@tal@lemmy.today avatar

tal

@tal@lemmy.today

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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,
@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,
@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,
@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, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Mmm…it depends. So, one particular example I recall calling for UBI without giving any details and urging people on /r/Europe to sign up for it was at an international level in Europe, and I don’t know what, exactly, the implications of that petition were.

But there are definitely systems of government where petitions do make a difference. The popular initiative exists, and there it’s explicitly part of the process.

I’m not really a huge fan of the popular initiative and referendum – I live in California, which uses both, and I think that some of the policy that I think is most ill-considered in California has gone through via that process. However, it certainly can – and has, on a number of occasions, has – had dramatic impact on the state’s policy, as with California’s unusual property tax situation.

…cdn.sos.ca.gov/…/statewide-initiative-guide.pdf

Initiative Statute: Petitions proposing initiative statutes must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 5% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)

The total number of signatures required for initiative statutes is 546,651.

Initiative Constitutional Amendment: Petitions proposing initiative constitutional amendments must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 8% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)

The total number of signatures required for such petitions is 874,641.

Once proponents have gathered 25% of the number of signatures required (136,663 for an initiative statute and 218,661 for an initiative constitutional amendment), proponents(s) must immediately certify they have done so under penalty of perjury to the Secretary of State. (Elec. Code, § 9034(a).) Upon receipt of the certification, the Secretary of State will provide copies of the proposed initiative measure and the circulating title and summary to the State Senate and Assembly. Each house is required to assign the proposed initiative measure to its appropriate committees and hold joint public hearings at least 131 days before the date of the election at which the measure is to be voted on. (Elec. Code, § 9034(b).) However, the Legislature cannot amend the proposed initiative measure or prevent it from appearing on the ballot. (Elec. Code, § 9034©.)

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

My understanding – and I’m not a New Yorker – was that he has been often credited with reducing crime in NYC. Part of that was, as I recall, by cracking down on minor crimes, things like aggressive panhandling, with the idea that that was kind of a gateway drug to more-severe crime.

I don’t know whether that approach or him in particular was responsible for it, or whether it was other phenomena at the time – my gut is that changes like that usually aren’t just driven by one person – but my understanding was that crime did considerably fall off around the time, and crime was something that a lot of New Yorkers had been really upset about.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

You can get portable compressors.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

It is whatever you buy a battery and charger for first. Then you are unwilling to forfeit that battery to just buy another too

One could go pneumatic, get a compressor and pneumatic tools.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

At my mom’s place — air-source heat pump, double-paned windows — I can’t hear the thing at all from inside the house, and can only hear it if I go on the side of the house where it’s operating, which doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. You can hear the fan there.

Generally, I haven’t heard people complaining about it in the US. I have seen some people talk about it recently in the UK, which is in the middle of a push to transition to them, and I’m wondering if that’s because townhouses are more-common there, with houses packed closely together.

I understand that you can get noise-reducing enclosures:

www.silent-mode.net/domestic-equipment.html#/

There are also water-source heat pumps. I don’t know how the noise differs, but I’d bet that it’s quieter, because you’re moving water through a pipe rather than a lot of air. However, their installation cost is considerably higher (though their energy efficiency is also higher).

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.

I’m an Emacs graybeard

Emacs does have a music player, emms, which is what I use.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

You can get powdered porcini. That won’t require the soak.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I just have a concern about fan noise and was wondering how loud or quiet these things are since I will be sitting next to it all day when working. It doesn’t need to be silent, since nothing else in the rack, though currently nothing like the levels of typical rack equipment.

Not really what you’re asking for, but there are enclosed racks with sound isolation. Though they are a bit pricey, to my way of thinking.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Well, there are some fairly reliable maximum bounds, I suppose:

en.wikipedia.org/…/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered “flat” (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]

The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a “Big Rip”[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.

Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip — and we expect one of the two to occur — seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.

The theory suggests that from the “Big Bang” through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.

In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I don’t think that soup does improve as leftovers.

If you do like old soup, though, there’s probably bacteria growing in it, and as others point out, that won’t be happening with caned soup.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Given the trend to make “Super” variants of games for the Super Nintendo, we could have seen “Mega Mega Man”.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’ll try hosting video on my ~700Mb up line (IIRC) to see how it works if I get the howtos.

It looks like that if you set up a lemmy instance, there’s an upload size cap for things that people can attach.

