Daemon Silverstein

One of these cowboy hats:

(I want to add some metal spikes around it, making it a metal-goth-country hat)

According to my searches, while a RTG uses radioactive material weighting in the scale of kilograms (average of 5 Kg across missions such as Voyager and Cassini), a nuclear power plant requires several tonnes worth of plutonium and enriched uranium. The minimal critical mass for plutonium is 10kg, the double of how many fuel RTGs hold (that’s why RTGs don’t blow while ascending and/or on space). It’s a large difference of mass/weight between RTG fuel and rods for nuclear power plants. They’d need to carry the whole tonnes worth of radioactive material split across very small quantities (which would require a lot of lead walling and/or launches)

I can imagine a rocket full of plutonium and uranium rods, sitting above immense tanks of combustible liquid: what the odds of such a rocket exploding during ascent? What are the effects of solar and cosmic radiation energy over these rods (even if they’re lead shielded), especially around Van Allen radiation belt? So many questions.

Isn’t a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?

Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the “Open” or “Save” buttons/menu items are clicked.

/r/unexpectedfactorial

In Brazil, there are regional variations and word/phrasing variations as well.

Formally:

• “Você ligou para o número errado” (you called the wrong number)
• “Você discou o número errado” (you dialed for the wrong number )
• “Você está ligando para o número errado” (we call it the “gerúndio”, something like “-ing”, as in “You’re calling the wrong number”)

Informally/casually:

• “Discou errado, irmão” / “Discou errado, mano” / “Discou errado, cara” / “Discou errado, mermão” (“dialed wrongly, bro”, with “bro” variations across Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the latter being the latter variation))
• “Tu ligasse errado, visse” (some Brazilian northeast states, something like “Thou calledsth wrongly, see?”)
• “Né aqui não, moço” (Minas Gerais, something like “It’s not here, boy”)

There are lots of other variations and I’m not really aware of all of them.

Also, the way I answer depends a lot on multiple factors such as: my emotional state (wrath? Sad? Okay? Excitedly happy (rarely)?), my current pace (rushing? Chilling?), among others. Generally, “Não é aqui não” (the Minas Gerais variation without the ending “moço” and a fully spelled “Não é” instead of “Né”, because I’m originally from interior of São Paulo state but highly culturally influenced by a part of the family from Minas Gerais).

On my laptop, Brave for non-“personal” things (such as fediverse, SoundCloud, AI tools, daily browsing, etc) and Firefox for “personal” things (such as WhatsApp Web, LinkedIn, accessing local govt. services, etc). On my smartphone, Firefox for everything (I disabled the native Chrome).

I’ve been using Brave in a daily basis because it’s well integrated with adblocking tools, especially considering the ongoing strife regarding Chromium’s Manifest V2 support, where Brave nicely stands keeping its Manifest V2 support independently of what Google wishes or not.

Firefox is also good, but I noticed that, for me, it has been slightly heavier than Brave. So I use it parallel to Brave, for things I don’t need to use often. For mobile, it’s awesome, as it is one of the few browsers that support extensions, so I use Firefox for Android, together with adblocking extensions.

“The system can listen to conversations”.

What a timely coincidence! Patent got published basically at the same time Meta’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s “Active Listening” got public as well. 🤔

Regarding privacy, PGP is far better than out-of-the-shelf IM-embedded encryption, if used correctly. Alice uses Bob’s public key to send him a message, and he uses his private key to read it. He uses Alice’s public key to send her a message, and she uses her private key to read it. No one can eavesdrop, neither governments, nor corporations, nor crackers, no one except for Alice and Bob. I don’t get why someone would complain about “usability”, for me, it’s perfectly usable. Commercially available “E2EEs” (even Telegram’s) aren’t trustworthy, as the company can easily embed a third-party public key (owned by themselves) so they can read the supposedly “end-to-end encrypted” messages, like a “master key” for anyone’s mailboxes, just like PGP itself has the possibility to encipher the message to multiple recipients (e.g. if Alice needs to send a message to both Bob and Charlie, she uses both Bob’s and Charlie’s public keys; Bob can use his own private key (he won’t need Charlie’s private key) to read, while Charlie can use his own private key to do the same).

You didn’t specify which problem or which thing that broke. However (and based on my previous experiences on that matter), one could face a problem regarding package PGP/GPG signatures upon trying to update. This is because archlinux-keyring is not being updated before the signature checking. That said, a better approach is to always update archlinux-keyring (sudo pacman -S --needed archlinux-keyring) before anything else (sudo pacman -Syu). This way, you guarantee to be up-to-date with developer signatures, needed for pacman to check the validity for every package to be updated/installed. There’s also a pacman-key command, but I never had to use that.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1984 - George Orwell).

I’m Brazilian so I generally use public Brazilian (Portuguese) groups, publicly available through Telegram searches such as “Livros grátis” (“Free books” in Portuguese) or “livros pdf” (“pdf books”). There probably are similar anglophone groups as well.

PGP/GPG encryption. It works with any IM, social network, anything (at least if the platform/program/app/medium allows for sufficiently lengthy messages so to carry the encrypted payload). There are some IMs that bring PGP/GPG natively, as well as extensions for existing IMs that also adds PGP/GPG feature, but PGP/GPG doesn’t need to be native to the app to convey encrypted messages, it’s a base64 text. It’s really an E2EE.

Firstly, I search for the book among Telegram book groups. Then, Google/DDG/Bing/Yandex results for “[title of the book i’m searching] filetype:pdf”. If neither yields the book, I turn on my Tor and try to find it inside Imperial Library of Trantor. Worst case scenario, I try to find a working Z-Library HS. But some comments here added to my possibilities, such as Libgen (I knew Libgen from onion, but it’s interesting to see it also routeable on surface).

As long as it didn’t pollute the fedi timeline with ads, AI slop and partnered posts, that’d be OK to me… (If someone worrying about our posts/comments being used by AIs, it’s already happening even for those instances that does not federate with Threads; Proofs? Once I searched for my own username and I got surprised on how my fediverse posts are spread all across the results through federated instances that I never heard about, so if my fedi content shows on Google, it’s certainly being fed to some AI datasets)

or they can keep using their old Windows 10 install without security updates.

Sure they can… It’s just a matter of clicking “Stay on Windows [old version] for now” on those ever-occurring popups (while Microsoft kindly offers this button to be clicked)

Simultaneously, Microsoft has been expanding their efforts so to require Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11, even those who own old machines that don’t have TPM 2.0, while those machines are prohibited to really upgrade to Windows 11, meaning that their owners would need to buy another PC/laptop. Several Windows users were using a cheat to install Windows 11 without TPM 2.0, but Microsoft has been patching it, so it’s going to be a no more. Users of Windows 10 will have two options: buy another PC or migrate to Linux. I’d bet Microsoft already knows the latter possibility. Several distros generally come with the option “dual-boot installation” as default, so there are many novel Linux users, migrating from Windows, that chose to keep Windows together with Linux (so to not lose files and configs they made on Windows). What if something broke Linux and these users that are trying to escape Windows are now forced to use Windows?