recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.

Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.

Copy Link to Highlight is my favorite addition.

I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.

For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.

To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.

But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.

So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.

To be fair, your “SUUUPER stable” is another person’s “not really going anywhere”…

Yeah, my immediate thought was “Why would anyone voluntarily listen to this song?” and it had nothing to do with the quality of the song.

Yeah, I also recommend this. Particularly with laptops, it’s good to have a full-fledged desktop environment, since you’re more likely to need WiFi, power management, easy display configuration etc…

I’m no expert. I probably know too little about the propagation speed of a wave to understand what you mean there.

But here is a scenario where something is faster than light in the given medium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

As I understand, neutrons and gravitational waves are also bound by the speed of causality, because they have no mass. And I believe, unlike light, they are unaffected by electromagnetic forces that a material exerts, so they would presumably (always?) travel faster than light in that medium.

I will also say, that from what little I understand of this video: https://www.pbs.org/video/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-light/
…it sounds like trying to determine the speed of causality by measuring it, is kind of backwards. You’re at best experimentally confirming what has to be a given under our laws of physics.

Alright, yeah, we’re talking about a pH value of around 8 for alkaline water. That’s also the pH value for eggs, sea water or blood. So, I do imagine our mouth+esophagus can deal with that. At the very least, alkaline water should be food-safe.

That’s kind of why I never feel great about buying video games. The price is pretty much entirely arbitrary.
Like yeah, they did an investment, it is fair that they recuperate that. But the actual price they need to ask of each customer entirely depends on how many customers there are.

And so, they will always start out asking more than what they expect to need to ask of each customer, which just feels like I’m paying too much.
But even when they do put it on sale, there’s likely going to be sales in the future where they sell it for even less. It’s not like they need to empty out a warehouse or such, where they put up uniquely low prices. So, even when I could get a game on a sale, I’ll feel like I could also just wait longer…

The body doesn’t care much about alkaline water, since the stomach acid is so acidic that it will easily overpower it…

She did the math (with some assumptions), but basically 0.25 mL of lemon juice will turn 500 mL of alkaline water into neutral water:

This is in the video at 13:16.

The reason is that pH is a logarithmic scale. Alkaline water has a pH of about 8, which means it has a tenth of the hydrogen ions compared to neutral water at pH 7.
Lemon juice has a pH value of 2, which is 1,000,000 times more hydrogen ions than there are in pH 8. So, you just need a little bit of lemon juice to increase the hydrogen ions in alkaline water tenfold, which makes it neutral.

That is a good tip. Unfortunately, I am too fish to understand it. 🙃

I just type ps and in 9 out of 10 cases, my shell suggests ps -ef | grep <process-name>. So, it’s actually less for me to type than “pgrep”…

Ah, that was a brainfart. I do use pkill primarily. I just use the other command, when I’m not sure what the process is called…

Yeah, I especially don’t understand it here, because it’s a graphical tool. You don’t have to keep backwards compatibility.

Even if you’re worried about people depending on the format that’s being piped, you could keep only the piped format stable. We have the technology.

Yeah, I would often just grab htop because I had no idea how to read the CPU usage out of top.
For example, for me it says:

%Cpu(s):  0,4 us,  0,4 sy,  0,0 ni, 98,8 id,  0,0 wa,  0,3 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st

Now that I look at it, I can guess that us and sy are supposed to be user and system time. And I guess id is supposed to be idle.
I have no guess what the other numbers might be, though. And well, I would often like to see the CPU usage per core.
Now I know that I can just press 1t and get effectively the same view as in htop.

I might learn top’s filtering workflow, too. But so far, I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name> and then kill <pid>, which isn’t particularly more cumbersome, so will see…

What terminal emulator are you using where ctrl-c copies instead of sending SIGINT when text is selected?

I know that the terminal emulator built into the JetBrains IDEs works that way…

What also surprised me is that the speed difference depending on medium is actually quite substantial. For example, glass has a refractive index of about 1.5.

So, the speed of light in glass is c/1.5 ≈ 200.000 km/s, i.e. 66% of the speed of light in vacuum.