Briefs. Actual support. The singular function underwear has.

Boxers are just commando with extra steps. Utterly pointless.

I consider all enlightened boxer brief centrists to be strictly in the briefs camp as boxer briefs are just briefs with leg extensions.

Yeah, the notion that “cut” and “delete” are the same operation was an interesting hurdle. It’s quite elegant, honestly.

The only thing it disrupts is the situation where you want to copy something, delete a second thing, then paste the first thing. Oops! Too bad! It’s gone now!

I’m aware we do have access to multiple registers in Vim, effectively giving us many clipboards to bypass this, but I don’t know the commands to utilize them. Without that knowledge, this little quirk remains an occasional irritation. Just not irritating enough to motivate me enough to knuckle down and learn it.

I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I’m always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.

Especially true when newlines are involved, it’s always a mystery how many newlines I’ll paste into my document when I hit p to put.

This is not Vim’s fault, it’s just skill issue.

Oh, and it’s also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There’s some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn’t.

I like VIM as a casual user.

I barely know any of the fancy shortcuts, never successfully used a macro in my life, can’t remember how to open more than one edit buffer and have to look it up every single time, and I still constantly wrongfoot copy and paste regularly to the point where I consider it a waste of my time to try and I just type things out the long way. I totally get why people feel very defeated by this editor.

But I do feel very slick darting around with hjkl, occasionally throwing in a gg or a G or a $ to leap around. Yeah, there are faster ways to get where I want if I’d only learn them, and I may some day, but this gets me around. If you can build up just the basic movements, that’s enough to at least begin to appreciate the editor.

Not having to touch my mouse to edit text is a massive game changer that is worth it on its own. Not that vim is the only one that offers this benefit, of course. But what it does well that I haven’t experienced in editors I’ve tried is how beautifully it flows if you happen to already know how to touch-type. Y’know, hands on the homerow, certain fingers hit certain keys, building up the muscle memory so you don’t have to look at the keyboard to type, all that. It’s why vim uses hjkl to move the cursor–it’s where the right hand rests in a touch-typist position.

If you don’t use keyboards this way, vim will probably ruin you. I know a lot of people who are proficient typists who never learned standard touch typing, instead home-rolling their own cursed setup that works for them, and god bless them, but they would be hard-pressed to negotiate vim. If this is you, vim may not be the editor for you.

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Man, I haven’t seen a pony in the wild in ages.

Remember when incandescent light bulbs were the norm? They worked by sending full line voltage through a tiny tungsten wire that would get so hot that it glows, making some light, but 95% of the energy that gets consumed is frittered away as heat? The high-power lasers needed to make fusion happen are a lot like that.

I believe all this article is saying is that 15% more energy than what came out of the lasers as useful laser light was liberated in the reaction.This completely ignores the energy it took to power those massively inefficient lasers.

I think it also ignores the fact that the 15% more energy liberated wasn’t actually, like, harnessed by a generator. I believe (and I may be wrong) this was testing only the reaction itself. Actually hooking that up to a turbine and using it to create energy that is cost competitive with contemporary sources is still a completely unsolved problem.

Private contractors also prefer building single family homes because they get paid way more to do 50 individual houses than put up an apartment that houses 50.

We aren’t here because people are stupid. We are here because this is where all the incentives align.

In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they’ve managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.

Lots of reasons:

• It’s bigger and less fragmented. More content, more diversity, more activity, and it’s all in one easy place.
• No extra conceptual hurdles to overcome like “what is an instance” or “which instance do I join”.
• Network effect. See point 1. Unless you are some kind of FOSS enthusiast or a refugee of every other social media platform due to your vulgar, sexual, illegal, and/or politically extreme interests, your friends, followed creators, and other people of interest have a far higher chance of being on BlueSky than the Fediverse.
• An actual algorithm. Many people who jump to the Fediverse hate it, but a silent majority of casual users actively want it. Meticulously curating your own feed is not a boon to them, it is a chore.

A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.

Thus gen alpha, who haven’t been around long enough to develop an identity resulting in a catchier nickname.

“iPad babies” seems to be the closest thing we have at the moment. Only time will tell if that sticks.

step 2 of this process involves making a backup. whether they understand how they did so or not.

I have lived in a home with a ceiling fan for nearly 30 years and I cannot confidently answer this question off the top of my head.

