I want to smell it.

No seriously.

It’s a deep subject

We had to wager our houses to get the initial loans during startup. Loans are almost finished.

If I’m frugal, about a year. But I own a small business and this would only occur if my business is bankrupt. In which case debtors might chase my personal assets.

Reminds me of learning in the 90s. Giant “Learn C++” book, me adding 75 sticky notes around the edges…

It probably wasn’t a good book, but it’s the one the local bookstore had so…

Text editor is EDIT.COM ;)

Nope, haha. OpenSuse is old.

This is an amazing graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

OpenSuse comes from Suse which comes from Jurix and Slackware. There’s a dotted line from Redhat, because of the use of the RPM format, but that is as far as their interbred. Many people consider it one of the OG distros.

Arch sprang from the aether later, but one could argue it owes Gentoo for its concept (also a dotted line there).

Debian is an OG. It, Redhat, and Suse are approximately the same age.

Slackware on the other hand just keeps going.

In some countries, your religion is on your national id. See, for example, Indonesia or Thailand. Greece had it until 2005.

In some of these cases, you could literally have government id that says “Atheist”.

But it is largely a figure of speech. It means you not only identify with a group, but publicly identify with a ground.

Strategy favourite: EU4, before mission trees were added (too railroaded now). Yes computer game. It’s asymmetric, meaning you can choose to start in stronger or weaker positions.

Honourable mention: Go, chess, or other games with one page rules and emergent complexity.

Strategy bleh: any of the modern points based board games that take longer to read the manual than play the game. Catan is the only one I tolerate here, as it has enough people that know the rules that you don’t need to reread it for everyone’s benefit every time. If the game needs a GM to handle the rules, you cannot know enough about the rules to form a strategy while only playing it rarely.

Chance: Cribbage, in two player version. Well, admittedly you can still outplay the other player. But to outplay them, you need a fast and intuitive grasp of statistics. Selecting the cards for the crib is the biggest strategic advantage here, and it’s more of a weighted odds thing.

Chance bleh: Blackjack. You have no way to affect the outcome. There is a right way to play (over a large enough number of hands), and that is it.

Hybrid: soft spot for Texas Hold 'em. It’s a good hybrid of chance, strategy, and straight up social skills. No other game seems to rely as much on reading people, and you can do this right or wrong in dramatic fashion.

Lastly: D&D is the best of everything. The rules are long, but the DM looks after details (or you can wing it and no is grabbing the book to check). It has the reach of Catan, meaning you aren’t learning new rules at every table. There are social elements, chance elements, tactical elements.

Nice kitties

The government has a monopoly on force. That force should be weilded by the fairest and most impartial people possible. Police, investigation agencies, etc., should be as free from bias as possible.

Now, you have multiple ways to get to that point, and people have different opinions on the purest way to achieve this. But, electing them doesn’t seem to be the way. Tyranny of the majority is too strong. And appointment by elected officials is equally problematic. So how then does a system establish that is not subject to abuse by those with power?

I would argue that the best system for appointing law enforcement seems to be via a benevolent dictator or monarch or their representatives. And it only works for their lifetime, unless the inertia of the benevolent institution can be sustained. Well, it’s a crapshoot but stable at least for the lifetime of the monarch or similar.

I’d also entertain citizen lotteries for these sorts of positions. But that’s a crapshoot on shorter timeframes.

From the Ukrainian perspective maybe. Russia hasn’t drafted yet.

It’s also about shows of strength for political purposes. We haven’t seen total war in ages.

I thought GCC dropped support for compiling to the abacus?

At least the Falcon lineup has delivered like 2000 tonnes to orbit this year. Which gives them all the time they need to learn and experiment. But I agree, this is a Soviet era failure rate.

And every one of those are as grounded in reality as sci fi’s agelong obsession telepaths, telekinesis, or mutants with powers.

There is a class of modern sci fi authors are all coming to terms with this.

I’d recommend checking out stories like Neptune’s Brood – sci fi which takes on interstellar economics in slower than light scenarios.

Exceeding FTL (and breaking causality) is basically a sci fi trope at this point with about as much credibility as psychics. To have at least some credibility you need one of: a testable hypothesis, or an unexplained phenomenon. Right now we have neither. At best, we have some equations, that work below light speed, where we can extrapolate past light speed and see how the math works. The problem is: none of these equations are testable as they all contain infinities or other asymptotic features that prevent passing light speed itself. So, if there’s no viable math to get from sublight to FTL, and there’s no unexplained phenomena, then what we’re left with is nothing.

Even quantum entanglement, which is a darling of sci fi whenever they need a plot device (hello Le Guin and the ansible), has categorically been shown to obey causality and the light speed limit in every lab test.

At some point it’s like asking for negative mass, antigravity, or other things that the math would allow. Except our universe doesn’t.

I’ve got a wormhole to sell you ;)

Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.

Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.

There’s a historical consensus that Hitler had actually expected France and the UK to back up the Czechs, and was surprised when they didn’t. He wanted the war to start in 1938 when he had a major advantage in remilitarization.

That said, we, the west, should be directly involved in Ukraine already. We’ve had three years.

Canada is announcing ~40billion in additional annual military spending today. I hope this means it’s time to push Russia back.