Right. But I think it’s a mischaracterization to represent the EC as a “technicality,” as it’s very central to the way voting in the USA works. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s stupid and should be abolished, but it’s very much ingrained in the voting system.

I think I’d counter your example — keeping the sports theme — by saying it’s like the World Series: it doesn’t matter if there are three absolute blowouts, all the matters is who wins four games. So you could easily win the World Series, but have fewer total runs across seven games (game = EC votes, runs = popular).

(Again, I think the EC should absolutely be abolished.)

And water has great heat capacity, with a nice phase change, too.

From reading other links in this post, it sounds like pollution (runoff) is a concern, which is unfortunate.

That’s unfortunately not really a contradiction though, given the electoral college — I think Harris will obliterate Trump in the popular, but that’s sadly not what matters.

So we need to freeze our farts and thaw them out when we need them. Got it.

Yeah, I wanted Harris to completely eviscerate Trump, which didn’t exactly happen. But I don’t think that’s because she did poorly — it’s because I know who I’m voting for, and I’m not the target audience.

Had it been the proverbial bloodbath that I wanted to see, it might not have played well with independents/those on the fence (which I blame largely on sexism — a ruthless woman is “a bitch,” but a ruthless man is “strong,” etc.).

Judging from the headlines and conversations I’m seeing, I think she really threaded the needle — came across as strong, intelligent, leader-like, all the while giving Trump enough rope to hang himself. More might have alienated voters, and less might have come across as too soft. Really good stuff from her and her campaign.

I always say I have a 1969 Wayne Industries Batmobile. Usually a sheepish, “oh, um, we don’t cover that, sorry. click”

It’s not all bad, though!

I ran Linux in 2004, and it was great, but it was such a “second-class citizen” desktop OS. The fact that Unreal Tournament and sequels actually worked on Linux felt amazing because it was such a break from the norm, whereas now gaming on Linux is actually a viable option.

Maybe you could flash the ROM on your phone in 2004, but afaik nowhere near the vibrant community you have now.

And self hosting then kinda meant, “I have an Apache server and IRC daemon listening” (the irony is that the self hosting community is so good now in part because of enshittification).

Programmable microcontrollers — with freely available, to ust IDE+libraries — are literally the price of a nice cup of coffee (3x ESP32 can be had for $14 on Amazon). How cool is that!?

I think there’s a lot of shitty stuff out there, and the shitty stuff probably outnumbers the cool stuff — but there’s world full of really, really cool stuff out there.

Right — plenty of fog, but not a lot of salty spray.

I’d love to see someone like this go on Fox live, with the understanding that would give Trump a reach around…and then eviscerate him on live TV.

Or go full CW, and just transmit source code in binary as dits and dahs. (So long as you document what you’re doing it should be legal, though I’m not sure if you should use the CE portion of he band since it’s nonstandard…)

A new good stroller is $600+.

That is less than a week of daycare in our area. Ignoring thinking about college, daycare is the only cost that matters in terms of our kid. Everything else is pocket change, comparatively speaking. And the $5k dependent FSA amount is a total joke.

My university was pretty zen about this — essentially, “don’t use your own access point/router please. But if you do, please talk to your resident (University employed) student IT rep and they can probably help you set it up correctly.”

This joke is where the Led Zeppelin song name comes from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'yer_Mak'er

It’s easy to remember c and ℏ if they’re both 1…

…but was it the “Windows Uninstall” button…or the “format /dev/sda1 as ext4” button?

California has optional mail ballots for everyone. Can’t imagine voting without it — I can fill out my ballot at my leisure, researching measures when I have time. No need to remember anything or make a cheat sheet for election day. And no standing in line.

Just don’t try plugging it into a Raspberry Pi 5.

No data loss, but won’t work without changing your kernel. The other way around is much worse though — you can use an RPi5 to make a BTRFS drive which essentially only works on RPi5s.

I always prefer it without the dashes. And just add on HHMMSS while we’re at it!

Dermal regenerator ain’t gonna fix that burn amirite?

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but itay take some getting used to).