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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • No country in the world has ever allowed unrestricted free speech, find me a country where at least one of the following is not a crime:

    • Knowingly cause unnecessary panic, e.g. Screaming FIRE in a cinema
    • Lie about someone causing them harm, e.g. say you saw them murder someone during a trial when you weren’t anywhere near the scene.
    • Publicly plan an assassination or similarly directly threat someone in a credible manner.
    • Draw/write/or reproduce in any manner copyrighted material.
    • Disclose secret government documents.

    Fully unrestricted freedom of speech is not possible unless we radically change the way our society is structured so that there’s no privacy or private property anymore. Until then some speech will have to be restricted, might as well include any speech related to fascism as it falls within several of the categories above.


  • If I had to put a name I would say customizability and ease of use. I dual booted for several years, it started as Linux was my programming OS and everything else was on Windows, but organically I started to spend more time on Linux and at some point I noticed Windows had become my gaming system, anything else I was doing in Linux. I fiddled with Wine and some games I could get to run on Linux so I only had to reboot for some games. Then Humble Bundle gave me a few games for Linux and I found other ones that offered Linux builds like Project Zomboid and I decided “you know what? I don’t even game all that much, between Humble Bundles and Wine I can probably get enough games to keep me entertained and I don’t have to keep dual-booting” so I nuked windows from my system and a short while later Steam came to Linux consolidating my choice.

    So yeah, it wasn’t that I chose Linux it was that using both for long enough pulled me to one side. I can’t tell you exactly what pulled me, but whenever I try to use Windows everything seems so clunky and rigid that I think that played a large role. I remember several times when I had issues on one OS I would jump to the other, the issues in Linux were mostly self-inflicted (even though I didn’t knew it at the time), whereas the Windows issues were random, unpredictable and unfixable with time the Linux ones became fixable and even predictable.




  • Probably spelling, but there’s one quirk in English that makes it so you can build the arguably weirdest sentence in any language. Here’s the short version and explanation for people unaware of the 3 meanings of the word (which I’ll use 3 different spellings to make it easier to understand):

    • Buffalo is a city in USA
    • a buffalo is another name for an animal also known as a bison
    • To BUFFALO means to bother, or bully.

    So a Buffalo buffalo is a Bison from the city of Buffalo. If a Bison from Buffalo were to bother another Bison from Buffalo, you get the common example of this phrase which is Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo which means Buffalo bison BOTHERS Buffalo bison. You can add an extra Buffalo at the start to make it a headline of a newspaper telling you where this happened, but that only gives you Buffalo, Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo

    But we can make it better. See, in English you can add specifiers to a noun, the way we’re doing with Buffalo to specify this is a Bison from Buffalo, but the specification can be a full sentence. For example if we wanted to say that specify that the bison is known to bother other bisons you can call him a “bison bully” bison, or even if he’s from Buffalo and only bullies other bisons from Buffalo he’s a Buffalo “Buffalo bison bully” bison, or a Buffalo “Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO” buffalo.

    Cool, so if a Bison from Buffalo known for bullying other bisons from Buffalo is bullying yet another Buffalo bison you can say that a “Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo”… But what if the bison it’s bullying is also known to bully other bisons from buffalo? Then Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo

    But our bison might actually EXCLUSIVELY bully bisons that bully other bisons, so he’s a Buffalo bison BULLY BULLY, and if he’s from the city of Buffalo he’s a Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO. So if our heroic bison made a mistake and bullied another Bison who only bullies bullies then: Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO

    And you can keep making the sentence infinitely long by specifying that tach bison in the story is a Buffalo bison Bully bison.






  • No, in fact cars would be safer (about lighting strikes) if they had metal wheels or some metal touching the ground. Rubber is similarly insulated as air, meaning that they’re almost invisible to lightings.

    The reason why you’re safe in a car is because it’s a Faraday cage, the electricity flows around the body of the car instead of through you. That being said, exactly because the car has rubber feet it can hold quite a large charge still, so if you’re ever in a car that got hit by a lighting and the car doesn’t have a discharge (it’s common in some dry countries to have a metal chain or wire touching the ground to avoid getting shocked by your car due to static electricity), your safest bet is to touch the car against a metal pole before getting off. Because let’s say that the tires can insulate up to 10KV, the lighting might not have fully discharged and the car still be 10KV more charged than the ground, and when you touch the ground with one feet while the other is in the car you become the path of least resistance.


