balsoft @ balsoft @lemmy.ml

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Joined

1 yr. ago

Honestly, I think I'm mostly set already (as I often go backpacking and there's no internet there). I have offline maps for the country I'm in and neighboring regions downloaded in OsmAnd and mapy.cz (two sources just in case), Wikipedia in Kiwix, and my custom NixOS setup as a bootable ISO on a flashdrive. I'll probably miss being able to watch science/maths edutainment on YouTube, but it's not something I'd download.

If the Internet went away, we’d have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.

Good thing portable solar panels & lead-acid batteries exist that can easily power a couple of laptops even if their internal batteries are cooked. Solar panels last for a very long time if cared for, and lead-acid batteries can be (somewhat) useful almost indefinitely if you replace the electrolyte.

No, we’re all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.

So it would be really handy to have instructions for maintaining or even building weaponry, medical/medicinal literature to find useful herbs or other remedies, and engineering literature/textbooks/software to help us rebuild the electrical grid and then the Internet.

Honestly, while fun, those videos don't provide too much value per GB - and I say that as someone who's watched almost all of them. Their main actual benefit besides entertainment is (IMHO) getting people interested in the relevant field so they study more thoroughly. They often explain simple yet dazzling concepts which get you hooked but don't provide much value on their own, and don't directly enable you to solve real-life problems. Even more involved videos like those by 3blue1brown are still edutainment at their core, as acknowledged by the author. In an apocalypse (which, let's face it, is the most likely reason the internet would indefinitely go down in a developed country) you would be much better off with engineering (mechanical, electrical, etc) literature and textbooks, maybe a couple science textbooks for good measure (I have a drawer full of the Feynman lectures in case something like this happens).

On the other hand, their software to flash GPU VBIOS is proprietary, requires downloading from some third-party websites, and they are quick to DMCA the shit of anyone hosting it on GitHub. They're definitely not saints (neither is any capitalist corporation to be fair)

Have you ever tried to use one of those superapps? It's still a clunky experience overburdened with dozens of useless UI elements eating up screen estate of what I actually care about, and then whenever I wanted to do something for which there's no sub-app in the super-app it would be difficult due to lack of integrations with "the outside". That's even before we question the idea of putting all the eggs functionality in one basket centralized app with one developer entity, allowing them to ultimately control all aspects of one's online life.

And more philosophically, I'm surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.

Cool! And good to see flake.nix right out of the box as well :)

Although I'm a bit annoyed that it forces its own colortheme rather than use the default colors so that it matches the rest of my system.

What I find annoying is when some talking head says all code should be a certain way,

It's quite useful to have "all code be a certain way" within a language ecosystem. E.g. Haskell requiring all pure functions be actually pure is amazing because you know that any function from any library doesn't perform some stupid side effect when you call it, and just processes its inputs into an output. Of course, functional programming tools can be useful even outside purely functional languages, but having those important properties be ecosystem-wide makes you feel much more comfortable, and produces much better, safer and more reliable code in the end.

You can try out Nix. It can be installed right there on your Kubuntu box, without any conflicts with apt or other package managers.

It's somewhat similar to portage with its ebuilds in that it's source-first and allows you to set up complex dependency trees and configure every package in them. In your case it would allow you to avoid manual rebuilds and just build&install all your custom software with one command from one directory containing some .nix files that describe how to fetch, configure and compile every package. (Actually, for your dependencies those files are likely to be in nixpkgs already - you can check at https://search.nixos.org/packages. In that case, you don't have to write any packaging instructions or even build everything, as Nix will intelligently download the binary versions which are helpfully provided by the Nix community).

It's quite different from most other package managers/build systems, though, being much "simpler" (it can be described as lambda calculus on files with syntax sugar) but much "harder" (the learning curve is actually a learning wall with the first section requiring mountain climbing experience and covered in barbed wire). If you've been maintaining builds for multiple packages by hand for years, though, it shouldn't be too bad.

Very few things are trully impossible in linux land, but having multiple package managers on a single system is just asking for trouble.

Nix/Guix (and a couple other similar package managers) are specifically designed to not interfere with the rest of your system.

But instead, the device turns on (nearly) instantly. Because the wire isn’t actually what causes the device to turn on

That's not exactly true. In this case, the energy transmission would go like this: (change of electric field in the little bit of wire next to the power source) -> (change of magnetic field in the air between the wires) -> (change of electric field in the wire next to the load). This limits the amount of energy transmitted significantly and incurs a lot of losses, meaning if you had something like a lamp plugged in it would start glowing extremely dimly at first (think about how some cheap LED lights keep glowing even with the switch off - it's similar, albeit it happens due to inter-wire capacitance and not induction). It would then slowly ramp up to full power over a course of a year.

Here's a video from the same person about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 (although I haven't watched this yet)

Edit: after watching the video, I think I was actually wrong in a couple of my assumptions. First of all, it looks like the reason for the initial energy transmission is wire capacitance and not induction, so (electric field in wire) -> (electric field in air) -> (electric field in wire, in the "opposite direction", but because the wire goes back and forth it's the same current direction). This means that my LED example is even more potent. And the second one is that because it's capacitance and not induction, this means that there's no slow ramp-up, it just makes the light glow very dimly all the way until the electric field makes it through the wire, and then it ramps up very quickly.

The Fed Board, apparently: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

After reading through that page and the FAQ, I think it's because the banks should now be compelled to held reserves because Fed pays them a reasonable interest (close to what they would get if they give a very low-risk loan) on them, rather than it being a strict requirement. I don't know enough about economics to have an opinion on whether it's a good idea, but I feel like it's not too horrible? Like, maybe it makes some shitty banks even more susceptible to bank runs, but that's the reality of fractional reserve banking in general.

• Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
• There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn't even a Scotsman.
• On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it's DC, just to "figure out" where it "needs to go".
• More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.

It's actually 0.06 microseconds (0.00000006 seconds) per day, or ~22 μs (0.000021915 s) per year.

Also, technically, anything moving up or down in Earth's gravitational field while physically connected to it is having an effect, however it's usually to small to be reasonably measurable.

(I wonder what would happen if the rotation speed was changed by 0.06 seconds per day - that feels like a lot, adding up to 22 seconds per year, but would anyone except timekeeping nerds actually notice? I don't even know how to begin figuring something like that out.)

Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That's why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).

Doesn't it have a much bigger population than Aus? Wikipedia says that California has about 39 million people and Australia only 27 million.

Trying to "secure" a turing-complete computer system by some arbitrary limits like that will never work. Unless you manage to directly prevent traffic that isn't going through your proxy, it's all pointless as people will just hack stuff together, be it by downloading binaries themselves and placing them in the home dir, or even by running them in-memory.

Nah, still easy to circumvent. This should work: https://github.com/hackerschoice/memexec, or (for dynamic exes) just call them through ld-linux.

Wow, this is pretty good! I might have to finally ditch sway.

Probably to evade some software determining it's stolen/unlicensed copyrighted content and DMCA-ing/removing it (e.g. YouTube's Content ID system)?

Engagement is just "emotional involvement or commitment", it's not necessarily "corporate media framing". Capitalist platforms abuse this for profit (as they do with everything good), hopefully we can use it to create stronger communities.