Works great on 300 baud; not many editors can boast that. Also, if your programs are all under 2000 lines long.

The only northern lights I’ve ever seen were in Iceland. Honestly, the conditions were less than ideal and what I did see was very dim to the naked eye.

What a lot of people don’t know is that a camera (like on your phone) picks up even the faintest aurora with ease. I have pictures that make the whole thing look many times more vibrant than what I could see.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

It also helps that we’re talking about rather dense nuclei too. So it’s not just a neutron absorbing blanket, but a rather high-performing one at that. Which you need to convert fusion outputs to heat and power anyway. And gold is soluble in mercury anyway, so extraction is already a known (albeit incredibly dangerous) process. Win-win.

yielding several tonnes of gold per plant-year

Mother of god that’s a lot to magic-up outta nowhere. At first I thought this would disrupt the market, but it looks like yearly global gold production is around 3000 tons a year. So it would take a lot of reactors to impact the gold market, so… yeah. Reactors really could start paying for themselves.

Myanmar comes to mind as a worst-case scenario, too. They’ve been fighting since the pandemic and it’s basically in every direction, everywhere.

In the meantime, my fellow countrymen, beware of larpers who don’t even live in the US, much less in Minneapolis, trying to whip up rage and get people to fight.

This bears repeating. I’ve seen it in every political thread here on lemmy.world for the last year. Every, single, time, some troll crashes into the thread and promotes escalation and violence. And every time someone takes the bait and gets into an argument, swamping half the visible comment area, effectively pushing out any sane discourse about a smarter way to deal with this. It’s hard to see it happen with such regularity and not imagine this to be calculated and deliberate.

To this I say: let’s treat our political forum spaces like a protest. Stay civil. Call out provocateurs but don’t engage directly. Downvote and report to admins. Freeze these trolls out of the conversation, and let’s keep putting our heads together.

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

The trolls around here never prop themselves up as an example, especially when suggesting escalation or even violence. They’re baiting the gullible and distracting everyone else from working on a better answer.

Yeah, that’s the real threat. An arrest record will absolutely jack up future background checks on future employment. Which you’re going to encounter since your current employer will drop you for being a no-show. That will leave you without health insurance, threatening your savings until you can get employed again. Which will be very hard to overcome due to high unemployment (in some markets) and that arrest record.

The fact that there’s a through-line from “no social safety net” all the way to “compliant populace” is worrying to say the least.

The genius of launching an attack of this scale from an address space that is already jam-packed full of hackers, should not be understated. Id say that, if not for doing it live on stage, law enforcement now has a giant haystack of needles to sift through.

I have a USB-bootable thumbdrive with Ubuntu 24 on it. Two home systems down, two to go.

My chief concern is that this wave of enshitifiation will eventually make it to Microsoft’s security support. Historically, at least recently, the weekly updates and response to critical vulnerabilities and virus scanning have been pretty good. But now that they’re attacking their own flagship products - Office and Windows itself - I think it’s only a matter of time before they fumble Windows security in a big way.

I’ll also predict that Non-pro Windows will eventually be “free” (as in beer), but will be useless without a live internet connection and cloud services. So now really is the time to switch. IMO, all the money points in that direction.