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tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Have you ever seen coal burn? If yes, why?
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There are apparently a few people here and there who still use it. I remember reading some article about a guy in the US who preferred it.

googles

npr.org/…/for-the-few-who-heat-homes-with-coal-it…

Every few weeks, John Ord does something unusual for most people living in 2019 — he stops by a local hardware store in rural northeastern Pennsylvania to buy coal to heat his home.

Ord’s coal-burning stove burns 24 hours a day when it’s cold. He likes the constant heat it gives off and says it’s cheaper than his other options — oil and electric.

tal, to linux in Switched from Ubuntu to Debian yesterday
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It was probably /usr/sbin you’re thinking of rather than /usr/bin. IIRC – don’t quote me on this – Red Hat puts it in non-root user paths by default, and Debian doesn’t.

tal, to linux in Switched from Ubuntu to Debian yesterday
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Yeah, the reason for this is that sometimes Debian doesn’t enable Plymouth splash screens by default, so you just see the text stuff. It actually annoys me a bit.

I always go through and turn off all the stuff that’s covering up the diagnostic information that I want to see, myself.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in How do Hue Bulbs do millions of different colors, what sorcery is this?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

but no mortal can actually tell the difference between 255, 255, 255 and 255, 254, 255.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding

You can see some slight shifts even at 24-bit depth, if side-by-side. It produces a faint-but-visible banding.

Here’s an example (suggesting use of dithering to obscure it):

sean.cm/a/how-to-fix-banding-in-gradients

tal, to thefarside in 26 January 2024
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Not only were they a superpredator that preyed on apex predators, not only were they present in great numbers, but terrifyingly-enough, humans also worked together.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in If Trump loses in 2024, do you think he'd run in 2028?
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Not really, but I don’t think it much matters.

If Trump hit upon a political strategy that is effective, then someone else will presumably use it, absent a change in the political environment.

tal, to lemmybewholesome in AI will fix everything 😎
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Happily works on Nikki Haley-Kamala Harris passionate kiss in Stable Diffusion

tal, to asklemmy in Why do you think so many people misuse asklemmy?
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It’s got a name that doesn’t intuitively indicate its role.

And it has a substantial population as the Fediverse goes.

tal, to asklemmy in Are Americans more prone to conspiracy theories than people in other countries?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

While I think that it’s probably rare, there have been conspiracy theories that are intentionally crafted to achieve goals.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

And I am very sure that there have been many efforts to amplify existing conspiracies; you can look at disinformation research.

tal, to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Mmmm…okay, but the parent comment I was responding to does have a point in that there are some benefits to blocking Javascript above and beyond just trying to deal with tracking. Like, if you’re on a laptop, there are sites that will burn a lot of CPU time – and hence battery life – doing nothing useful. Or, on an older machine, it can speed up page loading.

My issue is just that unless you’re going to turn it on yourself on a site-by-site basis, killing off Javascript breaks too much of the Web today. It was a viable option to just have on back when there was a meaningful portion of the world that didn’t have Javascript available and web developers designed pages to deal reasonably with its absence and you were willing to deal with flipping it off on specific sites to deal with the occasional breakage…but today, it’s a huge portion of the Web that doesn’t work without Javascript.

tal, to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

That used to be a must-have for me about 20 years back, but today, it just breaks too much on too many websites.

I could maybe see selectively-blacklisting particularly obnoxious websites, but I don’t think that whitelisting them is really practical today.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Some that I use:

Dark Mode

I don’t like having a light screen.

  • Dark Reader. This does a pretty technically-impressive-to-me job of making reasonable dark versions of pages. It’s not perfect – there are a handful of sites that it needs to be toggled off for, makes something hard to read – but I’m amazed that it does the job it does.
  • Blank Dark Tab: Replace the new tab with a blank page matching Firefox’s built-in dark mode

Privacy/Anti-Tracking/Ad-blocking

Paywalls

Some paywalls can be bypassed.

Tweaking Frameworks

  • Stylus: Doesn’t do anything on its own, but permits collections of third-party themes to be applied to websites to fix annoyances.
  • Greasemonkey. This doesn’t do anything on its own, but it permits people to publish little modifications to be applied to webpages, permits for a lot of little scripts that fix annoyances on websites. There were a number of useful scripts that I used on Reddit.

