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Our current economic systems require infinite growth in a finite system. In cellular biology, this is known as ‘cancer.’
  • Living things are "entropy eaters" --- they take in energy, reduce their own entropy, and poop out entropy to the environment. This is fine, and it doesn't violate any thermodynamics if you look at the whole picture.

    So I think the point is that creationists take a myopic view and only look at the creature itself, where indeed it reduces its own entropy...but that's because the creationists are stupid and ignore, you know...everything else.

    This is true not only for individual animals, but for evolution itself --- more complexity in animals can be viewed as a decrease in entropy (again, this is only a problem if you ignore the rest of the universe).

    Their argument is the same as saying that you can open your fridge door to cool off your room.

  • Can we please, PLEASE for gods sake just all agree that arch is not and will never be a good beginner distro no matter how many times you fork it?
  • Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely --- you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably "idiot proof," but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

  • Can we please, PLEASE for gods sake just all agree that arch is not and will never be a good beginner distro no matter how many times you fork it?
  • If your distro can't be forked into a "beginner distro" then it's fundamentally flawed IMHO.

    To be clear, I've used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it's not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there's nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a "beginner" distro.

  • Every Canadian and European fedi community right now
  • It's kinda a weird take? Like if I'm in a discussion about some scary things AfD are doing and a left-of-center German joins the conversation, I'd like to think I'd have the ability to...you know...hear what they have to say about things.

    There are a bunch of Americans who asked for this; there are a bunch who stood by and did nothing to stop it; and there are a bunch who tried to stop it, did not, and are devastated.

    I guess at the end of the day it's just a meme.

  • (Gentoo)Help me reduce my boot up memory usage
  • You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

    But remember that the kernel knows best --- this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

  • [Crosspost not OP] Early 30s CD looking for advice on where to travel. For a holiday
  • As someone from San Francisco, I'd suggest at least looking into it as an option. (I'm a straight white guy though so maybe not the best source here...). In particular https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_District,_San_Francisco

    For some color on the type of neighborhood it is, here's a recent incident. Unfortunately it involved some violence, but the good guys won (I don't think it should be triggering...): https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/11/nudists-save-tourist-attack-castro/

    Of course, San Francisco being in the US, I wouldn't blame you for trying to find somewhere else. But California (and SF in particular) is very different than Trump country.

  • could you be able to self host on a raspberry pi
  • I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it's just a much nicer experience.

    The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC "just works," and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

    My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

  • Sadge
  • My comment from cross post:

    Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed laser, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power and energy for a pulsed laser!

    Note that it's not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.

  • San Francisco's historical fleet

    People often complain about San Francisco's public transit --- and to be sure, it's not perfect by any means (multiple separate agencies doesn't help). But the historic streetcars are pretty neat!

    They're painted with the livery of various historic streetcars from all over the country (and a few international, I think). Best of all, they run alongside the modern fleet --- same route, same fare.

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    San Francisco @lemmy.world qjkxbmwvz @startrek.website
    Sutro Tower lights changed color?

    Noticed a few days ago that Sutro Tower's red blinking lights are now white. Just asked them on their website form, but wondered if anyone else knows the story with this.

    Personally, I miss the red ones!

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    Recommendations for first HF rig?

    Howdy!

    I got my Technician in early 2000s, and last year finally upgraded to Extra. Looking to set up a very basic shack.

    I'm looking for an HF setup, with most of my use probably using digital modes, but would like the ability to use voice.

    Current transceiver is on loan from girlfriend's dad, a Ten-Tec Scout 555 --- 50W HF unit with separate modules for each band. One limitation of this is that the modules set the mode, so it's LSB on 40m, making e.g. FT8 not possible (without some hacking of code or perhaps hacking the module).

    Antenna is end-fed with an off-the-shelf 49:1. Currently only have 20m half-wave, but have just enough room for a 40m half-wave in the attic, which is the ultimate goal.

    For digital modes, it looks like there are sort of 3 classes of radio:

    • "full digital" where the radio has e.g. a USB port and handles audio, transmit, and frequency set.
    • Some computer-control with RS232, but uses computer audio+adapter to transmit.
    • No digital, use adapter to transmit. This is what the current setup uses (and it works great!)

    I'm leaning towards a conventional transceiver, e.g., something from ICOM, Kenwood, Yaesu, (or others) rather than an SDR unit. I'd like the ability to go up to 50-100W if possible.

    I don't have a hard-and-fast budget; would like to keep it <$1000 if possible; mostly just looking at used transceivers. Something like a Kenwood TS-590 looks pretty amazing and very "plug-and-play" (but pushing up against price). Something like a Yaesu FT-920 looks pretty feature-rich too; and even something more affordable like an ICOM 706 or even a 725 is probably more radio than I need. Or just grab a new 7300 and call it a day!

    Anyway...clearly, I don't know exactly what I want, but figured I'd ask folks with more experience if they have any wisdom. Thanks!

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)QJ
    qjkxbmwvz @startrek.website
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