@tal@kbin.social avatar

tal

@[email protected]

Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Won't show up on thermals, unlike a lot of other stuff in this conflict.

tal,
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It's possible that Ukraine is using Russian mines that they've removed from fields. If so, it'd be the opposite.

tal,
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Could be. I've seen video of someone in Vietnam clearing mines, and they just did it with a knife. Didn't detonate the thing.

I'd assume that anti-tank mines, unless they have anti-handling mechanisms designed to target people disarming them, probably won't go off on a person.

tal,
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Text-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There's a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.

tal,
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Wow, such fast response!

The roof appears to be wet in the first image. It's dry in the second. I doubt that they're that close in time.

EDIT: Though the timestamps claim that these are close in time. Hmmm.

tal,
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£

Ugh, didn't think of that interpretation.

Pound sign, as in "#".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

tal,
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No, though it could be the first character in a hashtag. A hashtag includes the characters that follow.

EDIT: The article I linked to says that in Canada, it's typically called the "number sign", in the US, the "pound sign", and in the UK, the "hash mark".

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I use these tools.

That being said, I think that a lot of the value of knowing them comes specifically from their ability to let one cobble together things to automate the broader Unix environment, for which they are invaluable.

If one's goal is specifically exploratory data analysis, I think that one probably gets more bang-for-the-buck in learning GNU R or something like that.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Han is the captain. The captain of a ship makes the calls as to what it does, and the Millennium Falcon came back.

I think a better question is why Luke gets special recognition versus the other pilots. I mean, he happened to be the one to make the final shot that blew up the Death Star, but everyone else in the squadrons went in too.

tal,
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I'm thinking that this is some sort of joke article at City AM, because it's always convention to define an acronym at first use, and they didn't just omit it -- like, it probably wasn't just an editorial error -- but put it in at the very end of the article.

tal,
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I suppose it was just a matter of time for this to happen, once the Russian government started cracking down on domestic Internet use in Russia.

tal,
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I don't think that there's an immediate application for specifically making carrots, because I doubt that the economics work, but I can imagine a world where we manufacture a lot more food than we do today.

tal,
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Unfortunately, we haven't managed to domesticate huckleberries, so getting the huckleberries for the sauce is probably going to be a pain if you don't live somewhere near where they grow in the wild.

tal,
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Ehh....Not really a mechanism for that that I can see. I mean, say that there's demand for that, which I can believe. Do I go to a given distro and buy a "security hardened" version? I don't see how that would work. Is the distro going to refrain from incorporating security fixes into the "non-hardened" free version?

tal,
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Railway

The Vatican Railway (Italian: Ferrovia Vaticana) was opened in 1934 to serve Vatican City and its only station, Vatican City (Città del Vaticano [tʃitˈta ddel vatiˈkaːno], or Stazione Vaticana [statˈtsjoːne vatiˈkaːna]). The main rail tracks are standard gauge and 300 metres (980 ft) long, with two freight sidings, making it the shortest national railway system in the world.[1] Access to the Italian rail network is over a viaduct to Roma San Pietro railway station, and is guaranteed by the Lateran Treaty dating from 1929. The tracks and station were constructed during the reign of Pope Pius XI, shortly after the treaty.

Beginning in 2015, one passenger service runs each Saturday morning with passengers for Castel Gandolfo. Most other rail traffic consists of inbound freight goods, although the railway has occasionally carried other passengers, usually for symbolic or ceremonial reasons.[2][3]

tal,
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Well, you've got Ardour. But I suspect that there are people who do want this software package.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I don't know if France24 is doing it because the US uses a leading currency symbol, but if so, we in the US obtained the convention of having a leading currency symbol from the British, so technically it's the Europization of Europe.

I am kind of inclined to think that France24 isn't doing it because it's a US convention, as the date right below it is DD/MM/YYYY, while the US convention would be MM/DD/YYYY (and in my opinion, the world standard should probably be YYYY-MM-DD, but that's another story).

tal,
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It looks like the UK has some drastically-older yews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortingall_Yew

The Fortingall Yew is an ancient European yew (Taxus baccata) in the churchyard of the village of Fortingall in Perthshire, Scotland. Considered one of the oldest trees in Britain, modern estimates place its age at an average of 5,000 years.[1]

Some estimates put the tree's age at between 2,000 and 3,000 years; it may also be a remnant of a post-Roman Christian site and around 1,500 years old.[2] Others have suggested an age as great as 5,000 to 9,000 years. Forestry and Land Scotland consider it to be 5,000 years old.[1] This makes it one of the oldest known trees in Europe.[3] (The root system of the Norway spruce Old Tjikko in Sweden is at least 9,500 years old.[4]) The Fortingall Yew is possibly the oldest tree in Britain.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llangernyw_Yew

The Llangernyw Yew ([ɬanˈɡɛrnɨu] ⓘ) is an ancient yew (Taxus baccata) in the village of Llangernyw, Conwy, North Wales. The tree is fragmented and its core part has been lost, leaving several enormous offshoots. The girth of the tree at the ground level is 10.75 m (35.3 ft).[1]

This yew tree lives in the churchyard of St. Digain's Church in Llangernyw village. Although it is very hard to determine the age of yew trees,[2][3] the churchyard gate holds a certificate from the Yew Tree Campaign in 2002, signed by David Bellamy, which states that "according to all the data we have to hand" the tree is dated to between 4,000 and 5,000 years old.

tal,
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I don't know, the camera formatted them, but I highly doubt that it is NTFS. So propably exFAT...

