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Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)

> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.

400 billion dollars and a portal to hell later scientists discover evidence of the elusive spearmint.

> Writing a story in which a toaster in conscious is not even new

Fixed the link for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

(Hah. It gets eerily relevant starting at 2:37)


Its future isn't over there because it moves in that direction, instead it moves in that direction because its future lies over there.

Relatedly:

> [General Relativity] basically says that the reason you are sticking to the floor right now is that the shortest distance between today and tomorrow is through the center of the Earth.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/250800/gr-and-my...


They're Made out of Meat

- Terry Bisson, 1991

https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Radio play by Miriam Tolan and Russ Armstrong:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-...

(EDIT: the original parent was missing "rather adapting from the original")



Your EDIT is untrue, but thanks for linking to originals.

Here is Jon Benjamin reading Bisson's original text: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4>


Hmm. I could swear it wasn't there, hence my posting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry for that.

RAM disk is, like, the brd module on Linux, which allocates and exposes a /dev/ram0 block device.

From the project description this looks like it, exposing a raw block device backed by VRAM (with some trip through the nbd protocol, but that's an implementation detail to have it in userland, it could just as well have been implemented kernel side).

It's just that the usage of this mem-backed block device is different than the thing of yore (copy HD or floppy into RAM)

The more frequent alternative to brd, tmpfs, skips the block device part and does a filesystem directly. I wonder if it could be made so that it's swap directly and skip the block device part entirely like tmpfs.


As a Fastmail user, every time I have to use Gmail for work I'm aggravated by the absolute stupid UX of it which seems to have been thoroughly ruined around the Material Design era; it also seems to be unable to handle basic operations such as mass mark read or delete, or search.

Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.

The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.


I went with Fastmail just because it's not hosted in the US (they're in Australia)

All the comfort of the hemisphere least likely to suffer nuclear fallout coupled with the familiar warm embracing hug of the five eyes security panopticon.


Fastmail is an Australian company, but their servers are located in the US [0]

[0] https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280221-Ho...


They are hosted in the US, legal entity is in Australia, so nothing was gained.

Unfortunately, I remember reading that Australia now has weak privacy laws:

> The Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill (TAAB or AssAccess) require technology companies like FastMail, Google, Apple, Cisco to provide Australian law enforcement and security agencies with access to all communications without any judicial oversight, transparency, or reason. The only restrictions offered to protect people’s privacy is the vague terms “reasonable and proportionate.”

Source: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/goodbye-fastmail.html


What issues do you see? I've never had issue with any mass operation there.

> How do you deal with overcommit

    echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

> We do not have great insight as to how we ride a bicycle, and we do not have much useful advice for someone who is learning.

I indeed balked at this, finding both of those sentences wildly incorrect, as someone both having been taught as well as having taught multiple people myself.

Also: https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

It seems that it is something that is forever doomed to be forgotten and then rediscovered over and over.


What we forget is that two-wheeled vehicles drive themselves. There is a stable feedback loop built into the geometry, akin to an aircraft with a good dihedral wing. You have to force the machine to corner, then back off to allow it to do its thing. See the rider in red in the above video. He leans the bike to initiate the turn but then is actually leaning the other way once the bike is cornering/slowing due to the gyroscopic forces now pushing the bike deeper into the corner. Cornering a two-wheeled object is vastly more complex than handlebar pushes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihedral_(aeronautics)


> 2.X to 3.X (for reasons I can't recall)

Many big structural changes, IIRC bundler integration, plugins became engines, etc...

It was the big Rails+MERB merge.


Ah yes! I remember Merb now that you say it :)

I have my criticisms of Rails, but that definitely set it on a better path.


> If the ring uses Bluetooth to sync the data to your phone and the phone syncs data to the Oura servers, but the data is in the clear on your phone, then by this definition, it is not E2E encrypted.

Yet another angle would be that both the phone and the ring are in one's material possession, whereas the cloud is someone else's computer, and to display a nice web UI it has to have the data unencrypted over there.

In that case, the cloud is the potentially untrusted intermediate between the data and one's eyeballs.

All of these are equally valid, it all depends on what is your threat model.


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