“You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.”

“Er, five,” said the mattress.

“Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”

― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

That looks like a type of Thin film interference, like you’d see on an oil slick or a soap bubble. Wikipedia says:

Thin-film interference is a natural phenomenon in which light waves reflected by the upper and lower boundaries of a thin film interfere with one another, either enhancing or reducing the reflected light.

I’d guess the display uses a thin film on one of its layers causing this rainbow interference pattern that shifts depending on viewing angle.

One of my takeaways is that some of the people aren’t intrinsically awful, they are just un-aware or un-knowing. That some think feminism means female supremacy, or that woke is some undefinable thing they don’t like. And that with some stomach churning effort some people can be reached. I applaud those willing to try and reach them.

A bit of a meta comment/thought. Looking through the list of proposed communities, I see a few that were a “Reddit thing”, communities that would be like AskReddit, Ask Me Anything, and Today I Learned. In some sense, I wish for Beehaw to have its own identity. That it figure out its own way to do things. That might just be a differentiating choice of name for the same thing, but one that helps convey our values through the names’ connotations. Or it could be that we come up with our own ideas for communities that can cover a wide variety of topics.

In the text about our creed, Be(e) nice, I see a desire to be(e?) different. That Beehaw isn’t Reddit. I feel that should help guide the communities we create.

“…do you teach feminism?” … “No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.” … ‘She buys three kits.‘

The whole article is so enlightening.

I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.

My understanding is that a lot of the reasons for defederation stemmed from a fundamental lack of sufficient moderator tools. Tools that have not appeared and the lack of which has prompted Beehaw to consider moving to a different ActivityPub supporting platform in the fediverse.

The Newton was before its time. So many features we use our phones for today were pioneered in the PDA era.

It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.

Maybe add the old LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango to the list, it’s more comical than ‘scary’. It has a relatively recent remaster with modern controls. Some would say the original tank controls are a horror into themselves. Though looking at the ESRB rating it is T for teen.

He's been back before too, drawing a few panels of Pearls Before Swine in 2014. The artist likened it to seeing bigfoot.

Interestingly, Apple has donated the phone version of MagSafe to the Qi open wireless charging standard. Soon we’ll see a magnetically aligning wireless charging Qi2 devices from other manufacturers.

I follow the Bogleheads philosophy of investing and use the tenants of a Three-fund portfolio. I like the idea of riding the flows of the market at the lowest cost. Glancing at your list, you have some overlap between the total market and the various “cap” funds, and you don’t have any bond funds. So maybe add in some Fidelity U.S. Bond Index Fund (FXNAX) depending on how close you are to retirement.

Digging deeper, the Federal Reserve says this about it:

The FedNow Service went live on July 20, 2023. It is available to depository institutions in the United States and enables individuals and businesses to send instant payments through their depository institution accounts. The service is a flexible, neutral platform that supports a broad variety of instant payments. At the most fundamental level, the service provides interbank clearing and settlement that enables funds to be transferred from the account of a sender to the account of a receiver in near real-time and at any time, any day of the year. Depository institutions and their service providers can build on this fundamental capability to offer value-added services to their customers.

So it’s a system your bank uses to send your money to other people’s accounts at other banks. In my mind it’ll kinda be like bill pay, you’d go to your bank’s website to do it.

You can’t build chests in space, so there’s very limited buffering or surplus options.

I think the biggest change with space is that it appears that the asteroids are an infinite resource.

They are already doing that. Patherfinder 2e itself is going through a ‘remaster’ under a completely new license, it has all the OGL remnants stripped out.

For me, the Apple Watch is about reducing notifications to mere glances at my wrist. That instead of interrupting what I’m doing to pull my phone out of my pocket I can at a glance categorize what, if anything, I need to do in response to that notification. That and always accurate time to me was worth getting a watch. I upgraded from a series 3 to a series 6 when the sensor tech advanced enough to convince me to update. The 9 has some new stuff, but not enough to convince me to upgrade.

Ah, they are talking about an inertial measuring unit. Basically, by measuring all acceleration you’ve experienced you can calculate your change in position. They can’t determine absolute position though, only relative, so this doesn’t so much replace GPS as assist it.

