somat

Your amounts are off. that wikipedia page lists the f-15 as having a service ceiling of 65,000 feet. Perhaps irrelevant but a f-15 shot a satellite down once(not relevant because that is more the missiles capabilities than the planes, which is probably the relevant point)

Unit mix up?

The f-16 however, does have a surprisingly low ceiling, there are fighter pilot memes about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koEQp8ImlnI?t=643 something about having small wings, get above 30,000 feet and it's not happy.

It is the age old conflict, what is better a verb focused or noun focused world.

Is the core the database(the filesystem) and the apps roam around in it, or is the core the apps each with their own database.

I grew up with noun focused operating systems, which is probably why I prefer them. Here are your things and you can use various actions on them(some valid some not). And as such find the verb focused ones unpleasant to use. Here are your actions each includes it's things. But where are my things? It does not matter, each action knows where it's correct things are. But I want my things, I know they are in there somewhere. (fights the phone for a while)

I always liked the ipfs concept of a multihash where a hash algorithm id is stored with the hash, I don't know how well it worked in practice, but in theory all applications of the protocol are now forced into a world where there are multiple hash formats and it can and will change.

LLM's when leaned on too heavily, have a tendency to destroy critical thought, or perhaps more accurately replace it.

It is similar to a spell checker, while spell checkers improve spelling in general, they do not improve a persons spelling ability. Instead acting as a crutch. No need to spell well when the machine will do it for you.

Some people really like expanding their thoughts via LLM prompt. Some so much it acts like a big crutch, no need to think coherently, the machine will do it for you. So they use the LLM for everything.

As a related tangent something is messed up in my web browser spell checker, it gives the red squiggles indicating a misspelling, but refuses to give suggested corrections. I would fix it but... My spelling ability has never been better than it is right now.

"why did the ship crash?"

Unpatched bug, wrong color lights.

Yes, it is a bit of a stretch, I desperately hope programmable navigation lights are not a thing. And I also don't think every bug needs a CVE. But in the correct context nearly any bug could be critical.

My theory is satellite retrieval, Not ours, theirs. Play the long game, year two of a three year mission, do a little unannounced orbital dance, somebody's spy satellite has a unexpected failure, while really it is now in the rf shielded environment of the x-37's payload bay. Year three, bring it down for study.

Yeah, probably way to much science fiction there, way too many things would go wrong, and spy satellites tend to have huge antenna have fun trying to stuff that in a rather small payload bay. However... One of the space shuttle mission profiles was to deorbit a satellite. Officially, the space shuttle never did this. But I think the airforce really liked the idea and wanted to retain the capability.

Spectrwm(rather obscure, but I like it) has a free window mode for things like this. where free windows are in all workspaces. Define some hotkeys for the special app invocation and perhaps add a protected region to keep normal windows out.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

And a rendered manual https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/spectrwm/spectrwm.1.en.ht...

I had fun figuring it out one day, but the way I use the computer it did not provide much utility. so my config stays rather stock.

I think that is the exact benefit to tiles.

For me it the epiphany was that I either want one full screen window, or several windows side by side, I never want one window to obscure another window. And with our modern wide monitors I almost always want several windows side by side. Why do I have to line them up by hand?

The downside is that there are many poorly programmed applications that are unable to adjust themselves as the window manager requires(calling you out steam, or it just may be me but steam was not happy with a tiling wm), and model dialogs, which always suck, suck even more when tiling. But most tiling wms's support a float mode for just that occasion.

Tiles were a common early metaphor, And I think tiles are generally more useful but floats looked cooler in the ad copy and so that is what ended up as the dominant desktop metaphor.

On the subject of one window partially obscuring another window the only tech that makes that halfway tolerable is "don't raise on click" and "point to focus" This lets you look at the upper window while manipulating the lower window. two features not found on the major desktop systems. X11 has it's warts, and is very weird. But it is miles ahead in actual usability over it's peers.

There are login-group options which lets you have a single sign on with a group of repos, To unify the other bits it looks like it would be possible to change the main menu links to the central repo(in the web settings).

Never wanted to do what you want but it sounds possible

set up the fossil server on a directory of repos probably with --repolist to get a list

    fossil server --repolist /var/fossil/

get all repos in the same login-group

change the menus in each repo to point to the core repo. Based on some quick tests I suspect a full http:// url is required.

    - Forum     /forum       {@2 3 4 5 6}
    + Forum     https://mydomain.org/core/forum       {@2 3 4 5 6}

In fossil's case, every instance includes those features, this makes the social platform "the web itself"

Having said that, there are central hosting projects, but where that has some value with git, git proper is distributed and does not need it but all the auxiliary stuff does. with fossil it provides almost no value. All the auxiliary stuff is built in so all it provides is a place to host. Which is fair but hosting is not hard with fossil.

https://chiselapp.com/

With everything included in fossil I abuse it as a personal social platform(think discord) super easy to host and it gets me chat, forums, wiki, and file storage. None of them great, but it is so easy I don't really care. voice and video do require an additional service, so there is that. Now I just need to find some friends...

