sxan

sxan, 12 days ago

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Attributed (but debated) to Samuel Clemens.

sxan, 11 days ago

Really? Because of anybody could benefit from some years in prison, it would be Trump.

OTOH, Hitler spent time in prison, and look how he turned out.

sxan, 12 days ago

My bowsrer also had sprl chek, i knoe exatcly what yoi me E n!

sxan, 12 days ago

At least the “how” should be easy: drop Tsar Bomba down Old Faithful, and set off the Yellowstone caldera.

sxan, 11 days ago

Imagine being in a jury with Willem Dafoe and disagreeing with him during deliberations.

sxan, 12 days ago

Texas has Austin, Dallas, and oil. All three are things we’d like to keep; the first two are mainly dragged down by the rest of the state, and the rest of the US still needs the last, for now.

sxan, 12 days ago

I didn’t realize I have the same question as OP, and I don’t think you answered it. The question is: how do the gene selections happen? What process decides?

Not every combination is being tried in the egg during fertilization, right? You describe the outcome, but not how the gene combination selection process happens, and what decides which genes are used.

sxan, 12 days ago

Basic K12 biology didn’t go into deep details; OP is asking, I think, what decides which genes are combined. You can only get at most half of each from the parents - you don’t get all of each - so what exactly selects which genes from each are combined?

sxan, 12 days ago

Put. Engineers. Back. In. Charge.

All of the C-suite, except maybe the CFO, should be aerospace engineers. That’s how it was back when Boeing made great planes; how to fix the company isn’t rocket science. Just get rid off all the MBAs.

sxan, 11 days ago

Man, the good news just keeps coming in today.

May 30, 2024. A very good day.

sxan, 12 days ago

Isn’t the major controversy that they’re trying to argue that there were benefits for the slaves? Not benefits for the nation, benefits for the state, or even benefits for the plantation owners… but they’re forcing teachers to teach that the slaves themselves benefited - right?

These people are so fucked up, I just can’t. I can’t figure out how they’re in office.

sxan, 12 days ago

You know the best way to analyze a submission to the OCCC? Compile it, then run the result through a disassembler. You get back far more readable code than the source.

But you’re right; reading code isn’t easy; I meant relatively. If you have government-level resources and can hire a bunch of experienced software developers to review source code, armed with a bunch if static analysis tools (<cough>NSA), you have a decent chance of finding malicious code in software. I know of no similar tools (and the automated software analysis tools are the important factor) for finding backdoors in hardware.

sxan, 12 days ago

Software is easy. It’s the hardware backdoors that are hard to find, and those have been being built for at least a decade. They were pretty simple to start; I can’t imagine what they’re capable of hiding in 5nm process chips.

sxan, 12 days ago

That was an excellent read.

Also, I learned from the article that the Canadians have a (somewhat better) term for SovCit magic: OPCA: Organized Pseudolegal Magic and Ceremony. The website about it looks like a great source of information.

Nice find, OP!

sxan, 12 days ago

I vote post titles must be prefixed with “[GAMENAME]”. Many of these posts are just noise in my feed, without context.

sxan, 12 days ago

The rules say you only have to include one ingredient, so this one counts!

Looks good, too; I’ll have to try this one. I love drinks with egg whites; they’re so… mellow.

sxan, 12 days ago

Amaretto Sour: Amaretto, lemon juice, simple syrup, and egg whites.

I want you see the drink that follows with the egg whites.

sxan, 12 days ago

What, the device, or the coffee?

They’d have to seal the coffee in a near complete vacuum, or ensure all air in the packaging is replaced with an inert gas; once ground, coffee oxidizes rapidly, and this is what ruins the flavor. Even whole beans oxidize, just more slowly. This is why it’s recommended you ground at the last minute, and buy beans that were roasted within the past couple of weeks.

Of all the pretentiousness in coffee culture, this is probably the one most true, most important factors to coffee quality: the impact of oxidization on roasted beans. It’s why Nespresso pods make actually decent coffee: the air in the pods is replaced with nitrogen, preventing oxidation of the grounds. If Nespresso wasn’t owned by the completely amoral Nesté, and if the pods weren’t such a terrible impact on the environmental, I’d probably give up my current process and just drink Nespresso.

However, my point is that any packaging this company could do to preserve the product would probably be as horrid for the environment as Nespresso pods. They’d have to sell grounds, because of the process; bags would be the least impactful, but how fast can you drink a pound of ground coffee? Because the grounds will be oxidized and ruined within days of opening the bag - you’ll only get great coffee the first day after opening; OK coffee the second, and shit coffee the rest. So it’d have to be pods, and now we’re back to plastic waste.

The one way I can think of this working is for cold-brew folks, because you’re brewing one big batch at a time, and using 12 or 16 oz of grounds at once. Open a bag of inert-gas vacuum-sealed grounds, dump it in, fill with water, and let brew for 12 hours.

IME, cold brew makes good coffee, in that it eliminates most of what can make coffee harsh, but it’s also the most forgiving of bean quality in that it also removes a lot of other, desirable, subtlety in the result. Cold brew is the one coffee I’ll buy from Starbucks, because their shit-quality beans don’t affect the cup much.

And, @almar_quigley, I’m keying off your response, but I am not assuming you don’t already know all of this - I’m writing for non-coffee nerds.

sxan, 12 days ago

Oh! Good point! Selling the extracted product would be viable. I can’t see any reason they couldn’t sell boxes of brewed coffee.

sxan, 11 days ago

That is the most soothing blue.

sxan, 12 days ago

Snot on a finger? Ew.

sxan, 13 days ago

Sure, why not? I’ll send an email tomorrow.

sxan, 11 days ago

Finally.

sxan, 12 days ago

Maybe because not every system is Debian, and Plasma has to work on systems that either don’t have /usr/share/i18n/supported or put is somewhere else?

I manage a project that encounters this sort of thing regularly; my biggest problem is terminfo entries. Not all distributions contain all of the same terminfos. It is one of the biggest source of bug reports my project gets. I’ve been considering just embedding all of the terminfos in my project, just so I know they’ll all be there on every system it’s installed.

I don’t know this is Plasma’s reason for including their own list, but it could easily be. It could also be because those are the locales Plasma supports, and it may not support every locale that might be in the distro system list.

sxan, 12 days ago

Good riddance, Felicia.