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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Track stands! Not a contradiction to your statement at all though: you need to be moving just ever so slightly.

    With a fixie it’s easy, because you can pedal forwards and backwards in tiny amounts. With a freewheel, it’s trickier but you get the hang of it with practice. Ideally you’ll have an incline, so you pedal forward to go forward, and ease up to slide back. After some practice I can use the raised reflective paint from e.g. crosswalks as the “incline.” This miniscule motion is enough to balance — and like you said, it ain’t the angular momentum that does it.


  • I think you need to include energy cost in the preparation stage. Bread requires a hot oven, which is a real amount of electricity — it’s close to $0.40/kWh where I live. From this link it says that a bread maker uses only .36kWh, but an electric oven would be more like 1.6kWh. So bakita single loaf of bread, you end up with a not insubstantial fraction of the total cost going to heating the oven.

    Of course, many bulk foods require heat, so it gets a little sticky this way. Oats/oatmeal probably wins out here, as you can just soak them overnight.



  • No, they make a profit if your premiums are more than your care+overhead. Preventative care is sometimes offered with no co-pay — presumably because you end up costing them less over the long haul if you keep up to date with your Dr. appointments.

    It’s not a great system; but it does work very well for some customers, and failing to recognize that tends to preclude having a productive discussion.


  • 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.












  • 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 it may take some getting used to).