Jayjader @ Jayjader @jlai.lu

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I "fell" into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).

So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.

And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything "inside" the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can't "see" more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.

This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.

Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I'm giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck "scale" for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don't know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the "minimum size limit" beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.

This is why I began this comment with "space and time might be continuous per se"; we just don't conclusively know yet what "really" goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.

I have no idea how widespread it is among other distros, but ArchLinux's bootable install disk/iso comes with a genfstab command that snapshots your current mount points and outputs it as a fstab.

You still need to figure out where and how to mount everything yourself, but at least it saves you from most typos that could otherwise end up in the fstab file.

Yes, sway presents itself as a drop-in replacement for i3 (just built on top of wayland instead of xorg).

I've used it on a Thinkpad laptop for close to 4 years, and on my desktop for the past 3.

The only problems I've encountered are some apps not being Wayland-compatible; xwayland makes the rendering work for those but then things like sharing a window or the entire screen don't always work. Notably, Discord's sharing doesn't work, but I can use OBS to record any entire screen since [the OBS devs] put in the work to properly support Wayland.

For what it's worth: I self-host gitea, and it gives me the possibility to import not only repos but also issues, projects, etc from GitHub, gitlab, bit bucket, and a handful of others.

I don't know if Utterances can work with gitea's API. If it does, then in theory you should be able to migrate to gitea from GitHub for this use case.

Wow, I think that's the first fedi instance I've ever seen that's more or less dedicated to a single video game. Very cool.

Some slight pushback from a French person: we aren't purists, our old reactionary institutions are purist (notably the Académie Française which, fun fact, is officially "in charge" of the french language while having zero linguists in its ranks).

Hang out with a group of young adults in France and you'll hear a ton of English and a decent sprinkling of Arabic amongst the French.

Also, it's not just French, Spanish has "ordenador". It makes some linguistic sense; computers do compute but they also sort and arrange numbers.

100% agree that the USA is a special case. The country's geography (occupies a significant, contiguous portion of the continent) and legacy as the "last remaining superpower" basically requires a non-trivial amount of effort for most Americans to be exposed to non-American anything, let alone people. On top of that, the two-party duopoly is so entrenched in (and fabricated by) the ossified voting & election system that it becomes very hard to separate "fighting for what you believe in" from "fighting against the 'other half' of the country".

[phatic to attempt to convey that I appreciate and think I understand what the article is trying to say] Thanks for taking the time and effort to lay it all out in writing!

I particularly appreciated reading part/chapter 4; many of your statements resonate with my own lived/subjective experience.

[with the phatic niceties covered, here is the meat of my comment:]

There is a phrase that I am uncertain how exactly to interpret:

Even more so because English speakers appear to have a second brain to scrutinize language for microscopic signs of alignment.

Is this more of a throwaway joke, or a serious expression of something you notice? I wonder, notably, about how particular this is to English speakers (and I realize as I write this that I may just be re-enacting the behavior you deplore in your ice cream example). I am French/English bilingual and have lived in both the USA and France; in my experience, the determining factor in whether someone exhibits this "second brain" behavior/characteristic is their degree of preoccupation with politics (and to an extent, their familiarity with the history of politics and propaganda).

Something about seeing what arguments have been used to prepare, enact, and justify atrocities in the past makes those arguments very hard to take at face value the next times they are encountered. Consider the "states' rights" rhetoric used to justify and rehabilitate the Confederacy's succession after they lost the Civil War; that specific wording triggers immediate wariness in me today, and I'm willing to wager it also triggers it for most people that:

1. have learned a certain amount about that period and/or the "Lost Cause" movement, and
2. are ostensibly against slavery and racism (in principle, if not in practice).

Yet the term "states' rights" did not have that effect on me the first time I encountered it - I developed that reaction as I learned more about who was using that term, where and when it came from, and what was effectively being said when that term got employed.

Similarly: McCarthyism, the red scare(s), and the apparent failure of self-proclaimed communist revolutions over the past century to effectively bring about "free and egalitarian societies", have together trained many English speakers to deeply mistrust anything that could be the start of a "slippery slope" to communism - even when they readily agree that "something must be done" to reign in the damages of severe inequality. This seems to me to be a product of specific events in world history rather than anything intrinsic about the English language and/or the cultures that speak it.

On the other hand, English is (to my understanding) somewhat uniquely a mishmash of other languages' grammars and vocabulary, with notably so many synonyms that can imply slight and subtle nuances. Perhaps it lends itself to a higher level of scrutinizing seemingly innocuous phrasings (to the point that a human brain develops mechanisms and habits for it) because there are more choices available for articulating an idea.

Can confirm, ran fine on my desktop machine without needing to tinker (caveat: I changed the "compatibility layer" to use proton-ge before attempting to launch it of my own initiative).