Not a historian, but folks on The Internet have characterized the Soviet program as a series of milestones, with the US program a series of stepping stones in support of a single goal.

This makes sense with the cartoon, where the Soviets were first in basically everything except walking on the moon.

Not sure how much merit it has, but it’s kinda interesting.

Except it would probably end up being a sequel and prequel at the same time…

200MWh is about 1/100 of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Compressed air can get out all at once given the right circumstances.

Storing energy in a way that can go boom is something I’d be a little scared of, were I a nearby resident. I’m sure thermal batteries can have gnarly failure mechanisms but I would way rather live near one of those than a giant compressed air cylinder.

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Right now the only thing I genuinely feel is missing that would increase my happiness, is an exercise routine.

I’ll put in a plug for cycling. You can nerd out over the latest bike gear, restore vintage bikes, or just pay the nice folks at your local bike shop to set you up and focus on the riding, it’s up to you!

You can also ride “unplugged,” or you can measure speed, cadence, heart rate, even power output (if you spend $$$)—again, something for everyone!

Good luck!

13, without the pillow, is kinda how babies/toddlers sometimes sleep (once they can roll over).

Resistors.

That works for linear motion but not for rotation—that requires acceleration (provided by gravity).

(I know, it’s a meme comment and I’m being pedantic…)

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

I would recommend PoE security cameras. You probably want support for RTSP / ONVIF.

I have some Amcrest cameras talking to Frigate. It is completely local—cameras on a separate VLAN that can’t talk to the Internet, footage is recorded on a server running Frigate. Works very well for me. No vendor lock-in is also nice!

Not the parent you’re responding to, but I think it’s that my “mediocre” comment was a reference to the movie, and yours was a literal response to my joke. A bit of a whoosh situation.

Carnauba wax would like a word…

So you’re saying it was…mediocre?

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you can build up intuition around Fourier decomposition I think it gets much easier to understand.

Multiple things going on at the same frequency are indistinguishable (up to a phase). Lots of stuff going on at different frequency can be separated. Light also has frequency (color) and volume (intensity)—it may be more intuitive to conceptualize in this way.

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.

Americans had “unity” after 9/11

Uh, no we didn’t. Source: am American, lived through that period.

Yes we had a brief period of unity (and solidarity with NYC) following 9/11, but as soon as the American War Machine woke up, my country was intensely divided.