This special knot prevented the cable from transmitting a signal?
I'm not OP but presumably the knot made it so that the cable wasn't long enough to reach the computer.
Readit NewsMichaelDickens commented on Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly economist.com/internation... · Posted by u/johntfella
The sphere and anything cylindrical...
The title says "first shape found" but the article clarifies that it's really the first convex polyhedron. A sphere isn't a convex polyhedron, so it doesn't quality for the (now-disproven) conjecture.
MichaelDickens commented on You did no fact checking, and I must scream shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/... · Posted by u/blenderob
Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.
I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
> Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore.
Is there any factual basis for this claim?
I don't have any evidence, but I would speculate that if you got longitudinal data somehow, it would show that more people today care about objective fact than they did in 1950.
Gold, silver, stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, baseball cards, fine art, Rolexes - everything is trading at or near their all time highs. The value of the US dollar is simply going down.
Those things are trading high relative to basic goods like food and clothing, so you can't explain it away as inflation.
MichaelDickens commented on Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander masteringemacs.org/articl... · Posted by u/TheFreim
Thumbs are one of your stronger fingers. In contrast the pinky is by far the weakest but we have dedicated it to almost every modifier and outlying key. I currently use an Elora from SplitKB so I can't speak to the Moonlanders thumb cluster, but if you find one you like it's a massive difference in how much usage you can get out of your thumbs while typing.
For me the biggest benefit of thumb keys isn't finger strength, it's the fact that the thumb is separated from the rest of the hand. It's really easy to hit a thumb key while hitting any other key on the "main" part of the keyboard. Whereas on a traditional keyboard, typing something like shift-T or ctrl-R requires stretching out your hand.
MichaelDickens commented on California issues fine over lawyer's ChatGPT fabrications calmatters.org/economy/te... · Posted by u/geox
For so many people, option A is chatgpt lawyer and option B is no lawyer. When the hourly billing of a lawyer approaches the weekly pay of a worker, something’s gotta give
Have LLMs resulted in a democratization of law where anyone can now afford to hire a lawyer? As far as I know, the answer is no. Lawyers who use unreliable tools to generate fake citations are still charging just as much.
Other significant issues I've had with `pass`:
- Important processes are undocumented. E.g. sharing the pass repository with another computer is not obvious: you need to copy more than the `.password-store/` directory...
- Hard to install if not packaged. I tried to install `pass` on a headless NAS, but it required gpg, which looked hard to cross-compile to aarch64.
- `pass` is a light interface over `gpg`. So it has all the problems of GPG – I've had a few annoyances with `gpg-agent`. Many organizations are trying to ditch GnuPG and switch to simpler and better cryptography tools, like age. https://github.com/FiloSottile/age
- Android with `pass` was a bad experience. The official package was unmaintained. The fork was not packaged in F-Droid. The UI was cumbersome.
I still use pass, for lack of an obviously better universal solution. There's FiloSottile/passage for minimal change, just replacing gpg with age, but no Android. A better alternative would be gopass, which is portable across all unixes, is compatible with `pass` and has an age plugin. But still no Android packaging. https://www.gopass.pw
> - Important processes are undocumented. E.g. sharing the pass repository with another computer is not obvious: you need to copy more than the `.password-store/` directory...
What do you mean? I copy my repo to new computers by just copying .password-store and I've never had a problem.
MichaelDickens commented on EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy weplanet.org/post/eu-cour... · Posted by u/mpweiher
I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed.
(Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.)
(Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)
MichaelDickens commented on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal tribuneindia.com/news/wor... · Posted by u/whatsupdog
> it’s literally a war crime to use tear gas on the battlefield
Chemical weapons are banned because they’re useless for a modern military [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
That explanation sounds fishy to me. If something doesn't work then there's no need to ban it.
When I tell this to people they understand immediately that I am in fact on that "spectrum".