Trantarius

Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.

Actually, yes. Light travels about 30cm in a nanosecond, around the size of a cucumber.

They’re probably picturing the typical American grocery store: giant warehouse-like building, massive parking lot, tons of people coming and going. It would be a bad idea to put one of those in the middle of a neighborhood.

I think you’re missing the point of the -porn suffix. Its not supposed to convey “the study of” or “images of”. Its meant to convey that viewing it is satisfying in some primitive/emotional/aesthetic way. NaturePorn isn’t just “pictures of nature”, it’s “pictures of nature that suck me in and make me want to see more”. In that regard, the comparison to sex is intentional.

I doubt you want to. Its probably at least a terabyte.

I used to consider myself republican, and I think I’m still closer to republican than democrat. I prefer small government, which is at least sometimes a republican ideal. I am also against identity politics of any kind, so I am against affirmative action. I am in favor of gun rights, with regulations that allow for appropriate tracking of who has guns where, how they are stored, how they are transported etc. However, regulations that prevent particular people from owning guns or ban any particular weapons should be very conservative. Even felons should regain gun rights after an appropriate period of time. Only ridiculously dangerous weapons, like nukes, should be outright banned. Stuff like full auto weapons should be legal, but restricted to only be stored at a gun range or something. As far as LGBT goes, I don’t think the government should have anything to do with them. Let them do what they want, let people react how they want (as long as it isn’t violent of course, which is already illegal under other laws). I’ve never been really sure about abortion. My gut reaction is to just let people do what they want, but I struggle to logically justify it as anything but murder. Not to mention the impracticality of banning it.

I wouldn’t really call myself a republican anymore though. This is largely because of the religious aspects. I don’t know if republicans have actually become more authoritarian or if my perception has just changed, but either way they don’t seem to prioritize the same things as me anymore. Things like right to repair, net neutrality, and E2EE are important to me, but they don’t align with that at all. The party also keeps embracing identity politics, just with different identities than their opposition. Religion should be a non-factor from a governmental perspective. It doesn’t need any special protections, just to be ignored.

If I had to call myself something, I guess I would be a ‘libertarian socialist’, however much of an oxymoron that seems to be. For instance, I like the idea of UBI, largely because it would allow almost all welfare/social programs to be eliminated (including social security). Doing so would reduce government control, because they no longer have an ability to tweak who gets what, since everyone gets the same amount.

That’s still best achieved with SBMM (just a less strict version). With random matchmaking, you are only equally likely to see better/worse players if you are in the 50th percentile.

Also, each player is independently selected (when random). This means there will probably be a mix of high skilled and noob players in every game. You would not see a team of mostly noobs or mostly pros. For a player in the 50th percentile, with a team of 6, the chance of being better than every player on the other team team is only 1.5%. For the 25th percentile, it is 0.02%. So a very significant number of players would (almost) never experience an “insane spee on noobs”. However, the chance of having at least one player in the 75th percentile on the opposing team is 82%. So they would frequently encounter situations in which they feel hopelessly outmatched.

The only way to solve this is to use matchmaking that attempts to take skill into account.

The Chinese room argument doesn’t have anything to do with usefulness. Its about whether or not a computer that passes the turing test is conscious. Besides, the argument is a ridiculous one to begin with. It assumes that if a subcomponent of a system (ie the human) lacks “understanding”, then the system itself (the human + the room + the program) lacks understanding.

Well I guess I’m one of the 2 then

I love that they keep saying stuff like “introducing Ubuntu to the Christian community”, as if they couldn’t already use it.

When you hit the windows key (aka meta-key or super-key) it brings up the app launcher. You get a dock at the bottom with pinned or running apps (like a taskbar), and all of your open windows are presented in a sort of mini-version that lets you switch between them or move them between workspaces. There is a search bar that you can immediately type into to open any app with a .desktop file. There is also a button to bring up the app grid which shows your apps kind of like a mobile device’s home screen.

Not having a dock is one of my favorite things about gnome. I actually use an extension to hide the top bar too. There’s just something so satisfying about having 100% usable space on screen. I get all the info back in the win-key overlay, so I don’t really need that stuff on screen at all times.

You formatted your links as images. Markdown uses  for images, […](…) for links.

Factorio has a mod manager built in. It can browse, download, install mods all right there. It even syncs mods to save files and checks for updates. Factorio mods have better support than most games do. I really wish some other developers would put that kind of effort into mods. Just think of what, say, Minecraft could be if it had that.

It’s easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.

What do you mean no alternative to VS? There are many IDEs on Linux. What does VS do that nothing else can?

Well letters don’t really have a single canonical shape. There are many acceptable ways of rendering each. While two letters might usually look the same, it is very possible that some shape could be acceptable for one but not the other. So, it makes sense to distinguish between them in binary representation. That allows the interpreting software to determine if it cares about the difference or not.

Also, the Unicode code tables do mention which characters look (nearly) identical, so it’s definitely possible to make a program interpret something like a Greek question mark the same as a semicolon. I guess it’s just that no one has bothered, since it’s such a rare edge case.

Every thing you code is binary. You may write ‘15’, but the code your computer runs will use ‘00001111’. The base-10 source code is only like that for human readability. All mathematical operations are done in binary, and all numbers are stored in binary. The only time they are not is the exact moment they are converted to text to display to the user.

I find that much harder to read than a for loop. You are making a helper function to only use it once, which is kind of confusing when it is totally unnecessary. Also, distinguishing between two groups only inside the setter line is weird. Applying the modification to one group, then the other, is more obvious. Considering the alternative isn’t really longer, and only using basic loop syntax, I would just use the loop. If you really want to add the “set dots visibility” explanation into it, just use a comment, that’s what they’re for.

I literally just now misunderstood your code and had to change my comment to correct for it.