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Troy

@ troyunrau @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • At your current rate of spending, for how long could you survive without income?

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  • 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.

  • Beehaw has a huge surplus of money. Could we use it to fund another service?

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  • Right.

    A lobbyist with access to federal politicians in Canada with actual portfolios is like a quarter million per year as a minimum. Maybe a million if you want to fund a "think tank" and publish "studies" and do press releases trying to get the news to bite on some of them, so you can use the news as your excuse to bring issues up.

    If you're doing it yourself, then $5k might get you a plate at a gala where you hope to run into the appropriate politician for a minute. Would you pay $5k to hope to have a one minute conversation where 45 seconds of it is pleasantries and you might get one sentence in? And you have to use that sentence to explain who you represent... And someone is tugging their elbow leading to another table and they're gone. Well, hopefully the people at your table were interesting conversation.

    Storytime: I am small business owner. We pay a few thousand dollars a year to throw industry drinking events primarily for networking. Personal invites. Sometimes I can get the provinical Minister of Mines to attend with his handlers, but only if I promise no lobbying. I might get about five minutes of their time (as host) and try to honour my commitment to no lobbying at the event (their handlers will remove them if they feel it is a lobbying event). My payoff is a direct communication line, which I try not to abuse. Then the government changes (elections or cabinet shuffle) and I have to do it again. I've failed to get a direct line on the current minister for almost two years. But this is small potatoes Canadian provincial politics. I'd have to spend 10x that amount to attempt get face time with the federal minister.

  • Beehaw has a huge surplus of money. Could we use it to fund another service?

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  • $6k is nothing. Bank it in case of a catastrophic server failure or something.

  • At a coffeeshop! Made me chuckle

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  • "Decaf!?", he screamed incredulously as he plunged the broken carafe into the barkeepers neck.

  • And that's where distros come from

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  • 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.

  • What are your favorite and least favorite pure chance and pure strategy games? And why?

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

  • I love how resource-efficient linux distros are

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  • I thought GCC dropped support for compiling to the abacus?

  • Gotcha!

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  • Best nephew

  • Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?

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  • 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.

  • Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?

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  • 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 ;)

  • Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?

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

  • Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?

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

  • The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer

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  • Colour me cautiously optimistic

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  • If the music is good, yes :)

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  • Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

    A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

  • Looking for the Best KDE Distro – Fast, Stable, and Feature-Rich

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  • I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

  • What are some creative ways to use an unused telephone jack outlet?

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  • Wouldn't put more than like 5V DC on it, but you could use it to put power to some low power USB toys.

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  • I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I'd get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

    But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn't fraud or a scam -- it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same -- I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

    I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

    I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same -- write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don't think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn't organic.

    That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.