Thank you. I don’t know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland’s population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like “there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times,” with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn’t day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to “blow up the world” once? But that graph is interesting; it’s even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.

I mean, if that’s how you get your rocks off, you do you. Personally, I’ve never found vitriol to be in any way healthy.

The biggest challenge for future intelligent species, and the reason why I know we’re the first technological ones, is that we’ve mined all of the easily accessible metals and all of the easily accessible fossil fuels. Any intelligence arriving after us is going to have to make a civilization without iron, precious metals, oil, or coal. Unless you get into some sci-fi bio-engineering scenario where they’re growing high tech, they’re doomed to being stuck in the stone age. It’s going to be hard for them to escape the planet, defend it from asteroids, deal with super-volcanoes, build advanced calculating devices… all of the stuff we would already find challenging even with all the resources we have.

Millions of years are not enough to replenish the fossil fuels, and the sun is going to start expanding before enough life lives and dies to produce any useful amount of biomass. Before then, more metals will become accessible, in places, but good luck working it at industrial levels without fossil fuels.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but we’ve given a severe handicap to advancing beyond a rudimentary agrarian society for any successor species; even if it’s our own descendants re-arrising from a post-apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.

“You’re not obligated to respond”, combined with “nobody else cares about your quarrel but you and that idiot” are the two maxims that make my social media experience better. Sometimes I feel like arguing, but if I think someone’s arguing in bad faith, I just block 'em.

Life’s too short to spend time interacting with morons.

But why would you have thought that? There have always (for recorded history values of “always”) been people in Greenland; there have only relatively recently been nuclear warheads. So - regardless of truth - why would you have assumed that there must have at some point been more warheads in the world than people in Greenland? That doesn’t seem like an obvious assumption, to me. What made that occur to you?

Calibre is one of the great pieces of FOSS software, and demonstrates everything good about FOSS: it has regular updates; it’s been around for simply ages; it works really, really well; it gets updates and new features and yet has never in my memory had a breaking, non-backwards-compatible release… it’s stable; and it resists - in its way - the attempt by publishers to steal our rights and ownerships of our media.

I contribute to Calibre. I hope that Goyal has a successor lined up to take the helm who can continue such an outstanding contribution when he finally retires from the project.

Just to clarify for OP:

The format is always SVG, as it’s an open standard. Inkscape is the leading FOSS SVG vector editor. Boxy is a web-based SVG editor which is freemium.

SVG is the W3C standard for vector graphics that can be rendered by practically every browser. Gzip compressed SVG files (svgz) are much smaller but enjoy less support.

Illustrator can import, edit, and export SVG files.

A little later, maybe, but much the same… on the upside:

• we were optimistic.
• we were going to conquer space, and it was going to be real live humans, not semi-autonomous robots
• society (in the US and W. Europe) was (very) slowly getting more progressive.
• Hitler had been killed, and fascism defeated forever. Never again would we have another dictator; never again would we watch a country commit genocide against a people.
• life was slower. TV was the bad influence rotting kids brains. We didn’t have an entire industry focused on commoditizing us.
• computers were fucking incredible. The future we imagined coming from computers was very, very different than what we ended up with. For one thing, we didn’t imagine a single-minded focus of all software and computing power on commercializing every aspect of our life.
• no Facebook, no Twitter, no TikTok
• Income disparity was far less extreme, and class mobility was a realistic dream. You could imagine buying a nice house and raising a family on a single income. If you worked hard and had a little luck you could pass on some reasonable wealth to your kids.
• shit really was - in the aggregate - getting better all around. Technology was advancing and bringing amazing products; science was being discovered that you could basically wrap your head around. Lives (in the Western world) were improving (relatively, compared to previous decades) for most people, and all this happened at a pace that didn’t up-end your world every day, 365 days a year.
• you could get all the news you needed for a fairly rounded world view in a single newspaper, much of which you could read over breakfast. There was no information overload.

On the downsides,

• dad beat us with a belt as punishment
• we were having wars that were disrupting society. The draft was a real worry.
• we were constantly afraid that nuclear war could happen at any time
• commies were hiding under our beds
• minorities of all kinds were fighting for their rights, and fighting to get them enforced. It sucked to be gay, or black, or a woman (but it was getting better, slowly)
• most people didn’t have access to a computer, much less a PC until well into the 80’s, so you had to infiltrate University computer labs.

It was a slower world, with fewer consumer goods, fewer conveniences, and worse medical care. Everybody smoked, all the time. But slower was good, and - best of all - we didn’t realize yet that we were killing the planet; the world wasn’t ending.

When it was first released, I was interested in the decentralized nature of it as a currency. I liked - well, I still like - the idea of a currency that isn’t controlled by a government. At the time (2009-ish?), I also thought it was anonymous, which also appealed to me; cash is mostly anonymous, but it can’t be used online, and even then the fact that society was increasingly moving toward cashless - and very traceable, and usary-heavy - credit cards was clear. Stripping privacy is critical to control.

Bitcoin isn’t anonymous, but other cryptocurrencies are, and bitcoin laid the groundwork. To your question, I, and many other people, paid some money to get some bitcoin - I think I spent $120? Mainly so I had enough to explore the space and play with it, because even then mining seemed painfully slow. Once money was spent on it, by whomever and for whatever reason, it acquired value: the value that, if you had some, you could sell it to someone else, or trade it for goods. In that way, it has the same value as an IOU on which I’ve scribbled “Good for $10 from Ruairidh Featherstonehaugh” and signed my name. Flawed metaphor, but you get there idea - the paper itself has no intrinsic value.

Despite that mining is so horrible for the environment, the concept that motivated Bitcoin still IMHO has value. An entirely digital, cashless system, not controlled by any one organization but rather by the community of participants. If Bitcoin didn’t have the environmental cost - if it has been proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work, or if the computational work was actually something useful to society like gridcoin.us, it wouldn’t be so controversial. Sure, people are still going to be bitter about not buying into it early, but as long as people are willing to trade goods and services for it, it’ll have real value based on market rates.

There’s hope, though. Although stalled by the current civil liberties regression phase we’re going through in the States, and the rise of fascism globally, in some States and some countries assisted suicide is legal. There’s a wonderful product called the Sarco Pod, developed by an Australian, that performs euthanasia by nitrogen, which is one of the best methods of suicide. It’s not currently widely available, but hopefully services offering it will start popping up. We have to get through this rough patch, first.

Most of the people who get into trouble in the water and need to be rescued already know how to swim. My point wasn’t that they should be afraid of swimming, it was book learning isn’t going to help, and what they read in a book is going to be the first thing to go if they do panic. Which is likely what will happen if they read a book thinking they’re learning to swim and then go try it.

Go to a pool. Get in the shallow end and practice putting your face under water. That’ll be far more useful than reading about how to do a breast stroke.

Well, yeah. But they could also skip the books; the practice will be much more useful.

You can’t watch your form in a mirror, in a pool. Well, Elon and Bezos probably can, but most normal people can’t. So you can’t tell how you’re doing, if you’re trying to actually swim well. Having an instructor, or even a friend who knows a little about swimming would even be better than any amount of book reading.

I’m all for book learning, but I doubt many people learned to ride a bicycle by reading a how-to first.

If they’re going to spend time trying to learn to swim, that time is better spent in a pool, than reading about it.

I know logind can’t easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.

I also have the prompt set to the host name. I’ve never understood why people included their usernames; I don’t log in to more than one account on each machine.

It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.

Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can’t just be used in it’s own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.

I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it’s in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.

Systemd is not modular if you can’t swap parts out for other software. Systemd’s modularity is a bald-faced lie.

The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they’re the components most distributions don’t use by default.

Based on some real-world knowledge, no.

For example, there’s this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings. They have the body of a helicopter which can be dropped into a big swimming pool. The pilots strap in, they’re dropped into the pool, and they have to unbuckled and exit the helicopter.

So many people fail this, repeatedly. Scuba divers are in the pool just to extract the people who can’t make it out. The issue is that when you panic, you tend to stop thinking rationally; it’s why swimmer lifesaving is so dangerous - a panicking swimmer will do anything to save themselves, including grabbing the lifesaver and trying to climb on top of them, which can result in both people drowning. In the pilot case, people panic and can’t unbuckle themselves, straining against the restraints to get out, until they have to be rescued. Even if they start well, trying to unbuckle, if they fumble at the restraints, they can panic and then they stop trying to unbuckle. Even though the helicopter is only a cockpit and a bay with big van-style doors, people panic and get lost trying to get out; they just can’t find the bay doors, and have to be rescued. For these night tests, you can’t see which was is up, and people panic and forget to take time to orient, and swim toward the bottom of the pool, and have to be rescued.

All of the theory in the world can’t protect you from panic; the only thing that helps is experience. You do it enough that you get used to it and have confidence that keeps the panic at bay.

Studying isn’t enough, because the first thing that goes when you panic is your ability to think rationally, and the only way to prevent panic is confidence, and that’s developed through experience. It’s why teaching always includes homework: you have to exercise the knowledge for it to become second nature.

According to election theory, a dictatorship is the only perfectly fair voting system: the only voter wins the vote, every time.

I’ve been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don’t like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the “do one thing, do it well” Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn’t an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it’s slow and doesn’t seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I’ve been using dinit on a system, and I’m pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I’m running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

dinit also has the ability to run user services, FWIW.

As long as it isn’t github.