Misc

  • Edit with Emacs. Permits opening the contents of a textarea in an external emacs instance. Nice for things like, say, writing a large lemmy post in Markdown. I vaguely recall that, at least some years back, there was a way to embed a version of vim in Firefox textareas, so if vim’s your cup of tea, that might be interesting, if it’s still around.
  • Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin. A variety of quality-of-life fixes for lemmy and kbin. Lets one open a given lemmy/kbin post on their local instance if they wind up viewing a page on a remote instance.
  • Reddit Enhancement Suite. If you still use Reddit, this has an enormous collection of quality-of-life improvements for Reddit.

EDIT: I don’t know if this is the embedded vim that I recall, but Firenvim seems to do roughly the same thing, if not.

EDIT2: There’s also some “overlay remover” plugin that can bypass a number of obnoxious overlays that I use on my desktop, but I don’t have it installed on this machine. I think that it’s Behind the Overlay.

tal, to asklemmy in Countries that let anyone in?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

everything is terrible

I’d guess that warming is probably long-term advantageous in terms of human habitation of Svalbard. We’re not really glacier-dwelling critters. Probably sucks if you’re a polar bear, but…

tal, to asklemmy in Countries that let anyone in?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

When it isn’t being cut, they have submarine cables to Norway.

en.wikipedia.org/…/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System

The Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine communications cable which connects Svalbard to the mainland of Norway. The two optical fiber cable consist of two segments, from Harstad to Breivika in Andøy, and from Breivika to Hotellneset near Longyearbyen in Svalbard. The segments from Harstad to Breivika are 74 and 61 kilometers (46 and 38 mi) long, respectively, and the segments from Breivika to Hotellneset 1,375 and 1,339 kilometers (854 and 832 mi). Each consists of eight fiber pairs and there are twenty optical communications repeaters on each segment. Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s. The system is now the sole telecommunications link to the archipelago.

There’s apparently 5G service:

www.lifeinnorway.net/5g-norway/

The company began Scandinavia’s first 5G pilot back in November 2018, conducted Norway’s first 5G video call, and launched the world’s northernmost 5G pilot in Svalbard. Telenor chose Nordic company Ericsson over Chinese firm Huawei to supply the critical infrastructure for the rollout.

I don’t know whether Starlink orbital paths can cover that far north.

googles

Apparently so, and they started service about five months ago.

satprnews.com/…/starlink-launches-in-svalbard-a-n…

Starlink Launches in Svalbard: A New Era of Internet Connectivity in the Arctic.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Countries that let anyone in?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Also, in general, if you have legal residence long-term in a country, most countries do permit a route to obtain citizenship. Norway does appear to do this too (though it’s not a guaranteed right, and you need to learn Norwegian as part of that process). Thing is, I don’t know whether legal residence in Svalbard – which is a Norwegian territory, but not part of Norway proper – counts as legal residence in Norway for naturalization purposes, and I could very much believe that that is not the case.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_nationality_law

Foreigners may become Norwegian nationals by application after residing in the country for at least seven of the previous ten years, while holding a work or residence permit valid for at least one year. Applicants must be at least 12 years old, demonstrate proficiency in the Norwegian or Sami language (or alternatively complete 300 hours of Norwegian language courses), intend to reside in Norway permanently, pass a good character requirement, and not have a criminal record.[11]

Thinking of an analog, I know that in the US, American Samoa is unusual in that while it is a US territory, American Samoa wanted to run their own immigration policy (because there are people in (non-American) Samoa who they wanted to be able to move in). Both the US and American Samoa were willing for American Samoa to be a US territory, but the US wasn’t willing to have American Samoa just be a back door to general entry to the US if they had different immigration policy. Normally, in an American territory – like Puerto Rico, say – the residents are American citizens. However, because of this independent immigration policy that American Samoa runs, based on the arrangement that the US and American Samoa worked out, American Samoans are not actually American citizens – they are American nationals. While generally they can live and work in the rest of the US, just the fact that American Samoa is okay with someone moving to American Samoa and has the right to let people in as they choose doesn’t necessarily mean that the same person can use that status to just bounce from there to legal status in the rest of the US.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Norway has similar restrictions on people bouncing via legal residence in Svalbard to broader Norway, because the situations are somewhat-similar.

EDIT: Yup.

www.lifeinnorway.net/living-on-svalbard/

It’s also important to understand that time spent living in Svalbard does not count towards residence in Norway. That means that if you’ve lived in Svalbard for two years, those two years will not count towards a permanent residence application in Norway.

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