Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you’ve not got a boot manager, of course.

Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Us Scots can say our aitches - always annoys me to hear “an hospital” on the BBC.

Faaking Laanduners - that’s who’ll be saying “an hero”.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

As an aside, the Mars rovers are much larger than this - we don’t see them side-by-side with people for comparison very often. Curiosity is the size of a car - three metres on a side, two metres tall, and weighs the best part of a tonne.

It’s one of those materials that has an almost complete list of superb properties, with one overwhelming downside. It’s cheap, abundantly available, completely fireproof and can be woven into fireproof cloth, adds enormous structural strength to concrete in small quantities, very resistant to a wide range of chemical attacks. It’s just that the dust causes horrific cancers. See also CFCs, leaded petrol, etc, which have the same ‘very cheap, superb in their intended use, but the negative outweighs all positives’.

One of the ‘niche industrial applications’ was the production of pump gaskets in high-temperature scenarios, especially when pumping corrosive liquids. We’ve a range of superalloys that are ‘suitable’ for these applications - something like inconel is an absolute bastard to form into shapes, but once you’ve done so it lasts a long time. But you still need something with similar properties when screwing the bits together. For a long time, there was no suitable synthetic replacement for asbestos in that kind of usage.

If you know that the asbestos is there, have suitable PPE and procedures, then IMHO it’s far from the worst industrial material to work with. It’s pretty inert, doesn’t catch fire or explode, and isn’t one of the many exciting chemicals where a single droplet on your skin would be sufficient to kill you. What is inappropriate is using it as a general-purpose building material, which is how it was used for so long, and where it was able to cause so much suffering for so many people.

From a UK perspective, a lot of US cars would be illegal to drive on public roads here - too large, too dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. “Dangerous” also applies to some of your other potential exports too. Chlorinated chicken, for instance, isn’t considered safe for consumption. So the absence of a market for those goods isn’t simply “customer preference”.

As a European, we’ve been too dependent on the US on some things for too long. We need to be more independent. The situation in Ukraine has shown that; we need to be able to support our allies better. But the US trashing their own economy, making themselves into global pariahs and handing over their superpower status to China is what I would have described as “not my dream way” of achieving that.

The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.

If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

A binary tree is one way of preparing data, usually for sorting. Each node can have a left, right, or both, children.

  A
 / \
B   C
   / \
  D   E

“Inverting the tree” means swapping the children for each node, so that the order that the nodes are visited is reversed. Depending on whether you want to copy the tree or swap it in place then the algorithm is different. C++ provides iterators too, so providing a “order reversed” iterator can be done efficiently as well.

You’re going to have to visit every node and do at least one swap for every node, and an efficient algorithm won’t do much more than that. Bring unable to do it suggests that the student programmer doesn’t understand stacks or recursion yet, so they’ve more to learn.

Lunacid is awesome - old-school dungeon crawling with slick controls. The speed and smoothness makes fighting all the old enemies new again.

The Kings Field games are… very hard to love. They’re old-school dungeon crawlers with the most awful, clunky controls that you can imagine. They’re all “pre-Miyazaki” FromSoftware games; don’t expect many Souls-like touches. Getting killed by a skeleton because you can’t turn round to face it in time, or falling down a hole because judging how far you’ve walked forward is difficult? Far more likely.

A Lunacid follow-up with a little more Ultima / Wizardry about it would be amazing. Bit more environmental variety, a few more RPG trappings, and for the love of all that is holy, a minimap. But I can’t see how that would be better done in Sword Of Moonlight rather than just adding them to their existing engine.

After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as “won’t fix” for years and years. No reason to ever go back.

Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses

Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.

For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.

To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.

The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.

Now that sounds interesting!

Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.

TempleOS network edition.

Dunno why you’re being downvoted. If you’re wanting a somewhat right-wing, pro-establishment, slightly superficial take on the news, mixed in with lots of “celebrity” frippery, then the BBC have got you covered. Their chairmen have historically been a list of old Tories, but that has never stopped the Tory party of accusing their news of being “left leaning” when it’s blatantly not.