If you have the filesystem mounted, I believe you can see in /proc/mounts.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

I don't know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I'm not in Europe, but I understand that it's fairly common in some southern areas, but overall much less common then the US. Air conditioning is apparently more common for offices and stores than for residences.

Rolling out more air conditioning in Europe may not be a terrible thing from the standpoint of electricity providers. As things stand, unlike the US, where peak electricity demand is in the summer (due to air conditioning), Europe's peak electricity demand is in winter, due to electricity-driven heating. Having more-even seasonal demand probably makes life easier for the grid.

All that being said, I believe that the article is talking about unseasonably warm temperatures for October -- which is not that hot -- not so much extremely hot summer temperatures. This may not be a "roll out air conditioning" sort of thing.

tal,
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30 planned today in the north of France

That's 86°F. That's certainly warm, but I do 86°F without an air conditioner, though I'll probably have a fan on. I could see someone using an air conditioner then, sure, but that's not an extreme "I must have an air conditioner" temperature, either.

especially for freaking October.

That's my point. It's warm for the season, but being warm for the season isn't what drives air conditioner use, but being warm in absolute terms.

Go back to summer a couple years ago, and that's the kind of thing that will drive air conditioner rollouts:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/16/europe/france-temperature-record-heatwave-intl/index.html

Temperatures reached catastrophic levels in France in 2019, when Paris saw a record 42.6° C in July. According to the French Ministry of Health, 567 people died during a heatwave between June 24 and July 7 that year. A second heatwave that summer claimed the lives of another 868 people.

That's 108°F. That's the kind of thing that'll make air conditioners important, rather than a warm fall.

tal,
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I live in a city, and where I live it gets up to around 40°C in summer.

tal,
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south facing windows. That little apartment turned into an oven in the summer.

Can try something like this:

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/solutions/temperature-control/

It's an infrared-reflective film you can put on your windows.

Or if you have the windows open, slatted shutters or a slatted screen.

I'm assuming that in the Netherlands, it's humid in summer, so probably can't use an evaporative cooler; that might be useful somewhere like Madrid.

tal,
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I would assume that it's neither a UI issue nor a problem with the source data, but rather a limitation of the routing engine.

Looking at your link, it does seem to say that support is experimental.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

republic candidate

Republican candidate

tal,
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The Steam store does have a section for non-game software. It's not very heavily-populated, but it's there.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=994&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

1,439 results match your search.

If I exclude non-Linux-native stuff (which will still generally run via Proton):

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=994&os=linux&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

100 results match your search.

And because it has a standard set of libraries, it's probably the closest thing to a stable, cross-Linux-distro binary target out there, which I suspect most closed-source software would just as soon have.

You run your open-source stuff on the host distro, and run the Steam stuff targeting the Steam libraries.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Well, whoever does that for closed-source software is going to basically have to do what they have done. Probably some kind of cross-distro fixed binary target, client software to do updates, probably some level of DRM functionality like steamlib integration.

If it's not Steam, it's gonna be something that has a lot of the same characteristics.

Personally, I kind of wish that there was better sandboxing for apps from Steam (think what the mobile crowd has) since I'd rather not trust each one with the ability to muck up my system, but given how many improvements Valve's driven so far, I don't feel like I can complain at them for that. A lot of the software they sell is actually designed for Windows, which isn't sandboxed, and given the fact that not all the infrastructure is in place (like, you'd need Wayland, I dunno how much I'd trust 3d drivers to be hardened, you maybe have to do firejail-style restrictions on filesystem and network access, and I have no idea how hardened WINE is), it'd still take real work.

Their use of per-app WINE prefixes helps keep apps that play nicely from messing each other up, but it isn't gonna keep a malicious mod on Steam Workshop or something from compromising your system.

tal,
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the Pixels are actually worth it and very very good phones.

Not the longest-battery-life devices.

tal,
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Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

Wait, outside Europe?

Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can't geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

I remember that the EU didn't want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn't heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it's not like the US says "if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him".

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary -- and I am not sure that it is -- that seems like the EU is saying "you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe". Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that'd kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it'd be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it'd basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don't know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company ("Valve Germany") or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I'm a little suspicious that this isn't a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it'd create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that's exactly what the situation is.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don't believe that that's what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here's an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it's just that these "mezha.media" guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I was wondering why they would call the BBC, of all places, to help get out of a truck in France, but then I realized that they probably didn't speak French (they were, after all, being shipped to the UK). The BBC is probably the most-visible face of the UK to the rest of the world; if you wanted to call someone in Europe who speaks English, it's probably one of the most-obvious places.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I dunno, but I just Googled for both the National Police and the Paris police department to look for contact information. In both cases, Google sent me to the English language Wikipedia page (which linked to it), andt the websites themselves were only French.

considers

I guess maybe one could call the French embassy in Vietnam. They could presumably do Vietnamese or something.