Maybe that’s just tremendous skill issue on my part, but recognizing that all ceiling fans are standardized to spin only one way and knowing which way that is seems like a weird thing to ask of someone who also needs a mnemonic for which way to tighten screws.

Not to mention a rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to read analog 12 hour clocks, so the analogy is not that helpful.

Those are some really theoretical ways to observe a clock face.

How about we just start saying, “torque in, torque out”? When the torque vector points in, the screw goes in (tightening). When it points out, the screw comes out (loosening). As long as you are standing on the side of the screw you can actually work with while working with it (and why wouldn’t you be?) this is never ambiguous.

Of course, now we’re kicking the can down the road and relying on people wrapping their heads around the right hand rule… Hmm…

This, 100%. The only value of preordering is guaranteeing stock of a physical item that threatens to be out of stock if you were to buy it walk-in. In the modern digital age where downloading tens of gigabytes that take up no space, ship near-instantly on demand, and have theoretically infinite supply, preordering is pointless if the actual game itself is all you care about.

Is this because the kernel assigns that port to that specific process, so that all traffic at that port is associated with only that process?

Yes, that’s what ports do. They split your IP connection into 65,536 separate communication lines, that’s the main thing, but that is specifically 65,536 1-on-1 lines, not party lines. When a process on your PC reserves port 80, that’s it. It’s taken. Short of hacking the kernel itself, it cannot be reassigned or stolen until the bound process frees it.

The SO answer you found it interesting, I was not aware that the Linux kernel had a feature that allowed two or more processes to willingly share a single port. But the answer explains that this is an opt-in parameter that the first binding process has to explicitly allow. And even then, traffic is not duplicated to all listening processes. It sounds like it’s more of a “first come first serve” to whichever of the processes are free to read the incoming message at the time it arrives, making it more of a load balancing feature that isn’t a useful vector for eavesdropping.

To me it comes off like you’re irrationally afraid to invoke its name.

I get and appreciate that you’re trying to make a statement here, but in my opinion it isn’t landing the way you think it is. By giving its name special reverence you’re needlessly elevating it, not diminishing it.

The point of the firewall is not to make your computer an impenetrable fortress. It’s to block any implicit port openings you didn’t explicitly ask for.

Say you install a piece of software that, without your knowledge, decides to spin up an SSH server and start listening on port 22. Now you have that port open as a vector for malware to get in, and you are implicitly relying on that software to fend it off. If you instead have a firewall, and port 22 is not one of your allowed ports, the rogue software will hopefully take the hint and not spin up that server.

Generally you only want to open ports for specific processes that you want to transmit or listen on them. Once a port is bound to a process, it’s taken. Malware can’t just latch on without hijacking the program that already has it bound. And if that’s your fear, then you probably have a lot of way scarier theoretical attack vectors to sweat over in addition to this.

Yes, if you just leave a port wide open with nothing bound to it, either via actually having the port reserved or by linking the process to the port with a firewall rule, and you happened to get a piece of actual malware that scanned every port looking for an opening to sneak through, sure, it could. To my understanding, that’s not typically what you’re trying to stop with a firewall.

In some regards a firewall is like a padlock. It keeps out honest criminals. A determined criminal who really wants in will probably circumvent it. But many opportunistic criminals just looking for stuff not nailed down will probably leave it alone. Is the fact that people who know how to pick locks exist an excuse to stop locking things because “it’s all pointless anyway”?

Back when I was still using Ubuntu MATE about half a year ago or so, I started having this really odd problem where signing into my account after a reboot would bring me to a blank screen with only my desktop background and nothing else. No taskbar, no panels, not even the cursor if I recall correctly.

Some furious Googling brought me to a serverfault thread that suggested that switching to tty7 with CTRL + ALT + F7 followed by ALT + F1 to switch back would alleviate it… and it did! But the problem returned on every login.

So for about six months I just had that as part of my routine on any reboot. Log it, switch to tty7, switch back to tty1. It was stupid and I hated it. Mostly because I didn’t understand what I was doing or why it fixed anything.

On a tangent, this is precisely the thing that makes people intimidated by Linux, I think… it’s not so much the inability to do things. Rather, even when you are given a way on a silver platter, you don’t feel like you’re really in control because you don’t know what the black magic incantation really does. It’s a truly horrible feeling.

I never did resolve the problem. I eventually nuked that OS and paved over its ashes with Debian Testing + KDE Plasma 5, and I haven’t looked back.