vimacs2

Well I would argue that gasoline is in fact still the "best" option if by "best" you mean the fuel source that balances energy density, ease of storage, and combustibility. Yes, it is environmentally unfriendly but so is the very notion of billions of personal vehicles to begin with, even if they were fully electric (which we are several decades from plausibly achieving).

At the end of the day, Excel is spreadsheet software. This is a class of product that is very old and there are few major innovations really left, which is also why Excel remains the leader. When you have a technology that has matured to such an extent, you are now chasing the margins in terms of improvement and that is where the largest and most well funded companies hold the advantage.

However the next step beyond a simple spreadsheet, the desktop database is still a sector that is quite nascent, especially in terms of products catered towards lay people. As you mentioned, currently databases are not particularly user friendly to the non-technical crowd but products like Notion are making such things more accessible. That is the area where I can envision something emerging that makes Excel or the very notion of spreadsheet software itself obsolete.

No argument from me there. People should stick to using Excel for it's intended use though I would argue it's in some ways a massive credit to it that despite all of it's obvious shortcomings in many other usecases, non-programmers find it so intuitive that they try to use it as a general purpose programming platform.

I can see why that would be annoying but it's a tradeoff between how many people would find the automatic categorization of a cell useful vs how many would find it a nuisance. I'm not a spreadsheet wiz but I'm pretty sure it would allow you to set a column to interpret input as raw text.

I love shitting on M$ as much as the next neckbeard but how is Excel terrible? It is still the world standard when it comes to GUI spreadsheet software and all of the other competitors are at best acceptable facsimiles up till they reach a certain cell count that Excel is capable of far exceeding.

No argument from me on Teams though. That is a dumpster fire.

Don't worry, if it ever came to that, Bill Gates himself will swoop in to protect his beloved Microsoft with his futuristic super yacht that is transformable into a giant battle mech[1].

1. I made it up.

All nation states repress their whole population by definition. You could argue about differences in degree but while the USA might not be as repressive to it's own population as the Chinese (or Russians) are, the reach of their repression is global in nature.

Most liberal democracies operate this way in fact. They offer their own citizens a modicrum of freedom - a mix of the substantive and performative - but bolster their own economic and political might through imperialism abroad. The only difference between the Europeans and Americans in this regard is the former rely mostly on "soft" power and economic represssion while the USA have a more overtly militant approach.

This does not mean that liberal democracies are not an improvement over the monarchies and fuedal states that preceeded them but lets not pretend that they are not still pretty terrible to anybody that's not either wealthy themselves or the most profitable group for the representatives currently in power to appeal to.

Considering how shit their cents per listen rates are in recent years, they should honestly be trying to compensate the artists they host more than their devs at this point. I've cancelled my sub largely because of this fact.

So it's somewhat akin to the Library of Babel but instead of the set of all possible books, it's the set of all possible functions :p

M type dwarfs can easily have a lifespan in the main sequence spanning many trillions of years with even their red giant phases estimated to outlasting even the main sequence of stars of our size.

A steller mass black hole's estimated lifespan would of course make even these seem like an eyeblink by comparison.

Curious if the same people getting upset about her words were similarly upset when Richard Stallman said after hearing of Steve Job's death "I'm not glad he's dead but I'm glad he's gone".

That's an impressive level of hubris. I hope you're aware that the extent to which a gene can propogate is only loosely correlated with subjective metrics like "fitness" and "superior" traits on to it's host organism. Otherwise, we wouldn't have crippling genetic disorders around after nearly 4 billion years of evolution.

Also, can we please oh please not project this liberal meme of the "free market" on to Nature. Nature doesn't have "better" or "worse" ideas and it certainly doesn't have markets - at least till we came around.

> - Since the process produces magnetically charged plasma, steam turbines are not necessary, a solution of directly harvesting energy with electromagnets was proposed.

But wouldn't that require aneutronic fusion to be viable? I had thought that the prevalence of neutron radiation otherwise would have made directly tapping the plasma for electricity impractical.

I know it's a meme at this point but I wonder if Deep Learning could possibly brute force patterns in the 150 years of data that the Noetic sciences have accumulated.

They keep finding a small but statistically significant effect and even performing every possible means to tamper or bias proof the experiments, the effect remains. On top of that, there is absolutely no coherent scientific model to account for this so currently the most probable explanation is still that there is some unaccounted for environmental influence causing the effect.

It's frankly frustrating which is why I kind of fell out of interest in the entire field.

This. It has less to do with personal character and more to do with the incentives baked into the company.

Think the OP is right on this one actually. If you're struggling financially, this is functionally equivilent to criminalising poverty regardless of the steps involved. It's also frankly bullshit that a corporation can charge a toll for all live television broadcasts in a country even when it has no bearing on their own content.

Simple solution: Put all of their shite behind an id system and charge a fee for that. Don't monopolise fucking live tv as if it runs off the stored farts of Jimmy Saville.

