• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there’s a sign “the glacier was here in 1910” and that’s where tourists back then.

    To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there’s several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it’s really far away.

    Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted…






  • Just to add to this, because it’s fascinating. GPS satellites signals are about as strong as radiation from a light bulb, 20000km away. The signal that arrives on earth is 20db weaker than the noise floor, so background noise is a lot stronger than the signal is.

    The way it works is that the background noise is random and the signal is repeated many times a second, so you can split the signal and add it together. The random background noise averages out and you’re left with a strong signal. But due to this, it’s enough to have a very weak signal that adds non random noise on the correct frequency for it to just break.

    And actually what I desribed above is just the first layer of a GPS signal, it gets a lot more complicated with signals within signals, it’s pretty crazy how well it works. this is an amazing write uo on how the signal actually works, in case anyone is interested



  • Those are not the same things… Glass is better for the environment, for one it doesn’t break down into microplastics which get everywhere. And glass can be recycled indefinitely (minus some loss due to impurities) whereas plastic can be recycled up 0-1 times usually.

    Plus the whole “it’s up to consumers to solve this” is just corporate propaganda to absolve themselves of any responsibility, all the while not offering any alternatives that a consumer could pick from. Like literally, they paid for marketing campaigns to convince the public that it was our fault.





  • there’s a lot of stuff you can do, and you can end up with something usable, though not great, at least not in my experience. NVidia’s drivers are to blame, they don’t really work well with opengl and have lots of issues (and also regressions).

    The 550 beta driver is ok-ish, steam flickers but I can play games. Drivers before 535 also somewhat worked, though it really depends on your GPU.

    But I don’t think you will have it working acceptably without some work.

    Here’s some pointers on stuff to try:

    • check protondb for how other people got games to work, you can filter by your GPU.
    • try running through gamescope or gamemoderun
    • try the modeset=1 (and maybe fbdev) kernel parameters for nvidia drm
    • and there’s tons of env vars and other things that can help, I couldn’t summarize them all here, but as a pointer: XWAYLAND_NO_GLAMOR=1, WLR_RENDERER=vulkan, LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia, GBM_BACKEND=nvidia-drm (for the drm above), __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia
    • try the beta drivers, if those are available somehow (I’m on arch so they were easy to install), or just different driver versions in general.

    The above is meant more as hints than something to copy paste, so use at your own risk. You can of course always just install a second DE with X11 and log into that for gaming and use your regular DE for everything else


  • that is a terrible idea. Even ignoring the energy use and that market cap is a bad metric for value, especially in a market with as much wash trading and painting the tape and just plain fraud as the bitcoin ecosystem.

    The code base is under the control of around 5-10 people, the mining is under the control of 2-5 mining pools, with the largest two being the result of the largest pool splitting because it was too big and that’s not good optics, the majority of those pols and mining is in China. It has not reliably relayed transactions, being severely congested for weeks on end several times in its history. It does not have a “stable fiscal policy”, it has no fiscal policy. It is limited to 7-10 transactions/second (and no, lightning does not solve this, as you still need a regular transaction to settle, onboarding something the size of the EU would take on the order of 50 years until everyone has their channel, and then another 50 years if everyone were to settle their channels, along with many others fundamental problems with lightning), completely laughable if you want to use it as the backbone of the international financial system.

    You want there to be a proper fiscal policy with knobs that can be turned, so you can deal with crisis/extraordinary events. For instance having your country’s currency tied to the dollar is horrible for managing that country’s economics and only done if there is no other alternative, using bitcoin as the global reserve would be that, just on crack and there’s no reason to do it unless you’re incredibly desperate, in which case the dollar is still a safer bet. You’d hand over control of your financial system to a shadow group of unelected people, so you lose even more autonomy. You want there to be checks and things like sanctions, to prevent fraud, theft and, in the case of sanctions, to have a political tool that is harsh but less so than an actual war. These things are features, not bugs. You can debate whether it’s good that the US is in control of a lot of these tools, but proposing to get rid of these tools altogether (which moving to bitcoin would do) would be even worse. There is no country that has gotten itself out of debt using bitcoin, so saying it is a solution is disingenuous at best.

    These are just the same old bitcoin talking points that make it sound like it could actually work but do not hold up to the tiniest amount of scrutiny. And the end goal is always to just make the price go up so the gambling pays off, not any use case or making the world better or anything.


  • I think it’s for many different reasons, but a bit the same as everywhere. Some are protest votes due to a distrust in government in general, then 35-45 is the age most get kids and in contrast to their parents generation they live in apartments, not single family homes, as houses aren’t affordable. Then there’s the general widening of the wealth gap and the populists pretending they have a solution and blaming it on immigration (while themselves being a big reason for the problem in the first place…), while left parties often get tricked into reacting to right rhetoric, letting the right dictate the discussion. Old people are less affected by the wealth gap, young people don’t have kids so they don’t notice yet. And in it’s also a question of mobilizing ones base, the right parties get a ton of money for ads and so on, they are good at stirring up fears of existential threats(which is ironic given the real existential threat of climate change), while a lot of people are disillusioned, so middle aged left voters are less likely to actually go vote whereas more right voters do. Of course <30 voters worry more about climate change and are more motivated to go vote, since they’ll be the most affected by its effects.

    I’m sure there’s many more reasons but these are the first ones I can think of off the top of my head.