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3349

If you set that to some insane number, I imagine that people can upload large stuff, and as I note below, at least webm files seem to be doable right now on lemmy.world (just that the lemmy.world size cap is going to keep someone from uploading anything of meaningful size). I’d imagine that if you lift that cap to whatever you want – if you want full-length movies, then probably a couple of gigabytes – the users of your instance should be able to upload. They’d click on “image” rather than “movie”, but…shrugs

The Lemmy Web UI isn’t really designed for huge uploads, doesn’t show a progress bar, so it’s probably not going to provide the best user experience, but I’d expect that it’ll work.

If you don’t want to run a lemmy instance, but do want to permit people to just anonymously upload files that they can link to on other lemmy instances, then while I don’t have a particular example ready to hand, I’m sure that there are no shortage of web-based “dropbox” systems that let one upload and then serve files. Just have people reference the file’s URL the way they would anything else.

If you want to run a PeerTube instance, which is aimed at fediverse video sharing, then I’d look at their docs. I’ve never set one up, but I’m sure that they have some kind of documentation.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

That’ll address the case where one is copy-pasting an URL, but not where following existing links.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes

List of things that, at least to some people, don’t work they way they’d expect.

I think that the Monty Haul problem is a good example on there.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

It’s not particularly confusing, but there are a whole class of paradoxes that rely on the same mechanism – the truth of a statement is being altered by the existence of the statement, because it is self-referential in some way.

I think that the Berry paradox is the first one of these that I ran into, and it’s a little more confusing to most, I think.

What is good to eat when you have no appetite?

I am super sick right now and haven’t eaten much in a few days. It’s getting to the point where I am gonna need to force myself to eat something to keep my strength up but everything just sounds terrible to me right now. I have been subsisting mostly on small glasses of milk and the occasional packet of instant oatmeal....

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

to eat something to keep my strength up

I wouldn’t worry too much if you haven’t eaten for a few days. I know of one instance where someone who was seriously obese went on a diet, and aside from vitamins and water, went over a year without eating. I’ve done over a week myself for the hell of it. Unless you’re absolutely emaciated or have some sort of medical condition that creates a need for it, you can probably handle going for quite a while without food.

All that being said, this isn’t to encourage doing it. Just that you’re probably not creating any kind of dire health situation if you don’t eat for a while.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

House on Haunted Hill had Black Dude (Eddie) being one of the only two to make it out.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I use dired in Emacs.

I assume you mean “why use these instead of file-manipulation commands in bash?”

I use both.

There are a handful of tasks that are easier in dired than bash.

  • Making small modifications to filenames that aren’t amenable to programmatic changes. You can just toggle the read-only flag on a dired buffer, edit the filenames, and then hit C-c C-c when done.
  • Marking a set of files to perform an operation on where that set cannot trivially be expressed using tools in bash. Think, oh, “which movies do I like enough to want to keep around”. This is especially handy when moving a number of files to another directory, which I think is why people often like the two-pane approach of orthodox file managers. Dired is not an OFM, but it can act like that if you have two dired windows open, using the other as the default target for the operation.
  • Dealing with filenames containing obnoxious-to-type characters like weird Unicode stuff. If I want to delete the one file in a directory whose name consists of a bunch of kanji, it’s easier to just manually select it in a list.
  • Navigating where I usually want to see the contents of each directory. I’ll often navigate around in dired while building up up an emms playlist. Browsing a list of movies to play.

EDIT: It’s also not really a file manager, but I do use ncdu to see what’s taking up space on a disk. I’ll also use du -h|sort -h|less, but ncdu is, like file managers, more convenient when just browsing around the tree and looking at each as one does so, while manually selecting a few items to operate on (deleting).

EDIT2: I’ll also add that virtually all of the people I know in person who love OFMs – I’m in the US – are from Eastern Europe, moved to the US from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, etc. I dunno why that is. Maybe just spreading along language lines. Maybe there are or were issues with switching between Cyrillic and Latin character stuff akin to my above irritation with kanji. But someone from Eastern Europe might have more input to answer your question.

EDIT3: The link I provided above for OFMs has a very long discussion from the author on why he likes OFMs (though not all terminal file managers are OFMs, many, like Midnight Commander, are). Reading it, I’d say that there’s a lot of overlap with how Emacs works with dired+TRAMP+eshell and some other Emacs packages, though they accomplish similar goals in a different way – sort of making integrated functionality that spans network file transfer, file management, text editing, file archive access, console commands, with a common toolset available for all. Would be quicker to learn an OFM than Emacs, though Emacs is gonna provide a considerably-larger set of functionality if you’re willing to spend the time on it.

EDIT4: There are also a number of OFMs in Emacs, like Sunrise Commander, so I guess I shouldn’t really treat it as an either-or matter.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • localhost
  • All magazines
  • Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #