troyunrau

troyunrau, 5 months ago

In the web interface, crossposting is handled more cleanly – both in making them, but also collapsing them. Not sure why. Nevertheless, it is one of the few shortcomings of using Connect.

Ideally, it would show the post once, and then show the comment threads for each community, so you can dive into the various comment threads from any/all of the crossposts.

troyunrau, 5 months ago

You had ChatGPT write that apology, eh? ;)

troyunrau, 5 months ago

Yes

troyunrau, 5 months ago

I also mostly use VLC these days. I also use it on android, with a copy of my flac library on my microSD there too.

troyunrau, 5 months ago

Outer Worlds 2 writing team here. You’re hired!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Wut

troyunrau, 6 months ago

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

The hydrologist in me always asks: why dig a well at the top of the hill? Surely that is more effort than digging it at the bottom of the hill where the water table is closer to the surface.

But I guess wells like this predate modern hydrology. And outhouses and such could be polluting the water as it flows down gradient. So the water at the top of the hill was likely cleaner and safer to drink…

I’d wish for clean drinking water in every well. ;)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Only in a 2D world with the directions being limited to “up” and “down”. Carrying it laterally around the circumference of the hill would be equally probable.

troyunrau, 5 months ago

This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.

But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.

In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Back in the day, debian used to render fonts badly to avoid a potential patent trap. Is that still a thing?

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I’m getting old, it seems. Kids these days probably don’t even have to configure modlines in XFree86. Sheesh. ;)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I worked in diamond exploration for years. We joked that we were turning diesel into diamonds – just not through compression. Seriously kids, buy a lab diamond if you want one.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

They do this gag in Babylon 5. Except it’s an alien using one of their penis tentacles…

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Geoscientist here. I concur. The names are punny sometimes (this example in particular), but usually non-descriptive. Exceptions for the super common things (quartz, pyrite) when used in a discussion where the chemistry is irrelevant in that specific context. Conversely, we generally don’t care about the chemistry when talking about “clays” in geophysics, so defining them chemically would become noise to the reader.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Missing: any sort of physicist who will tell them both that the forward model says that the sun won’t explode for a few billion years, and so far that model hasn’t been wrong.

troyunrau, 6 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Too small to supernova and black hole, yes. But large enough to have a decent boom. Probably at least red giant, then a nova (explosion casting off outer layers) leaving a white dwarf remnant.

If I’m around by then, my model of medical science progress is wrong ;)

E: I’m wrong. That casting off of the outer gas envelope is not a nova. It’s just a death throe of some sort.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Look into history of object brokering in object oriented environments. I was around when KDE went from CORBA to DCOP to DBUS, but not involved in the decisions. Basically: object sharing between processes with security, type translation, and a few other things. In the Microsoft world, this was called “component object model” if my memory is correct.

DBUS is pretty nice for complex interactions.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

No. DBUS has its roots in freedesktop.org and the KDE+Gnome projects. It’s basically a desktop agnostic reimplemented of KDE’s DCOP, which was itself a simplified CORBA (gnome was using ORBit at the time, if I recall correctly). DBUS was so useful that the domain spaces its been applied to soon rapidly outgrew the desktop space, and this is why it’s usually started earlier these days.

It also works on Windows.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Well, the underpants glitch is going to get patched haha.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

In some countries, like Canada, directly advertising for prescription drugs is illegal. But the marketing folks behind the drugs find these sorts of legal loopholes. The “ask your doctor” line is a cover-your-ass version which is actually saying “Google it”.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Pasta? Pasta.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Likewise, KDE3 got forked to Trinity. But KDE kept producing (largely) quality software, so Trinity is pretty much an anecdote now.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

My hero. Thanks! I’ve been using the web interface for a few weeks because Scaled is just such a better choice. I’d even go so far as to suggest making it the default for all apps and servers. :)