on Windows is a fucking joke, so trying to install it remotely through Ansible/WinRM just popped the UAC anyway. I had to VNC into every single machine to click the fucking button. As an additional middle finger, winget.exe was not even in PATH when I tried WinRMing as the local admin.
Winget is the absolute nadir of package managers, and it should be doused in acid, burned, chucked in the dumpster where it belongs, and forgotten. Choco and Scoop all the way.