That was not clear to me at all from the context but maybe I lack reading comprehension.

Otherwise, I think we are in agreement.

The devil doesn't require an advocate.

Yeah, cute to spin it this way but it's more like the military kills a terrorist and also a large number of civilians surrounding that terrorist and then half of the media play apologetics for an operation that essentially caused the deaths of innocent people - with terrorist deaths as a rounding error.

The last problem the American people have is that they're too anti-war. It's literally the opposite.

>paid reparations

Not sure how well that aged now that the US essentially took all the money from the Afghan central bank.

Also, there have been leaked documents showing that the US would delibrately target ambulances and civilian infrastructure. I don't understand why anybody would take the US military's word as gospel without substantial evidence (and no, apologising and paying reparations after controversy is not compelling evidence that these actions were not delibrate).

Just an FYI, NoScript is made largely redundant with uBlock Origin since if you enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings, it will allow you to selectively block or allow third party scripts and frames.

uBlock Origin makes this pretty easy actually. You just have to enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings and it turns into a more user friendly NoScript, with an easy way to save settings for specific sites that require third party scripts or frames to function.

As the creator himself says, uBlock Origin is not just an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum blocker.

Not the same thing at all. Smartphones have reached the point where further improvements are largely superficial for years now. Pinephone's price point is only possible because of over a decade of the proliferation of cheap smartphone components.

Consumer VR headsets are nowhere close to that point. The Quest 2 is right at the edge of usably clear text for work - with a price point that is only possible through the backing of a giant corporation desperately gambling their future on their whole metaverse shtick.

Trying to do better means requiring optics and display technology that is going to drive that price point up, especially for a hackable headset that is automatically going to rule out monetisation through user data.

tldr: nobody should care about providing cheap hardware to entitled "hackers" at their own loss. Hardware doesn't grow on trees.

No need to be an ass. Also, you're quoting the limited edition price which seems to amount to aesthetics and priority shipping.

Elsewhere on this page, you literally said that you would have been happy to have paid 2000 for the quest 2 - which this device would utterly dogpile both in terms of optics and raw power.

Cute though that you feel the need to paint the completely normal aversion to having a corporation having the ability to depth scan your surroundings at all times as tin foil hat territory.

I'd rather you skip the hysterics and just "give up" if you have nothing constructive to say.

P.S. I own a Quest 2.

I just think your comment just signals ignorance of the industry. They're targeting this headset for people who are looking for a portable vr workstation with an angular resolution high enough to simulate 1080p monitors.

How exactly are they going to achieve the visual specs to achieve that at the price point you're expecting?

They are never going to sell something like this at high volume, not only because the market for it isn't there yet but because this goes beyond the specs of consumer level headsets - which means they wouldn't be able to source the required components to even address such a hypothetical demand.

Well you can hide the rest of the buffer and focus on a specific part of a file with the narrow-to-* functions (defun, region, or page).

However, this plugin seems to be a little fancier and instead creates different buffers for each selection. The analogous feature set in Emacs are indirect buffers. Try binding a key to run the clone-indirect-buffer and narrow-to-region commands in sequence.

This library might help too: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NarrowIndirect

Easy to justify that one: the amount of deaths prevented from gang crime attributable to cannabis trade would far outstrip any potential harm caused by legalisation.

Besides, that's not a good way to look at it. The better question is why criminalise an activity that does no harm to others?

I'm not even pro cannabis - I recently decided to go completely cold turkey since I realised I was essentially self medicating for other deeper issues and cannabis just gives me brain fog - but I think your comment is pretty nonsensical.

If your brother in law transitioned from marijuana all the way to heroine, chances are his drug abuse was a symptom of deeper underlying problems, not the cause. The solution is education, not criminalisation.

I generally like Gnome but I do find the lack of consideration for extensions when making updates more than a little frustrating.

For context, I use Arch so whenever I do a system upgrade which includes a gnome package, it often results in me having an unpleasant experience the next time I have to reboot and suddenly all my customizations are missing till the extensions get updated to have compatibility with the new gnome version.

I generally like the UI paradigm that Gnome has (including the lack of desktop icons) but certain things are a nuisance such as the lack of system trays without extensions. I fail to see exactly what I'm gaining from their absence especially in the context of apps not built specifically for Gnome - such as steam and many torrent clients.

I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not but rest assured, the sociopaths that hoard the IP behind the vaccines have all but guaranteed that there will be plenty of opportunities to study these alleged "positive health applications" at the back of the global south.

Sarcasm nonwithstanding, it took over 12000 years of technological advances for agricultural societies to catch up to their palaeolithic bretheran in terms of average life expectancy and even metrics like height.

I'm not a primitivist by any means (I'm using a pc right now as it so happens) but we continue to have a lot to learn from modern hunter gatherer societies both in terms of social organisation and food consumption.