Windows 11 is less of a poop smelling ice cream truck and more of a Kaiser’s Coffee Shop van. And you ain’t in the driver’s seat.

Better still, in the Nix world there’s https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager which allows you to set up all the settings exactly once, and then auto-apply them on all the machines!

Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight

Actually, one of main applications for batteries in the near-to-medium future is gonna be grid storage to supplement the explosive growth of renewables, and home backups to make the grid more distributed and replace diesel/gas generators during blackouts. For those purposes you don’t really care about the size, really don’t care about the weight, and a cheaper, more stable, less fire-prone chemistry suddenly becomes very appealing.

I agree with you that lithium is not going anywhere for a while, it’s the best fit for many applications like EVs, drones, etc. But I wouldn’t be surprised if its share in the battery market drops significantly over the next 10-15 years.

Can’t wait for one of them to be chasing me down for the crime of “thinking unfavorably about Peter Thiel”

Ah yeah, that makes sense. But I feel like it may be a bit easier to run away from a ground-based drone than it is from an aerial one. For one, they’re much slower so you’d probably have a more advanced warning.

Many labor movements throughout history started out due to advances in automation resulting in unemployment and rising inequality. This time around there’s also a huge cost of living crisis too, so things are lining up (you might hear “contradictions are sharpening” in marxist circles). If anything I’d have expected violence to start sooner and be more widespread, if someone gets laid off due to AI in this job market they literally have nothing to lose at this point.

It’s been happening for a good 20 years already. Do you think US drone strikes were all military targets? Do you think both russia and ukraine didn’t absolutely dronefuck multiple population centers? Do you think israel didn’t use drones to carry out its genocides? There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to drone strikes already.

Honestly for desktop usage it doesn’t really matter. All inits have their idiosyncrasies (“A stop job is running for Session”/logging hell on openrc/etc). But for managing a fleet of bare-metal servers I find systemd to be the best, most polished one out of the lot.

I’ve grown into a firm believer of Sunday–Saturday

I’m curious as to why. Obviously it doesn’t really matter. I can’t think of any arguments for Sunday–Saturday, and the only argument I have for Monday–Sunday is that in that case the “weekend” is actually the end of the week, rather than awkwardly split up. But then the word for “weekend” is different in different languages, so it’s a very English-specific argument.

I’ve also heard people do “three… two… one!” and then do the thing on “one”…

“This Thursday” is for the Thursday contained within the Sunday–Saturday interval you’re currently in.

Except according to ISO 8601, Monday is the first day of the week, and it is the definition used in some english-speaking countries (Ireland, occasionally the UK). That means every Sunday there is a definite ambiguity as to which day is “this Thursday”.

We’re already convinced that trains were better, but thanks for yet another pro-train argument

Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt

I would argue it’s not. There’s still a lot of professional and industrial software that doesn’t run on Linux at all, even through Wine. I’ve had a glimpse into the world of industrial automation, there’s a bunch of devices that simply don’t have the drivers to run on anything but a specific (old) version of Windows. Supply chain issues would persist for decades.

I’m pretty sure the model of train is a proper name and it’s named after the satellite. I don’t think I would describe any train as a literal “sputnik” of the rails.

Also Russian is full of composite words like that. “Explorer” in russian would be “исследователь” (issledovatel’) - ис (completely) + след (trace/footstep) + оват (make, imbue) + ель (he who). Literally it would be “he who makes (places) completely (covered in) footsteps”

If the “pa” part of “companion” comes from path

It doesn’t though, it comes from French compagnon/compaignon and then Latin com (with) + panis (bread). It probably originally meant “someone with whom you share bread (eat together)”.

And actually, looking at wiktionary, Old English had a word “ġefēra” (with the same meaning) which is constructed very similarly to “спутник”: ge (‘with’, still the same prefix in german e.g. ‎Gebrüder) + fera (‘to go’/‘to fare’, e.g. in seafaring)

That’s just not true. Most ATMs still run on Windows. There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day. A lot of POS devices too. Almost all accounting is done on Windows. The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense, it would probably be on the same order of magnitude as the last pandemic in terms of immediate economic impact as businesses have to manically switch to alternatives, and hundreds or thousands of people would die from financial chaos alone.

Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked, literally all of the internet just stops working, and a shitton of industrial automation stuff is gone.

It’s still super fucked up that you’re basically gifting some other person a sizeable chunk of your income just because they were able to put up a down payment and secure a mortgage. Landlords are rentseeking middlemen leaches that should not exist even by capitalist standards, see Adam Smith.

I really think we’re gonna lose a carrier to swarm drones before this is over.

Paraphrasing donald trump, “inshallah”

Yesterday I was thinking that trump might get angry that Iran is letting through some ships and try enforcing a complete blockade… this seems like the first step towards that

Actually, you are right and I’m mostly wrong. The Maastricht Treaty just says:

Any European State which respects the principles set out in Article 6(1) may apply to become a member of the Union. It shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the assent of the European Parliament, which shall act by an absolute majority of its component members.

So, what is a “European State” is effectively just a political decision by the Council and Parliament. I guess if Cyprus and Armenia were considered “European States” then Canada is not that big of a stretch.

Additionally, the next paragraph is

The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.

Soo I guess even the Maastricht treaty allows itself to be modified, maybe removing the “European” criteria completely.

So it’s not as difficult as I first imagined, it’s just a question of political will from Canada and the EU institutions.