And caffeine in the coffee would be listed in milligrams, but the alcohol in beer and spirits would be measured in percent and proof.

My MarioKart 64 cartridge probably won’t inform me that Python2.7 was deprecated.

It also won't tell you if the OpenSSL library it uses has a vulnerability or not. I program mainly as a hobby and I still wonder how containers deal with that issue.

The Steam summer sale starts June 29th, so you shouldn't have to wait long for that discount.

Universal Paperclips, mentioned in the book, is a journey. What starts as a clicker game turns into so much more. It's a free browser game, but in that old-time sense of freeware.

For Mac my backup system is a big Time Machine hard drive for local backup plus Backblaze for offsite backup. Backblaze personal backup is automatic, it just backs up most things on your computer. It doesn't do everything, skipping things like Applications and system files, but those are recoverable other ways than from offsite backup. Backblaze needs to see your computer once every 6 months, and any external hard drives you're backing up every 30 days. The initial backup can be a bit slow, but limited by your upload speed (mine was in progress for ~1 month until I upgraded my internet to fiber and it finished overnight) but after that it only uploads deltas saving on time and bandwidth. For me, between Time Machine and Backblaze I have enough piece of mind to not really worry about the backups.

Quern - Undying Thoughts tickled that genre for me. As did Haven Moon and The Eyes of Ara.

Thanks for that, I just had a nice wave of nostalgia.

The good old Unix philosophy.

Getting out to the dark and just looking up is a really good suggestion of a place to start. Turn Left at Orion is a really good absolute beginner book too, so I second that recommendation as well. One resource I'd recommend that was missing from the article is the Cloudy Nights Forums. It's one of the niche old-style forums that a lot of amateur astronomers frequent.

Sincere apologies, I typed it correctly 2/3 times and messed up on number 3. Corrected.

You replied to jarfil with the words "this post", it isn't clear if "this post" refers to jarfil's comment or to the article itself. Also, the use of "You" leads the reader to imply that the "You" is jarfil, rather than "You" meaning 'anyone who tells someone to withhold their vote for a political stance'.

Weird. That bans most marches too. 120 bpm isn't all that fast.

Luckily there’s a preprint of the article on arXiv if you want to read the source material for the article.

My basic summary would be that they have a model for how variable a quasar should be over time, and they can see a difference in that variability depending on the quasar’s redshift, the distance from us. And that difference is right around what we expect from relativity.

An umbrella that encompasses ‘today I learned’, ‘damn that’s interesting’/‘mildly interesting’ etc sounds interesting, though I don’t know what one would call it.

Perhaps just "Interesting", that seems to be a simultaneously descriptive and broad enough name.

It’s just so heartwarmingly cute.

Sure looks like an R, but I wonder if that wasn't always the idea. The shot of Deadpool in a car from the trailer is different from the screenshot on Marvel.com. Looks like they added in additional digital blood in post. Comparison here.

Ooo! You'd think a double double is 4x so at 2x the price is a steal!

All very fair points. It’s all wildly complicated, and I agree; we don’t really understand ourselves.

What are your underlying models of the world built out of?

As a Bayesian, my models of the world are built on priors. That is, assumptions I’ve made based on my existing information. From that, I make an educated guess about the world with that model and see what the world does. If my guess doesn’t match reality, I update my assumptions to rebuild my model and repeat the process until it’s close enough.

This is the way the best science is done, and I fell it’s the way that humans really work. Language is just a type of model we use to communicate the world to others, each of us may have a slightly different Bayesian understanding of the language yet we can still communicate.

Riven is quite possibly my favorite game ever. I had so much fun just wandering around immersing myself in the world.

Clan Lord. It’s a place that’s special in my heart. I’ve been playing on and off since 2001.

The game went to no monthly fees a long time ago. They only charge for new accounts and characters. If you have an old account you can just log in and play. There’s a player run news and link site here, that has a link to ‘Clieunk’, a client for modern macs and news since 2001. Though we haven’t always been the best at sending in news.