Solar is so much cheaper than Nuclear and the efficiency sway is so reasonable, it’s still the better option in non-ideal circumstances.

With initial cost of deployment being the biggest obstacle to nuclear, I’m not sure it will ever be the best green option for developing countries.

This is doubly true since it’s lifetime cost-per-kwh is much higher than that of solar.

One thing of note with the Steam Deck is that it CAN stream games from your PC, allowing you access to your whole library. You get access to fewer games in SteamOS (there’s still a ton). You can always look up what games are natively compatible with Steam Deck before you buy. The big ticket games are usually compatible nowadays (Starfield was markedly absent, but BG3 is there all-the-way).

Are you referring to Presh Talwalkar or someone else? How about his reference for historical use, Elizabeth Brown Davis? He also references a Slate article by Tara Haelle. I’ve heard Presh respond to people in the past over questions like this, and I’d love to hear his take on such a debunking. I have a lot of respect for him.

Your “debunk” link seems to debunk a clear rule-change in 1917. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’ve never heard the variant where there was a clear change in 1917. Instead, it seems there was historical vagueness until the rules we now accept were slowly consolidated. Which actually makes sense.

The Distributive Law obviously applies, but I’m seeing references that would still assert that (6÷2) could at one time have been the portion multiplied with the (3).

And again, from logic I come from a place of avoiding ambiguity. When there is a controversiallly ambiguous form and an undeniablely unambiguous form, the undeniably unambiguous form is preferable.

“used to”. Xfinity includes a public access point on my router that I’m not able to turn off. They used to lie about it and deny it until too many people caught on.

What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

Every time I’ve seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.

It’s one thing to say that they’re “not good at it”, but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they’re not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’m used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren’t. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.

EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I’ve got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can’t keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren’t as capable in their job - it’s not like I love capitalism as concept.

And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald’s assholishness. But then, I’m also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they’ll hide bodies for you (figuratively).

There has apparently been historical disagreement over whether 6÷2(3) is equivalent to 6÷2x3

As a logician instead of a mathemetician, the answer is “they’re both wrong because they have proven themselves ambiguous”. Of course, my answer would be RPN to be a jerk or just have more parens to be a programmer

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.

You are under the very relevant misassumption that HR is less likely to be handling a situation inappropriately

I have something called an “expertise bias” that I use to make decisions. In a vacuum, I trust an expert to solve a problem over someone with no experience in a given field. I don’t ask a barista to fix my car, or my doctor to fix me a latte. Both can screw up in their field, but they are less likely to do so than someone without experience in their specialty. I’m not a barista, a doctor, or an HR expert. Or to put it simpler, the odds of an HR person mishandling someone being non-serially abusive in the workplace is simply lower than the odds of the situation without that person involved. I need this attitutude to live; if a junior dev is trying to override the devops engineer on infrastructure, you’ll never guess which one usually wins.

A simple verbal overstep, on the first occurrence

What are you talking about now? The topic at hand wasn’t verbal and certainly wasn’t merely an overstep. We have a an insulting teardown in writing. Substantively different from a verbal teardown. I never said the moment a person loses their cool with em and tells me “fuck off man” I’m knocking on HR’s door. But if a senior dev on my team sends this flaming email to a junior dev on my team, I better find out about it and it’s getting handled… By HR.

I love how everyone online is psychic.

Actually, I’ve watched two GREAT workers and good people end up losing their jobs because a easily resolved situation turned toxic. The person who felt uncomfortable tried to take care of it 1-on-1 but had too passive aggressive a nature to really be clear when she confronted the guy.

So 6 months or a year later, she was on the verge of quitting and went to HR. He was terminated because it had gone too far. She left soon after because she still wasn’t comfortable at work after the cause of that ended.

