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kwk1

743 karma · joined December 7, 2016

I work on engineering software in Debian, particularly in the FreeCAD ecosystem.
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kwk1··on Why you can't divide by zero
Math is like a game where you can pick the rules but you have to live with the consequences, and if we choose to define division by zero, a result is that we can prove any number equal to another, e.g. 1 = 2. This ruleset is not fruitful, so we don't do it, but it can be that a new choice unlocks interesting dynamics, like choosing a definition that allows handling roots of negative numbers.
kwk1··on America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That's Not a Coincidence
Hypothesis: population growth looks like /, while public land growth looks like - or \ (e.g. cursory search for statistic shows federal acreage drop of 4.9% from 1990 to 2018)
kwk1··on Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans
And there is a 10 year Extended LTS commercial offering for those who need it:

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

kwk1··on Apple’s first online store played a crucial role in the company’s resurgence
Hmm, so 730k * 30 = 21.9M... with $21M and $12M figures in play, there may have been a digit transposition mistake somewhere, plus maybe truncation instead of rounding... Not that those are lesser mistakes, of course.
kwk1··on Blue Lagoon geothermal spa in Iceland closes after series of earthquakes
Not sure exactly which point you're refuting, but for a long time Vikings and Danes were synonymous, as preserved in terms like Danegeld or Danelaw.
kwk1··on Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon from the Air
Direct air capture is not the only way to lower CO2 levels, although you are right that point capture of emissions doesn't lower levels by itself. An example of another technique for CO2 reduction is enhanced olivine weathering, or bioenergy + capture. These are called negative emission technologies in general.
kwk1··on Debian discusses vendoring again (2021)
> Debian b

Just FYI, although the Ubuntu version naming scheme lends itself to being abbreviated to a single letter, this isn't true for Debian: the last three releases were Bookworm, Bullseye, and Buster.

kwk1··on Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
I've heard it that way too, but the pronunciation I posted is "canonical", or at least copy-pasted from Wikipedia.
kwk1··on Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
The Pedernales River: PUR-də-NAL-iss
kwk1··on FCC wants to bolster amateur radio
> Your messages are cleartext, can be forged

Digital signatures are permissible under the current rules and in principle avoid this issue although the software tooling around it isn't there. Similar example: Debian packages are transmitted over HTTP, but this isn't a problem because they are authenticated with GPG.

kwk1··on Dune 3D – an open source parametric 3D CAD app bassed on OCCT
Unfortunately, SALOME uses CORBA.
kwk1··on Words that deserve wider use
Perhaps worth noting the term's etymology as a cousin of "meeting", and from there seeing how it can come to mean both something that's worth talking about later and something that's not worth talking about now.
kwk1··on AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer
An important distinction is that what's not allowed is "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning", not encryption altogether, which means things like digital signatures can be permissible, if the public key is available through well-known means or included as a separate part of the transmission.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-97#p-97.113(a)(4)

kwk1··on A Texas semiconductor boom on the horizon?
They've had multiple power crises recently in which survival was in question, so the particular outcome in the last one says less than the expected frequency for more borderline events in the future.
kwk1··on 'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant batteries
A watt has dimensions of energy over time. It cannot be used to express a measure of energy unless you multiply it by time, as in a watt-hour.
kwk1··on Grindr employees have 2 weeks: agree to move across the country+RTO or lose jobs
I didn't downvote, but I do see an issue that could be the cause: the statement "you can't be fired for going on strike" misses the essential difference of the law as written versus the law as enforced, ignoring the messy reality of power and who wields it. If you're fired for striking or other protected activity, you can pursue legal recourse; hopefully you can still meet needs for food, shelter, medicine, etc. This may as well be on another planet from "cannot".
kwk1··on The many issues plaguing Nix
Nix (contrasted with NixOS) can be used on macOS as an alternative to and escape hatch from the Homebrew ecosystem.
kwk1··on DietPi – Lightweight justice for your SBC
For what it's worth, plain Debian runs fine on those as well, most easily via https://raspi.debian.net/tested-images/
kwk1··on No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers
One should use `apt-file search foo.h` for this (apt-file is a separate utility from apt and requires installation)
kwk1··on The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you
It's not so surprising that regular weather patterns can be prepared for.
kwk1··on ‘It’s the Wild West’: Vienna’s spying problem spins out of control
Anglos are the people in the anglosphere. The term is often used as shorthand for "US+UK interests". It's useful because of the frequency in which those interests and actions align.

The example of the word "German" is amusing because it's kind of coincidental. There used to be more "German countries", and if unification in the 19th century had gone differently, we might still have use of a term for the collective actions of those countries. See for example the Austro-Prussian War, also known as "the German War."

kwk1··on The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you
I'm not talking about an individual problem, sometimes events cause issues that are regional in scope, not limited by ISP, and also result in degraded cell service. If you like, replace "severe" with "extreme".
kwk1··on The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you
During severe weather, when the internet goes out, I can receive video updates on the weather situation with OTA TV. Even if cell service is available, it may be spotty or overloaded, and getting this info over a broadcast instead of through a network is simply using the right tool for the job.
kwk1··on Lima: A nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac
Looks like it defaults to using `-accel hvf`, roughly analogous to KVM, so no.
kwk1··on The horrors of Pompeii
> But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever.

There's an entire meme format to this effect ("R E T V R N", imitating Latin engravings.)

kwk1··on LXD is now under Canonical
Thankfully, the latest release of Debian provides LXD via .deb packages.
kwk1··on Garum Masala
Surprisingly unmentioned from what I've seen here is the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a circa 1st century Greco-Roman sea travel log detailing a trading route from Red Sea ports to the Indian and East African coasts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea

kwk1··on Mountpoint – file client for S3 written in Rust, from AWS
Presumably you forgot the 'r': https://rclone.org/
kwk1··on Ask HN: Who's an open source maintainer/project that needs sponsorship or help?
Yes, I'm "kkremitzki", one of the founding FPA members and a FreeCAD administrator/dev.
kwk1··on Ask HN: Who's an open source maintainer/project that needs sponsorship or help?
The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA.) https://fpa.freecad.org/
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