Living things are “entropy eaters” — they take in energy, reduce their own entropy, and poop out entropy to the environment. This is fine, and it doesn’t violate any thermodynamics if you look at the whole picture.

So I think the point is that creationists take a myopic view and only look at the creature itself, where indeed it reduces its own entropy…but that’s because the creationists are stupid and ignore, you know…everything else.

This is true not only for individual animals, but for evolution itself — more complexity in animals can be viewed as a decrease in entropy (again, this is only a problem if you ignore the rest of the universe).

Their argument is the same as saying that you can open your fridge door to cool off your room.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Sounds like he was a mantis and was posting while copulating.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

No love for us Dvorak users :(

That character is from the 20s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddy_Kilowatt

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

robot de cuisine

I don’t speak French but I may integrate this into my daily vocabulary.

As someone from San Francisco, I’d suggest at least looking into it as an option. (I’m a straight white guy though so maybe not the best source here…). In particular https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_District,_San_Francisco

For some color on the type of neighborhood it is, here’s a recent incident. Unfortunately it involved some violence, but the good guys won (I don’t think it should be triggering…): https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/11/nudists-save-tourist-attack-castro/

Of course, San Francisco being in the US, I wouldn’t blame you for trying to find somewhere else. But California (and SF in particular) is very different than Trump country.

I thought it was the poop challenge…

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

I have one SSID with pihole (which I use), and one without. Works pretty well, if you’re ok with a VLAN-aware network.

Ah, good point!

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it’s trying to compete with the Air.

It’s on https://www.thefarside.com/ today as one of the “Selections of classic The Far Side comics.” Comic says ©1984, but doesn’t give a specific date (an image on reddit suggests 4/6/84).

Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed laser, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power and energy for a pulsed laser!

Note that it’s not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.

man rot13 ;)

TIL, thanks! Edited my earlier comment.

I recently started using voice (SSB) on the HF ham bands, and have made contacts on 15, 17, 20, and 40m. No real DX, but made one foreign contact ~1000mi away and another domestic ~2000mi away.

I live in a city and it’s challenging to get a good antenna setup, so it’s always a compromise where I am.

Nothing very impressive by ham standards, but it’s fun.