There is openoffice base https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sdatabase/mai...

I am not going to claim it is any good, it suffers from the same problem most rapid application toolkits have, the easy stuff is easier, the hard stuff is harder. I was playing around at one point to see if it was worth using as a graphical interface to a postgres database. And... it worked. But in the end I preferred writing web applications. As much as I hate web dev it was better than the RAD jank.

Another interesting way to consider it is that a sunburn is a really mild case of radiation sickness.

Or the other way radiation sickness is the deepest worst sunburn you have ever had.

Noita is mad, in the best sort of way.

So it is this very hard amalgamation of rogue and powder toy that controls like terreria, Very hard, With none of that silly meta progression nonsense you find in most roguelikes, But you push through, get good and beat it. Guess what? That was at most 10% of the game(probably closer to 1%), the other 90% is deliberately obtuse, hidden and optional. What sort of madmen make 90% of their game a easter egg?

Deus Ex Used MOD, At least I think they were mod, There were a fair number of what was basically MIDI + samples formats.

Also while trying to get my facts straight (All I remember was trying to find a mod player to play the deus ex music found on the cd) apparently Unreal tournament and tyrian2000 used mod music as well, Someone at Epic Megagames must have liked them.

Roundabouts often have stop signs, usually when you really need to slow traffic down(lots of pedestrian use)

Reminder that technically a 4-way stop is the smallest possible roundabout.

Sigh, webcams, at one point they were solved. How far we have fallen.

Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.

And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.

So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"

The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.

Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.

I suspect the danger of pivoting into a pure fashion design is that even in the fashion market people crave a little authenticity. Perhaps you never run but you like the idea and so buy running shoes. do you get the fake running shoes or the real ones?

The other one I have noticed is work boots. With a complex market interaction. Real work boots are expensive, built to survive in an adverse environment. However people crave something with substance. So there is a large customer base buying them for fashion. The manufacturer notices this and start to reduce quality(no need to build them so well if the customer won't notice) and you end up with an expensive boot that sucks. The (much smaller) real customer base, the workers, do start noticing and slowly start moving to a different brand, the fashion customers eventually pick up on this and follow. the whole process can take decades.

If we are doing a survey of self hosted video conferencing services I would like to propose galene. Very easy to set up, I run it on obsd(an unsupported platform) and it just works.

https://galene.org/

For what it's worth(not much) On OpenBSD swap is always encrypted, With or without full-disk encryption. I don't know why linux always has to make the easy things hard.

A skit

Boss enters, enthusiastic hand gestures

dev: Web 2.0? what the hell are you on about?

Boss: evasive mumbling

dev: Oh... css border-radius Sure, I will get right on it.

I just got nerd sniped by the room map in the movie, it is a minor 30 second scene where the clerk shows the guests a map of the hotel so they can pick their room.

The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.

However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".

Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"

This is the source of my favorite border dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...

In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.

Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.

"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."

We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.

Yeah, insisting on "only" shell is weird, shell is at heart a process orchestrater, and denying it it's processes is rejecting most of it's functionality. It is equivalent to saying "do this in python, but you are not allowed to use any modules"

Without processes shell is just a weird sad little language, with them it turns into this epic data flow language. With some real design stinkers, Most of these are due to it's interactive first focus, The features desirable for interactive use, often start to stink for stored program use, I will note that having the same language for interactive and scripting is pretty kick ass.

On the subject of dataflow languages has there been any research in this area? Something that can stitch together processes as well or better than shell? Perl may work in this role but I have to admit I really dislike it's syntax, and as such I never learned Perl enough to love it. and while most other scripting languages can technicaly create pipelines, it is very awkward compared to shell.

Very depressing, and I believe it.

I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)

My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.

It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.

Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.

Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.

Boy it would be nice however.

On that note, I remember reading how some phones were able to use the headphone jack as a serial debug port, which is pretty neat.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Serial_debugging/Cable_sc...

It is sort of like english spelling, we all know spelling in english sucks(So pointlessly difficult we have contests centered around the skill), we also all know we can do nothing to fix it. Still gonna complain about it however.

The fundamental problem in music notation is that it was designed for an 8 note system and we use a 12 note system. It's.. fine I guess, they got those extra four notes in there and millions of people read music with no problems. But it does create a lot of confusion for novice readers who now think those 8 notes are somehow more important than the other 4 or that the sharps and flats are somehow half notes(they are not, all 12 are equally spaced on a log scale) and don't even get me started on the confusing terminology, there are 12 notes in an octet, semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.

With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.