qjkxbmwvz

joined 1 year ago
[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 86 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Look, if you don't want to listen to some random dude who thinks reading is cool, fair enough. But if that random dude also runs level three diagnostics on the warp core and can swap polarity on the main deflector dish with one hand tied behind his back? Yeah...you should probably pay attention.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 18 hours ago

Nah just give them the .tex source and let them deal with it.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It is "backwards" from some other commands


usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

And the icing on the cake is that I don't use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least...).

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 5 points 2 days ago

I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

In grad school I picked up a an old free HP LaserJet, with an Ethernet NIC card (it was an upgradable printer, maybe from the mid 2000s?).

It was great! Only complaint was no duplexer, but the thing printed great from Linux and the generic toner was cheap.

Today though...the experience is a bit different.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You discounted space dust.

No I didn't


it would thermalize and radiate.

This is not my paradox, and it's not really a paradox at all, as the big bang model explains it nicely. There are many nice articles on the topic of you'd like to read more about it.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Yes. But why is there an absence of light?

If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn't matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)

So, the universe can't have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.

This may all seem obvious, but it's neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 9 points 3 days ago (7 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox

Olbers's paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux's paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.

The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 10 points 3 days ago

Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It's about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly


it's just euphemisms and insinuation. And it's hilarious IMHO.

I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn't let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.

(Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I'm just trying to answer the question...)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 17 points 3 days ago

TIL NASA is woke.

(/s shouldn't be required but here we are...)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

To each their own though? I can't imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 "gets out of the way better" than most others in my experience.

But...that's just my use case. It's a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 7 points 3 days ago

I feel old...when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn't using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.

We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access)


but it worked for filesharing.

It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that's not necessary to stream).

view more: next ›