They have x86_64 models.

Yes, everyone forgets them. Mostly for good reasons.

Arm is better because there are more than three companies who can design and manufacture one.

Edit: And only one of the three x86 manufacturers are worth a damn, and it ain’t Intel.

Edit2: On further checking, VIA sold its CPU design division (Centaur) to Intel in 2021. VIA now makes things like SBCs, some with Intel, some ARM. So there’s only two x86 manufacturers around anymore.

Here’s one that’s not as consequential as other posts here. It’s not going to change the world, but would make things slightly better.

Split lock washers are worse than useless. They’re supposed to be a spring against the bolt to help resist it turning back out over time. They don’t. If anything, they make it worse.

Here’s a NASA publication on fastener design (because of course there’s a NASA publication on fastener design): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900009424

The lockwasher serves as a spring while the bolt is being tightened. However, the washer is normally flat by the time the bolt is fully torqued. At this time it is equivalent to a solid flat washer, and its locking ability is nonexistent. In summary, a Iockwasher of this type is useless for locking.

This was published in 1990, but we’re still using this shit. Stop. There are many other kinds of fastener locking that work, like nylon locking nuts or threadlock, and we don’t need these.

Yes, I’m aware of how this works.

The important point is that zip and compressed tarballs have overlapping but not identical purposes.

It’s just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.

See my reply here: https://midwest.social/comment/10257041

The two aren’t really equivalent. They make different tradeoffs. The scheme of “compress individual files, then archive” from GP is what zip does. Tar does “archive first, then compress the whole thing”.

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn’t know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren’t going to be compressed as much because they aren’t handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won’t propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

You reinvented zip and didn’t even know it.

Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.

Not really, I just have trust issues with my ISP, and I’m willing to spend three bucks a month to work around them.

I’m hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We’d need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap–tons of used servers on eBay are out there–but monthly costs are not.

It’s a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.

IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

I agree, and I think there’s some reliability arguments for certain services, too.

I’ve been using self-hosted Bitwarden. That’s something I really want to be reliable anywhere I happen to be. I don’t want to rely on my home Internet connection always being up and dyn DNS always matching. An AWS instance or something like that which can handle Bitwarden would be around $20/month (it’s kinda heavy on RAM). Bitwarden’s own hosting is only $3.33/month for a family plan.

Yes, Bitwarden can work with its local cache only, but I don’t like not being able to sync everything. It’s potentially too important to leave to a residential-level Internet connection.

KiCAD has also improved greatly over the last few years. It still has an opinion on how the work flow should be, but that work flow moves pretty well. It’s gotten easier to find pre-made footprints, too.

If only library management didn’t suck.

Presentation matters. Replies to posts about minor items aren’t displayed as prominently. This means the important answers are large and in charge, while debates about the merits of Rust in this situation are pushed away.

They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.

It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.

I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.

Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.

As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.

Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.

The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.

The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.

This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.