zehaeva

I always thought that such things were an urban legend of unix/linux environments. "Be careful with your commands! You too could nuke your entire installation!". When I was in college (some 20 years ago) I rolled my eyes every time I heard some old timer wag his finger and recount of sometime some new hire managed to destroy days/weeks/months of work by running rm -rf.

And then, one day, at work I was advising a junior engineer. He were having issues with a software build process that he was tasked with documenting. I explained what went wrong, what he can do to correct for that, and to try again. He said okay and while I stood there, looking over his shoulder, typed rm -rf . and hit enter faster than I could shout "NO!".

I just stood there and laughed for a good 5 minutes before I was able to catch my breath and explained to him why his machine was unresponsive.

Didn't one strain of the flu become extinct during the pandemic because we masked up and staying away from each other for a year? One would think that if we just kept that up we'd get rid of all the others.

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strai...

Your post has reminded me of Vimes’s Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness[0], but I can't figure out if you think that the way the system works is a good thing or more just "this is the way the world works"

[0] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

>We agree that liquid water is wet because we can't find anything (yet) that says liquid water is not wet, it's simple as that and science is ultimately as simple as that.

I find this a weird example of something that has "Enough evidence such that no evidence to the contrary can stand."

"Water is wet" is a definition, not a scientific finding/description. "Water tends to adhere to, and penetrate, materials." That's sort of a scientific finding. "We call this condition wet" isn't so much.

Science, by Popper's definition, is something that can be falsified but has not yet been so. If no evidence could contradict our current findings then, by definition, our current findings are not falsifiable.

I realize that I'm quibbling about definitions, I guess I just want to point out that your level of evidence is dangerously close to being a self reinforcing tautology. Similar to how any religion justifies itself.

I'm not sure the SR is really that large of a paradigm shift.

All Einstein did, I know that conceptually this was a large leap and just saying "all he did" is doing him a severe disservice for his contributions, is note that the mass of an object is dependent upon the speed of the object. Such that for velocities that are not an appreciable fraction of c we can use Newton's laws of gravitation perfectly well.

TLDR; Einstein did not replace Newton, he tweaked him.

I do agree them pressing the SaaS angle feels bad. Once I found out about the stack that the RM is built on I was blown away, I definitely had a moment of "why are they hiding this?". I told a few others in my office (we're software engineers) and everyone was completely unaware that this was an option. They really do bury the capabilities of the hardware.

It feels like a tax on the less technical/informed.

You probably could, but you'd have to find a way to port the display stack or write your own.

Edit: here's one of the big sites for 3rd party software for the remarkable https://toltec-dev.org

Edit2: Here's someone running doom on the RM https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/gkktxy/de...

The RM runs on linux and they hand you the admin password. I'm not sure how much more open you can get. Just SSH into the device and then use one of the 3rd party stacks for syncing.

Good news for you! The ReMarkable is build on Linux and you can direct access to the whole system via SSH!! They even give you the su password so you can do _anything_ you want with it!

You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.

But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!

This is entertaining to game out the idea that anything that happened digitally more than 7 years ago just disappears. A rolling Nothing that just eats anything that's 7 years in the past. A Great Oubliette into which we just toss anything from 7 years ago.

I think this would make an interesting dystopian novel.

There's a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up "channels" of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.

It's not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it's pretty close!

[0]: https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

I spent some 13 years working for a manufacturing firm writing custom management software for a similar sized manufacturing company. I now work for a SaSS firm in a different industry with a few hundred clients.

The thing that I learned from this is you either buy off the shelf software and run your company the way that the software company thinks you should run your business. You can, like some of our clients, fight the software and figure out all the janky work arounds you want, but ultimately you are bound by that software.

Or, you can write your own software and run your company the way you want it to run, with all the weird quirks of your business.

I get why smaller companies/firms buy software instead of rolling their own. It's a huge amount of overhead for little apparent benefit. It's worse when the software vendor isn't helpful or attentive to your needs.

My gut would be to say find a few software engineers you trust, hopefully with experience doing EDIFACT files (I've done this myself and the specs are a bear to dig through). I have this feeling mostly due to the unresponsive software vendor and your operating in a small niche.

For attracting talent, pay them well, and make them feel appreciated, and listened to. You'll be running a tight ship with very few points of failure (the bus factor), just one or two people leaving could paralyze your operation. You don't want the software people to start looking for jobs elsewhere in such a small department. My previous employer did not do well in that department and lost 90% of their software staff in a 3 year time span. And when your department is 4-5 people that's devastating.

