Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.
When I was a kid, Dad would bring home these little foam airplanes that the FedEx office in his building handed out as swag for people who used their services. I loved those things, and I’d be lying if that childhood positive association with FedEx didn’t have some small effect on my preferences as an adult – but it was free.. I think that’s a bit less insidious than paying for the privilege of giving my kid merch pushing a particular brand association on them.
Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.
My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.
I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.
Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.
MASH also had a Black character in the first season whose nickname was “Spearchucker Jones,” which is supposedly justified by him being a former javelin athlete (which strikes me as coming from the “Quiet has to be dressed in clubwear while doing Serious Military Stuff because she breathes through her skin!” school of poorly-justified writing choices). It also suffers from the conceit of Hawkeye being simultaneously the moral center of the show, and a shameless womanizer whose conquests only exist in the context of the show for as long as it takes him to bed them.
I love MASH for what it is, but there are aspects of it that are clearly of its era, which we wouldn’t repeat in modern television. I think you can either accept that society has moved on from where it was in the 70s and 80s, or you can be like Seinfeld and be mad that you’re no longer allowed to play sexism and racism for laughs with the perpetrator framed as the good guy.
In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.
The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:
For those of you who recognized the Transport Tycoon graphics, enjoy this magnificent recreation of the soundtrack with live instruments that the original composer put together several years ago.
It’s been many years since I read them, so I don’t know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:
and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn’t well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.
If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out… and if I’m perfectly honest, I’m fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that’s not the world we live in.
Studies have shown that in most cases that you’d care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.
Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:
Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.
The management agency that leased the house I lived in while I was in college tried to withhold our security deposit because we didn’t provide proof of carpet cleaning.
The house had all hardwood floors.
My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
Mr. Steal-your-girl’s-ex’s-kid
I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.
Good good, it is an Altima, isn’t it? I didn’t dare to assume but after a bit of Googling the interior is a dead ringer for an 07-12 Altima – objectively the hooptiest of all Altimas. This guy really is a walking stereotype.
All checks out.
For just a couple bucks more, I think I am gonna go with MT+ and Peacock to get IMSA, WEC, and a fair chunk of IndyCar for the year. I’ll follow the races to see how things evolve, but as things stand I don’t see a need to watch F1 live when there are more entertaining series out there for the money.
I still participate in a few small subs that Lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass to replicate, and even in many of those there has been a marked decline in the quality of posts and discussion. It’s painfully clear that the mods who left during the API protest were putting in serious effort, and the scabs that replaced them aren’t up to the prior standard. Makes it a lot easier to leave most of Reddit behind, at least.
There’s a school of thought that Egyptian monument building was somewhat analogous to the depression-era Works Progress Administration, in that it took advantage of an otherwise-idle workforce outside of the agricultural season, and provided them with an additional source of stable supplemental income
The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.