wazoox

There are industrial machines such as steam hammers that have been in constant use for more than a century.

Ah, it's flying Paris to Bogota in a 1 aisle, 4 seats per rank regional plane, pretty unusual if you ask me :)

I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours...

And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.

Lots of things to think about in there. One of them : science (and technology) isn't neutral.

England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe".

(And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).

OTOH my OnePlus 5T is more than 9 year old now, and still perfectly usable (I changed the battery once).

Ah ah I'm also a NEdit fan. Still using XNEdit at times (the version that supports UTF-8, https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit ), because I've written so many small tools in its weird built-in language.

For several years I've even hosted the nedit.org website :)

Yep, it was a "pre-MSX" like a couple of other machines like the Spectravideo SV-328... My first computer was a Casio PB100 (with the 1.5KB extension, so much memory! :D ), then the Sony HB75 (an MSX).

Funny, I rode many steam trains and I love it. I even plan trip at places specifically to enjoy an obsolete, stinking, smoky ride :)

An excellent reminder Jancovici makes in his climate presentations, is that the difference between 1950 climate and the last Ice Age is only 4 to 5°C. Obviously, 8 billion humans wouldn't be able to live in the last Ice Age.

A more indirect analogy is body temperature : having your body temperature 2°C above normal is a pretty bad fever; at 4°C, your life is in immediate danger; anything over that you're seriously harmed or dead.

You don't even need to unscrew the motor : simply pull one-handed the seat release lever, and leave with both the seat and the motor attached.

I won't easily pardon the US and Israel for making me pine for Iran.

In France, where we have relatively cheap and clean energy, they plan to build GW DCs with GWs setups of diesel backup generators. When these will run, the pollution will be staggering.

ifconfig is still the standard on *BSD, MacOS and other Unixen. Plus its output is more readable on Linux than ip IMO, because it adds a blank line between interfaces.

In case it can help, you don't need to install Microsoft authenticator. FreeOTP+, Aegis etc will do just as well.

Annoyingly many useful tools like the "Page Assist" browser extension or "Murmure" are plug-and-play only with Ollama...

There is no autocompletion, that's not realist. I never type "apt-get install nginx" I type "apt-g<tab> ins<tab> ngi<tab>"

Being too poor to buy professional software, with Rodney Zack's book in hand I wrote myself a Z80 assembly in MSX BASIC in 1986/87 :) That was my first tough programming stint ever...

I think Slackware would have been a good fit, and much easier to install :)

I have one (ANKER IIRC?) that looks very much like this, but with two-position buttons that actually cut power, and USB3.0 level connection on all ports I tried. Also comes with the proper power supply for the barrel power connector. I suppose this one is a knock-off of mine :D

In the 90s, at SGI (at least in France) they had Macs as workstations for tasks that didn't require or weren't compatible with an expensive SGI computer (like running MS Office or sending faxes). They switched to SGI Indy and O2 (running SoftWindows95 to run MS Office) at some point around 95/96, but that was a pretty expensive option, and Softwindows95 was a dog unless you had a really fast R10000 O2.

In Aliens (the second episode), the automatic cannons are controlled by a pair of Grid Compass.

Actually were a prop in Aliens :)

In Stefan Wul's SF novel "Nyourk", octopi evolve to become the Earth's dominant species, which was quite prescient back in 1957, when almost nobody knew octopi to be intelligent. :)

I miss nntp newsgroups :)

I've already disabled Play Protect ages ago because it kept removing apps I had installed through F-Droid. Actually, I almost only install apps via F-Droid. I wonder if the ADV will install with Play protect disabled ?

The process is as follows :

1° the wasp digs a hole in soft ground

2° it paralyses a caterpillar (some other species use different worms, or beetles, as their victims; but each species of wasp targets one precise species of caterpillar or bug and cannot use any other food source for its larvae than the one it's genetically programmed to catch).

3° it carries the caterpillar into the hole

4° it lays its egg on the caterpillar, far from the head

5° it closes the hole with dirt

6° the egg hatches in the dark, and the larva feasts on the paralysed caterpillar, eating it alive.

If you pull out the caterpillar while the wasp turns around to lay its egg, it doesn't interrupt itself. IIRC even if you take the caterpillar while it's flying to the hole, it still proceeds to the end, without the caterpillar (which makes no sense at all, showing it's a purely reflex activity, without any intelligence).

Se for instance https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3462

(Jean-Henri Fabre was a marvellous writer, and the English translation is very good).

There are many such mysterious mysteries in evolution. Some wasps paralyse a caterpillar of a particular species by stinging it very precisely in its nervous centres, then carries the caterpillar into the nest it previously dug out, lay its egg on the caterpillar then close the hole to never come back.

This is a completely automatic, unintelligent behaviour; if you remove the paralysed caterpillar at any point in the process the wasp simply goes on with its business (it will close its nest without any caterpillar inside, where the larva will die out from lack of food).

In the late 19th century, Jean-Henri Fabre studied these wasps (and many other strange insects) and had a copious correspondence with Charles Darwin on this very matter. His books are absolutely fascinating (ditto the letters Darwin and him exchanged).

Please explain how we run AC to avoid our forests burning, agricultural fields and orchards from drying, and the Mediterranean ecosystem from collapsing.

We must stop using fossil fuels as fast as possible, globally.

For more serious information, in my work PC I have a cache SSD which is a 2009 Intel 32GB, it got more than 46 TB of writes over 67000 hours of uptime, and is still working fine.