Yeah, this is a really nice feature; on the couple of rare occasions where an update completely borked things I was able to go from unbootable to everything back up and running in half an hour.

Given their choice of logo, I am advocating for everyone to start referring to it as Twitter/X11.

But there are % signs after all the numbers…

I’d be interested in hearing what it is about the language that has gotten you so excited about it.

Sure, but what’s the end game supposed to be, then? Just making the same request over and over again indefinitely?

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

The Year of the Lemmy Desktop

Ok where do I invest my money then?

Well-diversified mutual funds, or something equivalent to that, and in particular you want a mixture of asset classes such as stocks and bonds. You also want to have a hierarchy of investments, ranging from very low-risk but also low-growth investments for your emergency savings that you can tap at a moment’s notice to high-risk but also high-growth investments for savings that you do not need to tap for a long time (such as for retirement, assuming that is far off). “High-risk” in this context doesn’t mean “risk of your investment disappearing” so much as “risk of your investment suffering from a dip in value at the time when you need it”.

But to reiterate: the most important thing here is diversification, because diversification means that some of your investments can drop in value by a lot or even become worthless without causing you to lose everything. Putting all of your money into a single asset or kind of asset, such as a cryptocurrency, is basically the opposite of what you want to be doing.

Being absolutely terrified of the ambient noises in Doom.

Yeah, when I was a kid and Doom had first come out, I got scared to death when I walked around a corner and ran into my first pinky; it was horrifying!

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

Rooibos is just an inferior version of honeybush.

Change my mind.

In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

The problem is that fusion research does not tend to receive a lot of funding, especially relative to the huge challenges it presents. Even the National Ignition Facility, where this milestone was reached, was only built because it was needed for nuclear weapons research, with advances into using fusion for energy generation being essentially a side benefit (at least, from the perspective of its government funders).

The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.

OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.

Watch the show and then read the books. In my opinion the show is fantastic and incredibly enjoyable (except for ending the series in what is obviously the middle of a significant plot thread, which is annoying) but the books are even better and spoiled the show a tinsy bit for me.

Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.

Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.

(In fact, in the later books a “corrupt” version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)

I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.