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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • there’s also GNSS which is mostly used in Europe and Scandinavia

    GNSS is the generic term that covers all satellite navigation systems (GPS included).

    Galileo is the EU/ESA system you’re thinking of.

    GLONASS (Russian) and BeiDou (Chinese) are the other two major constellations with global coverage. The only other full system I know of is NavIC, which is Indian and has only regional coverage.

    Most devices actually connect to all of them. I’ve just checked my phone, and it’s connected to all of GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. People just say “GPS” because it’s catchier than “GNSS”.



  • Concept cars are, by definition, not actually finished. Nobody will be able to buy the car that was being shown at the car show. The car that will be on sale in 2-3 years will be a thematically similar but fundamentally different creature.

    Things like the onboard computer software/hardware/data sharing model won’t be defined yet. VW’s first party servicing costs or the price of replacement brake pads are not defined yet. It’ll be a job for a future car journalist to report on all those things once it’s actually defined.



  • That’s one popular reinterpretation, yes. But there’s another layer of revisionist reinterpretation beyond that which also has some standing, and that’s that Germany was also in no state to fight an actual war in 1938, and that they could have been slapped down in Czechoslovakia by a coalition of Britain, France and Poland even in the complete state that they were in if they’d put their will to it.

    By delaying for Britain to rearm, they also delayed long enough for Germany to fully rearm too.



  • Not to belabour the point, but the recipe in the link has both pepper and paprika in it.

    Personally I wouldn’t put paprika in a bubble and squeak, but I would put mustard powder in it. I also personally favour the “as much black pepper as you can get in there before it becomes inedible” approach, although having kids has made me dial that one down a bit. Also a pinch of herbs doesn’t go amiss; rosemary and thyme both work well.

    These things are as bland or not as you want them to be. Certainly fried potato and bacon doesn’t really need to be more than it is.



  • Two very different recommendations.

    First is the Southern Reach novels by Jeff VanderMeer (the first one being Annihilation). Unsettling, surreal Lovecraftian sci-fi. Gorgeously written, beautiful prose, and very memorable.

    Second is the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (starting with Red Mars). Hard sci-fi on an almost unprecedented scale: a comprehensive and incredibly detailed narrative of the colonisation of Mars, which covers almost every possible aspect of the story in glorious, engaging detail. You get everything from the love triangles and personal rivalries of the colonists, to politics and religion, to macro-economics, to superstructure engineering, to long deep chapters covering hydrology, micro-biology, the finer points of lichens and mosses, to architecture, art… Honestly, it’s breathtaking in just how thoroughly it covers its subject whilst still being a poignant, engaging, story. Not to everyone’s tastes, but it could certainly make an impact.


  • Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

    Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

    Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

    GitHub is a proprietary forge, X GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

    Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

    Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

    A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

    At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

    GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.


  • Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?

    Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).

    And as hydrogen scales up, it’ll get cheaper. It’s currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that’s with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it’s locally generated from solar, it’ll probably be quite a bit cheaper.

    Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it’s possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.

    Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don’t have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it’s more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don’t have to be lithium ion if it’s for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don’t need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you’re generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don’t make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).




  • where [it] comes from

    You imply it comes from:

    The “thin blue line” symbol has been used by the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which emerged in 2014

    But you link to a Wikipedia article that says:

    New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show The Thin Blue Line. Parker used the term “thin blue line” to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.

    The Oxford English Dictionary records its use in 1962 by The Sunday Times referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

    The term was used for the title of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood.

    I have no idea about this guy’s politics, but it’s a pretty well known phrase with a lot of different contexts.



  • Only UK is known to have only moderate decline, but they probably think it’s independence for UK to buy Tesla, because fuck Europe for some reason???

    UK Tesla sales are starting from a much lower base. Sales in the UK were essentially half of what they were in Germany before the recent decline.

    BYD is now the largest EV brand by sales in the UK, ahead of Tesla. Whereas in Germany Tesla is still the leading manufacturer, even after the drop.

    Also, the UK EV market in general grew last year, whereas sales of EVs across all brands declined in Germany over the same period


  • I reckon it’s simpler than that. Zuckerberg has never really invented anything novel; Facebook was a straight clone of a whole bunch of competing social media sites (which just so happened to win the numbers war), and WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquisitions.

    I think the Metaverse was Zuckerberg trying to prove to himself and others that he and he personally could come up with the “next big thing”. The fact that he came up with something which absolutely no-one wanted (and most people barely understood) is a testament to why he never came up with anything ground breaking before, too.


  • Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.

    How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.