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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2025

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  • There are no apolitical people.
    Only people who don’t understand that everything is political.
    When you’re stuck in traffic commuting to work, that’s a result of political decisions made by others.
    When you go to work despite being sick, that’s forced on you by political decisions made by others.
    When you have to decide between buying your meds and buying food, that’s due to political decisions made by others.
    “Apolitical people” just accept (or are forced) to let others dictate how they live.





  • Finally, after twenty years, the power of the Taborites was broken with the Battle of Lipany on 30 May 1434, during which 13,000 of the 18,000-strong army of Taborites and Sirotci, led by Prokop Holý, were overwhelmingly defeated by the united Catholic forces. Under the weight of this defeat, the Sirotci’s union completely disappeared. Many of the leading Taborite commanders fell in battle, including the leading priest Prokop Holý.
    Jan Roháč and his faithful fortified at his castle Zion, which was soon conquered and all the surviving defenders were hanged in the Old Town Square of Prague.



  • Them: Read The Fucking Manual!

    The Manual
                         The unset builtin treats attempts to unset array
                         subscripts @ and * differently depending on whether
                         the array is indexed or associative, and differently
                         than in previous versions.
                  •      Arithmetic commands ( ((...)) ) and the expressions
                         in an arithmetic for statement can be expanded more
                         than once.
                  •      Expressions used as arguments to arithmetic
                         operators in the [[ conditional command can be
                         expanded more than once.
                  •      The expressions in substring parameter brace
                         expansion can be expanded more than once.
                  •      The expressions in the $((...)) word expansion can
                         be expanded more than once.
                  •      Arithmetic expressions used as indexed array
                         subscripts can be expanded more than once.
                  •      test -v, when given an argument of A[@], where A is
                         an existing associative array, will return true if
                         the array has any set elements.  Bash-5.2 will look
                         for and report on a key named @.
                  •      The ${parameter[:]=value} word expansion will return
                         value, before any variable-specific transformations
                         have been performed (e.g., converting to lowercase).
                         Bash-5.2 will return the final value assigned to the
                         variable.
                  •      Parsing command substitutions will behave as if
                         extended globbing (see the description of the shopt
                         builtin above) is enabled, so that parsing a command
                         substitution containing an extglob pattern (say, as
                         part of a shell function) will not fail.  This
                         assumes the intent is to enable extglob before the
                         command is executed and word expansions are
                         performed.  It will fail at word expansion time if
                         extglob hasn't been enabled by the time the command
                         is executed.```  
    




  • Fuck it, let’s assume we can build jump gates.
    Let’s say they’re just big enough to send a tiny unmanned drone through.
    I hop into my space ship and accelerate with a conventional engine to 86% of light speed.
    No violation of physics needed, just shitloads of energy.
    I fly to another star, which takes 10 years from earth’s point of view.
    Due to time dilation at 86% light speed, time in my space ship passes half as fast as on earth.
    If someone on earth had a strong enough telescope, they could look at a clock on my ship and see that it ticks half as fast as the clocks on earth.
    But in my frame of reference, earth moves away from me at 86% light speed.
    So if I look at earth through a telescope, I see that the clocks on earth tick half as fast as mine.
    There isn’t a universal time. Time is always relative to speed and this is no problem when the reference frames are separated.

    I arrive at the star, after 5 years have passed on earth.
    I activate a jump gate and send the drone through with a message. It arrives on earth instantly, 5 years after I left.
    But from their reference frame, they could see my clock ticking only half as fast as theirs.
    After earth’s 5 years, only 2.5 years have passed for the space ship they see.
    They activate their jump gate and send the drone back with a reply.
    It arrives instantly at the star, 7.5 years before my space ship gets there.

    This is why FTL travel isn’t and will never be possible. Even with tricks like jump gates or wormholes, it creates time paradoxes.


  • We could maybe eventually load up multiple asteroids with building materials, frozen embryos, a self-healing nanobot factory, blueprints for building artificial breeding chambers and humanoid robots, controlled by an AGI to serve as educators, and send them off to nearby stars.
    Upon arrival on suitable planets, the systems wake up and jump-start colonies.
    After several hundred or thousand years of development, those colonies could build their own seeder asteroids, kicking off an exponential progress.
    If every colony in turn colonizes 4 new systems within 10,000 years, we could theoretically colonize every suitable star system in the Galaxy after 200,000 years. At a very reasonable ~0.1% of light speed.

    But we would have zero control over the colonies, no shared culture, no trade, hardly any meaningful communication. So there would be very little benefit to it, and knowing human nature, a war of total annihilation would be likely as soon as suitable planets get scarce.

    Intergalactic travel will never be possible for humans.
    The nearest galaxy is 2.537.000 light years away. By the time we get there, we wouldn’t be humans anymore.









  • If the cops actually had anything real on him, they could get the warrant over the phone while stalling you at the door, or even storm your place and get it later.
    And even if they don’t get it, no cop can get in trouble for the raid if they “suspect” you might destroy evidence, and anything they find can still be used in court.

    It completely invalidates your 4th amendment rights, but congress felt this was needed to protect you against “terrorists” 25 years ago.