CountVon

CountVon, 10 months ago

Essex comes from Old English Eastseaxan, literally “East Saxons”. In other words, this is the part of England that was invaded/settled by the Saxons and they divided their lands into east, south and west regions, plus a middle region (middle Saxons, modern-day Middlesex).

There’s no Norsex because at that time the lands to north of Saxon territory were held by the Angles. They also divided themselves into East Angles, South Angles, etc., but those names don’t seem to have survived into the modern day. Interestingly though, the Kingdom of East Anglia was divided into “North Folk” and “South Folk”, which is the origin of the modern-day names for Norfolk and Suffolk.

If you’ve heard of the Anglo-Saxons, yeah, that’s these guys, the Angles and the Saxons. The Angles came from parts of modern-day Denmark, the Saxons from parts of modern-day northern Germany. They shared a lot of common Germanic culture but were also rivals.

CountVon, 10 months ago

To be honest, I didn’t either but I wanted to know where all these names come from. So I did some Googling and that’s what I found. Apologies if I’ve mangled anything, but I think I got the broad strokes right. Etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is neat!

CountVon, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

TL;DR, for Expanse newcomers, I’d recommend bingeing the show before playing the game.

Do you like science fiction TV shows? If so, then I’d recommend the TV series. Do you prefer to read SF? Then I’d recommend the books. Both are pretty good, though the TV show adaptation made a significant number of (mostly) warranted changes from the books.

I would trust that the game does a solid enough job for newcomers to the series, but you’d likely get more out of it if you’d seen the show. The main character in the game (Drummer) is a prominent side character in the TV show, and I believe the actor for that role is doing the voice over for the game. Which is awesome, she was one of my favorite characters from the show. I believe that character doesn’t map one-to-one onto any character in the books though, as the show condensed and combined a number of side characters. I felt that was an understandable change for the TV adaptation since the books had a fairly sprawling cast of side characters. Anyway, long story short, if you’re on the fence for book vs. show, I’d say watch the show since the game appears to match the show’s continuity.

The game just released today and I haven’t played it yet. It’s also releasing in episodic fashion, as many Telltale games have done, so you’d only be able to play the first installment today. Reviewers have access to the first three, according to this review-in-progress, but as that reviewer points out:

I’ve not yet finished all of the episodes, with only the first three available to review, but what I have played is exceedingly promising. At this point, my only question is whether the core mystery is satisfying and if the developers manage to stick the landing, which is impossible to answer without fully understanding the breadth and scope of the entire set of episodes.

I love both the books and the show, and while I’m looking forward to the game I’ve decided to stay on the fence until all the episodes are available.

Edit to add: IMO the TV show did stick the landing, so I have no reservations about recommending it to anyone. The TV show covers the first six books of the series, and just like in the show book six ends with a pretty satisfying conclusion to the story started in book one. In book seven there’s a 30-year time jump, so books 7-8-9 are kind of a separate-but-connected story arc. Books 1-6 I loved, 7-8 I’m lukewarm on, and that’s made me less inclined to invest time in book 9 but I probably will at some point.

CountVon, 10 months ago

Yeah, that makes sense. I’m in the process of re-reading the whole series now. Currently on book 3, will take another crack at 7-9 once I read that far.

CountVon, 10 months ago

I hear you, normally I’d recommend books before adaptations so it feels weird to be doing otherwise here. In this particular case I think it makes sense though. The main character of the game ties directly to same character’s depiction in the TV show, while the book version of that character is actually three or four different characters.

CountVon, 10 months ago

This isn’t a user behavior problem, it’s a client code problem. Not wanting to see duplicates is reasonable, but expecting cross-posters to time-gap their cross-posts is not. There’s already a feature request to fix this for the Lemmy web UI, other clients will need to decide whether and how to handle cross-posts.

CountVon, 10 months ago

A fitness watch. Having a more accurate estimate of calories burned makes it easier to maintain a consistent calorie deficit every day. Down 20 pounds since Xmas!

CountVon, 10 months ago

We were driving from Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on the east coast of Costa Rica to San Jose to catch our late flight home. We had decided to go to the Jaguar Rescue Center in the morning, thinking we had lots of time for the drive. That turned out to be a bad call because there had been torrential rain in Braulio Carrillo National Park, our planned route on highway 32 was closed due to landslides, and alternate routes doubled our trip time. We’d budgeted lots of time to get to San Jose before our flight so that part wasn’t a problem, but it meant we’d be driving through the mountains after dark.

