My brain makes some dumb connections. This is basically Dom Joly with his enormous mobile phone, shouting INCREDIBLY LOUDLY into it.

It is if you count your profit in terms of percentage of global profit, and then, should that break down, in terms of global wealth.

Similar to how it’s impossible to reach the speed of light, it’s not possible to reach 100% of global wealth unless you’re the only sentient being left alive, but you can get arbitrarily close. And getting closer requires more and more human suffering, as reaching light speed requires more and more energy.

Only time will tell whether the rich will (publicly) switch to this metric because so far, “Newtonian” measurements of profit have been sufficient, and fractions of global wealth generation look piddly by comparison.

This has already been a thing, but with one important twist: When sugar was first imported to Europe, only rich people could afford it, and as such, their teeth went rotten far more quickly than those of poor people.

Having black or rotten teeth was a status symbol for quite a while.

What makes you think they care about that?

“Somehow, Palpatine returned…”

You probably mean well, but this sort of “advice” annoys me. It says what to do but not how to do it. Almost like explaining it would be as hard for the advice giver as it would be for the recipient to implement it, revealing what a sham it really is. It’s practically a heckle. “Boooo! Git gud!”

Oh yeah. Trying to get Black Mesa - which is a HL2 mod that became a game in its own right - to look right on a modern Linux PC has been less than fun. Textures, lighting and shadows are messed up in many places, basically breaking the flashlight most of the time. The game is 99% there, but that other 1% is impossible to ignore. The game plays fine… when you can see.

Kind of glad I got the game on sale.

But anyway, yes I’m kind of surprised that the textures seem to be different in the two screenshots. The lighting is necessarily different because HDR isn’t well supported (if it is at all) on Linux, but I would have thought that keeping the textures in line would be something Valve would be able to do.

Many materials are biologically inert. Titanium, for example, is often used for replacement joints and doesn’t need anti-rejection drugs. They autoclave or otherwise sterilise things during the operation, so the infection risk is pretty much the same as for any other kind of operation.

I could have sworn that the last time I tried to tar-copy part of a filesystem containing hard links that I ended up with copies everywhere rather than preservation of the hard links, and the tar manual page isn’t particularly clear about it at all.

But it looks like I’ve misremembered because a quick test with tar confirms that it detects and saves hard links, and they unpack correctly too. Now I’m wondering precisely what it was that I was doing where I ended up with all those copies.

Edit: disregard this. I have gotten my wires crossed somewhere.

tar cannot preserve hard links, where rsync can. Definitely something to bear in mind before doing a full drive copy.

As for why anyone would choose hard links over symlinks, sometimes, for some purposes, it’s not clear which file should be the target and which the link and also, symlinks - especially explicit, non-relative symlinks - are very easily broken when files are moved around. Patching them all can be a pain.

The other half to this is not to advertise on every post you come across even if it seems relevant. Knowing where and when to do it is a fine art that I’m not going to pretend I have good advice for. Advice, sure. Good, maybe not.

Too much means that people will notice and you might be accused of spamming (or worse, ignored or banned), but knowing how much is too much is the tricky part. It almost certainly varies by place and time as well, so it might be a case of lurking around and getting a feel for things.

None of Northern Ireland, England, or Scotland are countries

This is false. Every single one of those is a country. They’re considered constituent countries of the larger country.

Even Wales remains a country despite the fact that, for certain royal and administrative purposes, it counts as part of England. That’s why there’s no dragon or other Welsh indication on the Union flag, to the rightful annoyance of the Welsh, when there are English, Irish and Scottish flags blended into it.

Further proof they’re all countries - not that this is strictly necessary - is that they each have their own parliaments.

Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

With open source it’s either someone incredibly dedicated to doing things for other people (unicorns), someone being paid by a company to do it (workhorses. Some might have a horn, it’s hard to tell. Or the company’s the unicorn), or it’s someone with programming knowledge who also needs and wants to use the software they’re writing (hobbyists).

Outside of the horse analogues, you probably need to look at the demographics of the users of said software and put the programmer somewhere within that bell curve. As to precisely where, I’d guess not at the low end as they’ve had to gain at least some programming experience along with the knowledge of the topic the software is about.

For the unicorns and the paid devs, well, they could be anyone.

There are bound to be systemic skews not accounted for here. More men tend to go into programming than women, for example, or at least that used to be the case.

Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.

Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that’s rare, and it’s mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.

Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.

If the “kit” says it’s “one size fits all” or similar wording, check the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it for things that are likely to vary.

Otherwise, you’ll probably need to take measurements or, if you’re lucky, there’ll be make and model numbers on the existing parts that you can use to get replacements or new internal parts.

If you’re really unlucky, you have a bizarre but genius-designed toilet made by a now out-of-business manufacturer who found novel and unique ways around patents and lawsuits and you’d be better off replacing the whole thing.

if the ethnic cleansing ramps up

I guess I don’t want to see what qualifies as “ramped up” if the current state of affairs is anything to go by. (Loud whisper: Because it’s already up.)

Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.

William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

Anne would be f**king hilarious.

But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.

I have just watched the Legal Eagle video about the various law-related things that happened around the 2020 election.

It served as a reminder that the plan had apparently been to claim to have won before all the votes were counted - something about doing so in the interim between two sets of votes being counted (I want to say mail-in versus in-person, but I might have misunderstood) and then act as if Trump had actually won at that point, thus giving legitimacy to any later cry of foul that was almost sure to be needed.

Which is precisely what Trump did.

… my point being that it would be foolish to assume it wasn’t in the play book for this time around as well.