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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • This was one of the really interesting plot elements in World War Z, where towards the end of the war where they couldn’t really afford to be wasting resources on prisons, they brought back corporal and public punishment. They’d put people in stockades to let the entire community know they were caught doing something like stealing their neighbor’s firewood, or publicly lashing executives who were war-profiteering, and only imprisoning the absolute worst offenders who were incapable of integrating back into society.

    For a silly zombie novel, it honestly has a phenomenal amount of prettt interesting social commentary, and is absolutely worth a listen to the unabridged audiobook.





  • This had an interesting part in Westworld, where at one point they go to a big database of minds that have been “backed up” in a sense, and they’re fairly simple “code books” that define basically all of the behaviors of a person. The first couple seasons have some really cool ideas on how consciousness is formed, even if the later seasons kind of fell apart IMO








  • If you’re on single phase power, you almost always need something like a start capacitor, at least for large-ish motors. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reliability of the grid, and moreso how single-phase AC motors work.

    If that is a start capacitor, OP might actually want to shut it off once the motor is running, as they’re typically not meant to run continuously. Usually, there’s a mechanism that disconnects the start capacitor once the motor is up to speed, but it’s not strictly necessary




  • Which is one of the things that people seem to forget about with Microsoft when they think that them pushing Linux is some nefarious plot to kill Linux and get everyone on Windows. At this point, it’s like 12% of their total revenue. Not insignificant, but they’re likely going to see far more growth pushing products related to Azure, which most instances are going to be running some sort of Linux VMs.

    Microsoft saw the writing on the wall a while ago, and knows that the desktop and even embedded environment is a small slice of the computing pie. They would obviously still prefer to own 100% of that, but they also saw that there’s a finite number of users and devices that’ll use Windows, while there’s effectively an infinite number of things that people can put on their cloud services. Even if it has to be a “competing” OS, they’re making a shitton of money regardless.


  • Because if you’re like me, I can use my phone in a nuclear fallout shelter or at Point Nemo in the Pacific and still have 2 bars of 5G, but the moment I step into the Home Depot or Kroger by my house, my phone barely manages a single bar of non-data service. If I need to make a call or look something up in the store, I have to use the in-store Wi-Fi.