Holy shit let me tell you, when tourist guides to Costa Rica tell you not to drive in the mountains after dark, it is for a good fucking reason. Picture a steep, winding mountain road. Now imagine gutters on either side of the road that are V-shaped, four feet deep with 45 degree sloping sides. Now blanket the whole scene in the thickest pea soup fog you can imagine. That’s mountain driving after dark in Costa Rica.

This was done in a shitty little rental hatchback with no fog lights, because of course we weren’t planning to do any mountain driving after dark but fuck if it didn’t happen anyway! It was a solid hour of the most intense pucker-factor driving I’ve ever had to do. The only reason I’m not a corpse on the side of a Costa Rican mountain is because some local with fog lights passed me on one of those roads, and by god I got onto that guys tail lights like fucking tick and drafted him all the way down the mountain. Shout out to the Costa Rican in that beat-up red pickup, I’m only alive today because of him.

CountVon, 10 months ago

And yeah you drove by the Cerro de la Muerte (Death Mountain) at night. That’s a big no-no! That road is always almost coveted with fog (even during the day).

Wait, so the actual proper name of the mountain I crossed, at night, under heavy fog, translates as Death Mountain?? Actually yeah, that seems pretty sensible based on what I saw. Clearly I was lucky to make it through without suffering a disaster of some kind. On the one hand I fully acknowledge that I was an idiot to put myself in that situation… but on the other hand it sounds really badass, so this detail is definitely getting added to the story whenever I tell it in future.

CountVon, 10 months ago

It’s a fairly far-right instance, which makes it unpopular with many left-leaning members of the fediverse. Tt also tends to export a lot of trolls and drama that cause it to get defederated by mainstream instances that don’t want to deal with the moderation hassles.

CountVon, 10 months ago

Sooo, whataboutism doesn’t actually win the argument, y’know.

CountVon, 10 months ago

If an instance allows anyone to sign up then I think they need to tolerate those users having different tastes and interests, within reason. Most instances have policies against illegal content, and many don’t allow porn. Defederation is the tool instance admins can use to prevent subscriptions to content they don’t want to host. Other than that, if other users don’t want to see certain content, they can simply not subscribe to it and avoid the All feed. Personally I like browsing All precisely because it shows me things I didn’t know about, and might be interested in.

Currently there’s no way for users or instance admins to block specific communities. I hope that will be made available at some point, so content blocking can be done at a more granular level and defederation can be reserved for more extreme cases. Instance admins would be free to curate their All feed if that’s what they want to do. Users would be free to pick an instance that suits them, possibly one with a heavily curated feed or instead choose one that hosts a broad array of content. A broad array of content is much less likely to be an issue if users can block at the community level so they don’t have to see it.

CountVon, 10 months ago

Ahh I think you’re right, I got it mixed up. Users can block communities, it’s whole instances that they can’t block. Only instance admins can do that, via defederation.

CountVon, 10 months ago

From a practical standpoint, we believe Oracle Linux will remain as compatible as it has always been through release 9.2, but after that, there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise. If an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem.

This is the part of the post I find most interesting. Looks like Oracle won’t be engaging in whatever workarounds Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are using to continue operating as downstream distros of RHEL. Instead, if I’m reading this correctly it means Oracle Linux will essentially be forking from RHEL past 9.2. There were essentially three options before Oracle when Red Hat made their license change:

• Pay Red Hat for RHEL licenses. Lol as if, Larry Ellison didn’t become a billionaire by spending money he didn’t need to.
• Use whatever workarounds to remain a downstream distro and pay Red Hat nothing, while using their army of lawyers to fend off any ensuing lawsuits from Red Hat / IBM. It’s not like they couldn’t afford to fight the case after all.
• Fork from Red Hat.

That they’ve chosen the third options is kind of fascinating to me, and to understand why you’d probably need to understand how enterprise database support works. The Oracle databases I see day to day are massive, and they drive practically all of a company’s core operations. Unanticipated downtime is fucking expensive, so these companies are willing to pay a lot for top-tier support (not like I think Oracle Support is actually good, mind you, but that’s a whole other topic). The DBAs running these databases don’t want to deal with any headaches whatsoever, so they’re only going to install Oracle on approved operating systems. They can’t afford to have Oracle say “nope, sorry, unsupported platform” during an outage.