I don't want to be snarky, but I do seriously wonder how many people really cared about calculus when Newton/Leibniz developed it. It honest couldn't have been more than a handful because Newton slept on it for the better part twenty years.

I honestly think Math as a field has always been defined by "problems that only a handful of people care about".

The only exception I can think about is maybe basic addition and multiplication.

If we're concerned with traffic throughput then shouldn't we just increase the allowed speed? Why even have a limit in the first place?

I don't understand your point about having to slow down to follow at a safe distance. If I pull onto a highway and find myself _right_ behind someone I can decrease my speed by one or two mph to fall back to a safe following distance. How is that not safe? The car behind me, who should already be either already at a safe distance or adjusting their own distance should have no issues here.

What I think you mean to say is that because you're assuming that everyone else on the road is behaving in an unsafe manner you believe that you, too, have to behave in an unsafe manner. This simply is not the case.

Slowing down isn't an option?

Okay, but that's not the scenario that was being discussed.

At least you're honest about it, thank you!

To be honest, I have driven in the EU, but really only on a technically. I rented a car when I visited a Spanish island and really only drove a hundred or two km.

That said, I'm not talking about what people do, I'm talking about what is considered safe.

I do the same in my Subaru, even at the furthest, the safe distance is choose is no where near the 300feet(approximately 20 car lengths). It's closer to 8 car lengths.

I'm sorry, did you want an exhaustive list of the roads I've driven? How many times I have driven out west? Which routes? For how long? That's a ridiculous thing to expect from a random on a forum. Should I list out all of the 10+ hour trips I've driven to satisfy you? What level of experience would cause you to retract your simplistic dismissal of my option?

Also, you did not read my post. I specifically said that over the course of those long miles 10mph will cost you 2-3 hours. I literally said that in my post.

You also missed the part where I suggested that no one should be driving for 21 hours, let alone 18.

Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.

I mean, I have been driving for the last 30 years of my life, I've driven most of the north east of the US. Through highways, timber roads that are little better than muddy paths, country roads that have never been paved, and pretty much everything in between. I've driven 15 hours straight. I've driven up mountains and across (really small) rivers.

Between all the vehicles I've driven in my life I've accrued, got I hate that I know this number off the top of my head, around 350k miles.

So yeah, I do have experience with such roads.

A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue.

By that logic, that the time vehicles are on the road are necessarily limiting capacity of the system, then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?

I mean, it's only 3 times the kinetic energy (over 70mph), so any crash would be that much more dangerous/deadly. It's also very wasteful with respect to fuel, so you'd need to stop more often which would decrease your average speed.

Regardless, all of you all drive way too fast as is. It's not safe, it's not efficient.

This is the only answer that I've seen that's reasonable so far!

You're adding on a whole lot of edge cases onto an edge and coming to a conclusion that you think is best.

Some guy is shutting you out of the lane next to you, slow down and merge behind them.

How close do you find yourself to the truck in front of you?

Safe follow distances are, At 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately 300 feet. I'd be kind of shocked that you're getting stones hitting you and detectable fumes 300 feet away.

Why will you _want_ to pass? Is that 10mph going to get you there _that_ much faster?

If you were to follow that truck for all 1300 miles of 395 you would get to your destination 3 hours later than if you were going 70mph the whole way.

I would doubt that anyone would want to drive for nearly 19 hours straight, unless you're doing some sort of cannonball run like challenge.

If your destination is a mere 120 miles away, and you followed him the whole way you'd get there only 18 minutes faster. Was it really that important to get there that much faster?

If they're going so much slower than the limit that it's unsafe, wouldn't it be easy to pass at the regulated limit?

If they're going just a _little_ bit slower than the limit, why pass them? Are you telling me that 3kmph, or even 10kmph, slower than the limit is slow enough to make an appreciable difference to your everyday driving?

If all vehicles are limited in the same way I am uncertain how this could even happen.

If the computer enforced max speed is 120km, and I'm going 120km, and the vehicle coming up is also going 120km, they can't overtake you, they can't close the gap.

Maybe, if the vehicle ahead of both of you is going much slower than either of you then yeah, they could close the gap. But even in that situation you could speed up to the max speed, matching that of the approaching vehicle, and merge. You'd still need to slow down to match the vehicle ahead, but so too would the one behind you, regardless of what you were going to do.

So if every car is following the speed limit, that is going as fast as they are allowed, why would any one person be passing someone else?

So the solution to a lane ending unexpectedly is to speed up? One would imagine that slowing down or even stopping would be the correct solution there.