Reminds me of learning in the 90s. Giant “Learn C++” book, me adding 75 sticky notes around the edges…

It probably wasn’t a good book, but it’s the one the local bookstore had so…

Text editor is EDIT.COM ;)

Nope, haha. OpenSuse is old.

This is an amazing graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

OpenSuse comes from Suse which comes from Jurix and Slackware. There’s a dotted line from Redhat, because of the use of the RPM format, but that is as far as their interbred. Many people consider it one of the OG distros.

Arch sprang from the aether later, but one could argue it owes Gentoo for its concept (also a dotted line there).

Debian is an OG. It, Redhat, and Suse are approximately the same age.

Slackware on the other hand just keeps going.

The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.

I thought GCC dropped support for compiling to the abacus?

Only 7?

And the grift goes on

Doubly so for being a trans brick

I want to take that through airport security in the US. ;)

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

1988 was peak old school wiretapping. Like, physical connection to a phone line and a guy in a van. Still doable, but doesn’t scale well. Remember the crazy people that would unplug their phone when they weren’t calling anyone because the microphone could be on…

It wasn’t until the 90s with digital communications that people started being concerned with the possibility of mass wiretapping. See the Echelon NSA conspiracy theories and such.

But we are all wiretapped now all the time and do so willingly. Hey Siri…

I digress. Calvin definitely has a van parked outside. Or at least he can imagine he does, which is close enough.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Notably absent: Russia, North Korea

Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.

Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.

No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _

Very true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.

Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.

That alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.

Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.

If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.

Didn’t notice until you said anything. Getting too used to jpeg

Very very

Not since like 2010. Unless you’re still using spinning disks somewhere in an old NAS in a closet.

Well, okay, might also depend on your definition of strong.

I wash as I cook. Usually you have moments when you’re waiting anyway. Means I have serving dishes only afterwards.

Had to make it a habit though in order to force myself to do it. Took years to train the habit.