  • You are reading one thing and interpreting another. Both me and that link told you height is more important. What that link is telling you is that a wood gazebo in the middle of nowhere will attract lightning the same way a metal gazebo of the same height in the middle of nowhere will, so you’re not less safe in a metal gazebo than in a wooden one in isolation of one another. What I’m telling you is that if you put them side by side the metal one will be struck nearly 100% of the time.

    The myth that it is trying to counter is that you having a metal ring/watch/etc on you will make you a target over a tree or something similar.

    Lighting is not a magical thing, it’s just electricity, but it’s so much electricity that it can arc extreme distances and be conducted through things we consider non conductive. And here’s the thing, air is a much better insulator than almost anything else, so height will be the determining factor most of the time because it will always be easier for the electricity to run through 10m of wood than 9m of metal and 1m of air, but between 10m of metal and 10m of wood it’s a no contest.

    This is why you can be electrocuted inside a wooden gazebo, the tall building will offer less resistance to the lighting, and of you’re touching ground and a pillar you offer less resistance than the wood pillar. A metal gazebo is more conductive than you so it will create a Faraday cage, because the electricity will mostly prefer the metal. That is not to say you’re 100% sure to be safe there, but that’s where I would place my bet.


  • That’s wrong. Height is more important than material because air is a fairly good isolator, but electricity will always run the path of least resistance, which will invariably be the metal gazebo if they’re close enough.

    That being said, a metal gazebo can also act like a Faraday cage. The reason why a car is safe is because it’s a metal cage, electricity will flow more easily through the metal than through you so you’re safe. Wood might be less conductive than you, so the path of least resistance might go through you, making it less safe. Also trees are alive and have water inside so they’re way more conducting than a wooden gazebo.

    All of this being said, being near lighting when it strikes is not safe, as the electricity dissipates on the ground it creates massive electrical difference in the ground, and the least resistance path might be to go up your body and down the other side. Curiously if your feet are at roughly the same distance from the lighting strike you’re less likely to be electrocuted as the difference in electrical potential will be small, however if one feet is significantly closer than the other, as if you were running away from the lighting the electrical potential difference might be enough to kill you.







  • Since light cannot pass through a black hole does that mean light has mass?

    No, it doesn’t. Light is a wave. What is the weight of a musical note?

    Also why does light form a singularity in a black hole?

    It doesn’t, the singularity is the name by which the actual mass of the black hole is known by. In short singularity is the mass in the middle, black hole is the phenomenon caused by that mass, but they’re mostly the same thing.

    Is that like a fixed point on a map or something?

    Sorta, think of a black hole like a drain emptying a huge pool, you can feel it sucking the water the closer you are to it. The singularity is the drain, but from the outside you can feel the water being pulled from much farther away, and that’s the black hole.

    And can you travel to that fixed point after the black hole has its way with it?

    What point? The singularity? No. That is the black hole, it’s like asking whether you can travel to the sun after the star had its way with it, you’re using two words that mean the same as if they were different things.

    And if the velocity of a black hole is so intense that it exceeds the speed of light, then would that mean we have a new speed to consider?

    Black holes don’t have any velocity, they just are. Think on the drain example I gave, the drain is not moving, but the water around it is.

    If so can you explain what speed is that is faster than light?

    No speed is faster than light. Again, light is a wave, not a physical object, imagine the drain again, you’re making ripples in the water, and you see that those ripples get near the drain and are “pulled down”, you might conclude that the ripples are attracted to the hole, but in reality it’s just that the medium they’re moving on (water) is being pulled into it and so ripples on that medium get dragged along.


  • Cool, that looks like a beefy system for that price, glad to see options, but:

    • It doesn’t list sizes, mini ITX is usually significantly larger than the Steam Machine.
    • Are they shipping it with SteamOS and will they support it? The page seems to imply it’s coming bare and pointing you to a tutorial on how to install it yourself and marking that as a positive.
    • Will it have CEC? I see no mention of it anywhere.
    • Will it support low power standby and fast resume? Especially during games? I know that’s mostly a software thing, but are they making sure it’s supported here?
    • Can it be woken from that state with a controller?
    • Does it have an internal steam controller antenna?
    • Or a wifi one?
    • Or a Bluetooth one?

    Looks like a good build considering current pricing, but realistically it’s missing a bunch of the core features of the Steam Machine that seems to fly over people’s heads