EDIT: Ironically, I did almost the same thing the other day. I noticed, from an article, that a number of shops in Ukraine last winter that had lost power due to Russian missiles were running space heaters on diesel generators. That wastes a lot of diesel -- there are inexpensive Chinese diesel heaters that could be used instead. I went trying to find some sort of contact person in the Ukrainian government involved with energy who might be a reasonable person to drop a note to, but there's only so much in English. I eventually wound up trying to contact a charity in the UK that had been working to heat Ukrainian homes that had been impacted by explosions instead, hoping that they could direct me to a relevant party. And I wasn't in the position of having a frantic, suffocating family member calling me on the other end -- I was more willing to spend time searching.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

The women told investigators that the driver wasn’t involved, “saying that they climbed abord the truck thinking they were going to England because of the Irish registration plates,”

I don't think that would have worked, but they'd have maybe gotten to a country that doesn't have any border checks with the UK.

The six women were detained for being in France illegally before being released. Four were given 30 days to leave the country.

Via Calais, I expect.

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it's a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won't work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is "not secure", you're probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don't start with a dot in people's home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

  • A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user's home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.
  • WINE apparently has decided that it's a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.
  • Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.
  • A few logfiles
tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, I think I tried it and it didn't do something I wanted and so used a homebrew script for the same thing, but it or a similar package or script is definitely what I'd recommend.

That should work with dotfiles in .config, in the home directory, any other config you want to be portable across machines, etc.

Russia to hike defense spending by almost 70% in 2024, totaling around 6% of GDP — more than spending allocated for social policy (www.themoscowtimes.com)

The increased defense spending comes as Russia’s Central Bank warns economic growth is set to slow down in the second half of 2023, with inflation above the bank’s target of 4%. Vladimir Putin and other officials have largely shrugged off the economic effects of the Ukraine offensive, arguing Russia has largely weathered the...

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

As a percentage of GDP for a peacetime country, it is high, though Russia has generally run high.

As a percentage of GDP, it's higher than the US (IIRC currently about 3.5%) or Europe (with a few exceptions, below the 2% target of NATO).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true

The global average is a little over 2% of GDP.

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/220627-def-exp-2022-en.pdf

Compared to WW2 spending, it's quite low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II

In 1939, Britain spent 9% of its GDP on defence; this rose drastically after the start of World War II to around 40%.

EDIT: I'd also add a couple of caveats:

  • Given that this is in rubles, some is probably inflation, if the news source isn't adjusting for that, as the ruble has fallen in value relative to last year:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUBUSD=X?p=RUBUSD=X&.tsrc=fin-srch

    Relative to the dollar, it'd need to rise by 70% to hold constant since a year ago, so a 70% ruble increase may not be so exciting. I don't know what periods of time the numbers take effect at (like, in this situstion, where in the year the rubles are from may matter a lot).

  • What we have for this is Russia's word; it could very well be spot-on, but we don't know yet.

  • We don't know what the breakdown in spending is. So, for example, I believe that there may be benefits that need to be paid family of solldiers who were killed or injured and suchlike. At least in the US, I'm pretty sure that that'd be counted as military budget.

    https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/03/3/7327915/

    "All members of the families of military personnel who died during the special military operation in Ukraine (Putin's term for the war in Ukraine – ed.) will be allocated insurance coverage and one-time assistance in the amount of 7,421,000 roubles. Monthly monetary compensations will also be paid to each family member of fallen [soldiers]".

    Details: Putin also stated that he considers it necessary to set up an additional payment of 5 million roubles for the families of dead soldiers.

    In addition, he promises that the wounded receive a one-time payment of approximately 3 million roubles. And if a soldier becomes disabled during the war with Ukraine, he will be provided with monthly payments.

So it probably doesn't translate to something like "Russia has 70% increased capacity relative to last year."

I expect that Perun will put something up about it if he hasn't already, as this is his field.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I don't think that the glacier as an intact sheet of ice has value so much as it just is a particularly-visible sign of global warming, because small temperature changes to large masses of ice that are bounded by the melting temperature of water produce large changes to that mass.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I expect that the ice will still be melting wherever they put it. And according to the article, what they put in its place is snow on crushed rock, so that'll probably be melting too.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Hmm. Yeah, though I have to say that the USB route looks cheaper.

https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-audio-hats

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+audio+adapter

tal, (edited )
@tal@kbin.social avatar

Why would you expect USB to constrain your audio quality?

You're not getting better 0s or 1s based on which bus they're sent over to the DAC.

tal,
@tal@kbin.social avatar

I use kbin rather then lemmy, and the kbin API isn't complete, but looks like there's lemmy support in:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el

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