For a couple decades now, the supported Linux platforms for Oracle Database have been RHEL, SLES and Oracle Linux. Obviously Oracle Linux will remain on that list, and I doubt SLES is going anywhere either (it tends to be popular in Europe), but does RHEL drop off the list in future? Does Oracle think they can actually convert RHEL installs to Oracle Linux installs at customer sites? Or does RHEL stay on the list but become the red-headed step-child? Either way, this feels like an attempt by Oracle to erode the value of Red Hat’s platform. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

CountVon, 10 months ago

Non-southerners beware, flour that grows well at higher latitudes is “harder”, i.e. has more gluten, while wheat from the south is “softer” / less gluten. You may need a softer flour to make really great southern-style biscuits, and that can be tough to come by outside the south.

CountVon, 11 months ago

Yeah, the writing was on the wall as soon as IBM acquired Red Hat. IBM is going to end up hollowing out Red Hat in their drive for more revenue. They started by destroying CentOS, which used to be a community-supported binary-compatible RHEL analog but is now effectively RHEL Beta and thus useless for enterprise work. Now they're closing the source so they can kill the other RHEL analogs, like Rocky Linux.

It's such a short-sighted move though, so many things got built on RHEL and compatible because those FOSS options existed. IBM seems to think that some significant percentage of those free installs can be converted to a paid install, and they might be right in the short term but I think the long-term impact is gonna be dire. Over time RHEL could became a closed-source ghetto in the FOSS world because fewer developers will be able to test their open source projects on RHEL without paying the IBM tax. Once RHEL starts to fall behind it could cause enough friction that enterprises will start looking to other distros, and then Red Hat's primary revenue stream starts to dry up.

CountVon, 11 months ago

I think Fedora will continue to be fine for the foreseeable future as it's an upstream OS. It gets changes before they go into an RHEL release, which means a Fedora user is essentially beta-testing future RHEL changes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that and if you're happy on Fedora then you can stick with it and be confident it's going to continue to operate the way it does today (barring any future licensing changes from IBM that affect upstream distros).

This change will really affect the downstream distros like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. I think those distros have a valuable place in the FOSS ecosystem, as they allow FOSS contributors a low-friction way to test their code on an RHEL-compatible distro without having to agree to a Red Hat license. The fact they IBM / Red Hat is making this change must mean that they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms for downstream distros, and I have to imagine that their gain will be at least partly at the community's expense.

CountVon, 11 months ago

Is this the beginning of yet another corporate enshitifcation?

I hadn't actually thought of this as enshitification, but upon reflection... yeah, it truly is! Red Hat allowed the existence of downstream distros, and even made one of their own in CentOS, because they understood how supporting FOSS dev/test on their enterprise product ultimately increased the overall value of that product to their paying customers. Now that IBM has bought Red Hat they don't care about any of that, they just want to squeeze as hard as possible to maximize the return on their investment. I'd say enshitification started in earnest when they killed CentOS six months ago, so the current announcement is the second phase of enshitification.

CountVon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Probably something like this (syntax may be incorrect for MySQL, I work mainly with Oracle): select pc.product_id, sum(price) from products p, product_components pc, products p where p.id = pc.product_id and pc.component_id = c.id group by pc.product_id;

CountVon, 11 months ago

It's been edited a few times, try the latest again.

CountVon, 11 months ago

I'm using Jerboa on Android right now and it's working fine. The equivalent iOS app would be Mlem. All taken from this page: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/

Also, https://sh.itjust.works/ does work pretty well in a mobile browser. App optional!

CountVon, 11 months ago

Cosmetics, probably? If an instance had been customized for particular formatting on mobile, I don't think any of that would change the way that an app displays the site. I believe an app would read the raw data using an API and then format that data in whatever way made the most sense to the app dev. I'm not sure how much incentive there would be for an instance owner to spend a lot of effort formatting for mobile anyway. Personally I think it makes sense to let apps worry about formatting on mobile and let instances worry about formatting in desktop browsers. Although even then, I'm already overriding the desktop CSS to give my view of Lemmy a format closer to old.reddit: https://sh.itjust.works/post/53395

As for functionality, I think the answer would be "no" in the ideal case where everything is working correctly, but site-specific, app-specific, or site-app-interaction bugs might cause functionality issues. Those would hopefully be transient problems though, and not the regular state of affairs.