…look. I “obviously never dealt” with anything because nobody is allowed differing opinions here, but I have 20+ years experience at businesses where the existence or lack of good HR has been a deciding factor of the work-culture and comfort level of team members. I work 1-on-1 with my company’s Directors of HR on a regular basis to make sure my team is happy and because I am involved with other teams at my job who have their own interpersonal conflicts. One of HR’s responsibilities in a good company is to involve themselves in interpersonal conflicts BEFORE decisive action has to be taken.

The problem is that face-to-face confrontations without a mediator don’t always end well. And I would rather not have HR decide “we have to fire our Rockstar senior dev or this random guy”. But if you address it earlier, HR deals with it earlier (yes, because the paper trail m eans HR can’t just fire “this random guy” later over the Rockstar senior dev). It’s win-win for all parties INCLUDING the Linus Torvalds in this explanation.

But I’ve “obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario” and my experience doesn’t count. So you can ignore everything I said.

The term is “hostile work environment”. HR doesn’t just respond because of strict liability. Just one occurance of something like this can lead to an otherwise solid worker to spiral from discomfort of the situation, both feeling like a prisoner at their job and producing far less value for their employers.

The latter is why HR cares, but the former is why it’s OKay to go straight to HR. If HR is well-trained, things like this shouldn’t escalate just because you went to HR. They should be able to diffuse it productively.

From my memories of the Arch linux labs in college, no there isn’t…

… genuinely I’ve never been offered (even had to google EMLA)

But now that you mention it, I’ve never had this particular issue from novicaine at the dentist. And they always use a topical.

Next time I need a shot/blood, I’ll see if they’re willing to try that! Since it really does seem to be about the poke itself, something that changes the feeling might be exactly what works.

I hope being able to plan ahead for the occasional jab makes it not much of a real issue in your life.

Basically that. I schedule a day off if I need a jab for any reason, and work from home anyway when I’m miserable the next several days.

Does it happen for accidental/“natural” pokes? You mentioned the splinter thing, but if you had a thorn, cactus needle, or even a piece of glass stuck in your skin and pulled it out, would you do alright?

All of those are fine. And unlike a lot of people with my issue, blood doesn’t bother me in the least. Once in a great while I’ve gotten a mild version of that from an insect bite, but the feeling is just completely different.

Oddly, I think if a needle hurt more and did some tearing, it wouldn’t bother me so much.

But you’re asking some really thought-provoking questions. I have a lot of food-related texture issues and while this is COMPLETELY different, I’m suddenly wondering if it’s a little more similar than I thought. I do believe there’s a psychological component to it; I haven’t been able to test, but if I were surprised with a needle jab outside of a medical setting, I have no idea if it would happen to me or not.

What I did discover is that my blood pressure doesn’t rise and my heartbeat doesn’t go up in “prep”. I don’t seem to have a stress-rise effect for it to be stress-plummet related. I’m not asking anyone to surprise me with a shot, but I really do wonder what would happen.

Honestly, I wouldn’t trade it for the medical conditions of some of my family and friends. It sucks, and makes me hate doctors, but it won’t kill me.

I mean, I’d take this over diabetes and/or asthma shrug

Yeah, exactly. And I agree that there’s separate categories for skill, dedication, and niceness. Some folks are damn good but lazy and don’t care, others make up for being “only ok” by trying really hard and caring a lot, and some are just friendly when they screw up. It’s nice to have more than 1 of those 3 at a time. Someone in my family went to a weight loss doctor and asked me to come along. She was the friendliest doctor I’d ever seen… and the appointment finished with “I’m really lost. I don’t think there’s anything else we can try right now. You’re doing everything right”. Don’t know WHAT that was in the spectrum of skill and dedication. Maybe it’s true, maybe she was just giving up. But from what I’ve seen/heard, it’s definitely better than “well try harder, eat less, and workout more” that heavier patients hear from doctors who don’t even ask what they’re eating or what their workout regimen looks like.

I don’t have to deal with a lot of that stuff you do, but I can imagine it since what little I deal with has shown me multiple sides of people (doctors too, I suppose).