Ubuntu user here. Swapped away from Debian in its early days when Ubuntu made a real effort to stay current with the desktop environment (even coordinating their releases after GNOME), and back then it mattered. Nowadays my few attempts at other distros suggest that the hardware driver situation (especially proprietary) seems better on Ubuntu, for example to get everything working on fairly new laptops.

There are of course other things I’m less happy about. The snap installs via apt drives me crazy; not that I necessarily hate the technology, but sometimes I need a non-containeraized browser (for example to run inside another container), so I need to be allowed to choose what is being installed.

I made this the other day.

Anyone want to team up to build a time machine and travel the future until the perfect utopia is achieved?

How about we team up and try to make this world better instead?

Nope, this redefinition isn’t necessary, it is a choice SI made. Nothing would have broken by keeping an exact relationship between amount of substance and mass, it would just have retained the interpretation of Avogadro’s constant from before 2019 (experimentally determined vs a defined constant).

… weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.

Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.

Except when they aren’t. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.

Refunding the sale price is still theft.

What did you lose in this theft?

Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?

Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.

Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise “pay this price and own this movie” rather than “pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time”.

Here is a DallE rendering of the same setup that maybe is less offensive.

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” // Carl Sagan.

How the f**k do we have functional AI that speaks like a human and solves general problems on the level of a university student, but somehow household chores are still done with tech that was invented 50-100 years ago?! Why isn’t there just a hole in my kitchen counter where I can dump dirty dinnerware, pots, pans; the machine sorts it out, washes it, and returns it to the cupboard? Why doesn’t my washing machine sort by color, wash, dry, fold, and stack my clothes? Why do I still have to clean surfaces in my house by manually rubbing a wet sponge at them for hours?

I’ll tell you what I think: inequality. Women did house chores, men invented shit that was fun and useful to them. Maybe as the world moves, hopefully, toward more equality we will find that people who shares their time between chores and inventing stuff will start to actually tackle the problem of simplifying boring chores.

https://youtu.be/jI2zxBAIepI

But, “speedy” relative to what? Relative to the walls of the room your are inside? What if you are in a falling elevator? Relative to the rotating surface of the earth? To the center of the solar system? “Relative to the portal” is the only answer to that question that makes sense.

How can it not be b? Every situation in the Portal games is already exactly like this, but with the portal fixed to a slab that moves with the rotation of the Earth, whereas in the drawing the portal moves as the sum of earth rotation + the movement of the train.

Treating the question seriously, I think it is easy to think the one person is the right choice, because it just seems like less of a mess to deal with. However, I also think the end result is that you will never feel safe in your home again. You will always second guess if every squeak you hear is yet another person who somehow have made it into your house. This is the path towards slowly descending into madness.

Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!