gattr

This idea is fully escalated in J. Dukaj's 2001 novel "Black oceans" [1].

> Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".

That includes people's apartments and them having sex. And of course the NEti records are sealed and secure - theoretically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charne_oceany

As for malloc/free, I'm guessing the recommendation is to allow the user to pass their own allocator on library initialization?

Non-checked malloc returns - ouch, I count 12 (out of 56) without a check. Thanks for pointing this out.

To practise Rust, I rewrote my small C99 library in it [1]. Performance is more or less the same, I only had to use unchecked array access in one small hot loop (details in README.md). I haven't ported multithreading yet, but I expect Rust's Rayon parallel iterators will likewise be comparable to OpenMP.

[1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/libskry_r

On a similar note [1], there is a few times more trees on Earth (ca. 3 trillion) than there are stars in the Milky Way (100-400 billion).

[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/09/02/earth-three-tr...

It's the same for the recent Dell laptops, unfortunately [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940172

The Reddit thread suggests making Windows Registry changes to re-enable S3; however, in the latest laptops S3 is no longer even advertised by the BIOS. Just as in my December Inspiron 7506 - I got suspicious when, after putting to sleep, the fan would randomly turn on for a short time, and the laptop would stay warm. After some digging it turned out S3 is not available at all (i.e., under Fedora cat /sys/power/mem_sleep returns only [s2idle], and not deep.)

There are justifications floating around such as "certain devices/Windows drivers don't handle wake-up properly" or "CPU idle states are not re-enabled on wake-up", but still, I would like to have the option of deep sleep mode and just deal with any HW problems at my own risk. The "always connected" sleep functionality is of no importance/use to me at all.

Too bad, as I really like the build & screen quality on this model, and I guess I'll just get used to turning it off (which is not terrible, booting up takes only a few seconds.)

Non-integer scaling has been working fine for me for a few years now. I use Fedora + KDE, 175% on my 24" 4K monitor and 225% on 4K 15.6" laptop.

I just had to manually increase the mouse cursor size, and in Firefox change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the scaling factor.

Regarding display scaling: it's been working well for me in Fedora (X-Window + KDE) for a few years now, on a 13.3" FullHD laptop (scale set to 118%) and a workstation with 4K 24" monitor (scale 175%). Just had to manually increase mouse cursor size and set the "Force font DPI" value higher.

> The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time

I'm using Fedora as my main OS (on the laptop since 2011, on the desktop since 2015) and here it's easy to upgrade to the next release, I've been doing it for years (with only 1 full reinstall at some point):

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-u...

That's incorrect. We do use glass for large mirrors and it works just fine ([1], [2.1], [2.2]). Do not confuse these two effects:

1. Viscous liquid-like creep (does not occur).

2. Elastic deformation (sagging) under gravity - this of course takes place, and is compensated for by multipoint support and, in larger professional telescopes, "active optics" (actuactors that counter the deformation depending on mirror's orientation; not to be confused with "adaptive optics", which deform a mirror with high frequency to counteract atmospheric image distortion).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Telescope

[2.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Binocular_Telescope

[2.2] https://www.newswise.com/articles/steward-observatory-mirror...

To add some detail: a common minimum quality criterion for optical surfaces is λ/4 (divergence from an ideal surface), where λ is the wavelength used. For visible light this gives about 100 nm (though large professional telescopes are "figured" to more like λ/20). Any alleged glass creep visible in window panes over a few hundred years would quickly ruin any astronomical mirror (which definitely does not happen).

Same!

I do it for both the monitor and the TV, with two cheap "Ingared" lamps from IKEA; can recommend.

Tangentially related - I've just checked, luckily HBO GO still works (Fedora 31, Firefox 78.0.2).

I guess - we have maps of galaxy distribution out to a few billion light years, like the one from the 2dF survey [1]. "Celestial North/South Poles" are just the points in the sky in the direction of the Earth's rotation axis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2dF_Galaxy_Redshift_Survey

Seconded. As I mentioned when this last came up, I encourage to read also Stephen Baxter's "Flux". (Even crazier, here the lifeforms dwell inside the neutron star, in the neutron superfluid.)

As regards frequency of civilizations occurring, I've read recently an interesting take: when we look at the Earth, each of the following milestones seems exponentially more difficult (i.e., probability density is far smaller for each):

- simple unicellular organisms to eukaryotes (~2 billion years)

- eukaryotes to multicellular lifeforms (~a few hundred million years)

- humans + consciousness + language + prehensile limbs (only a couple of million / a few hundred thousand years ago?)

In addition, if panspermia (exchange of biological material via meteorites/comets etc.) is in fact effective, the conclusion was: Earth-like planets may very well be (almost) universally covered (infested?) with one or another kind of unicellular goo; but only some tiny fraction has anything more interesting, and we could be one of the handful - or even the first technical civilization in the Milky Way.

"But wait, how can you perform telescopic observations in X-rays? They tend to penetrate matter (including telescopes), right?"

Correct, normal optics would not work. X-ray telescopes use grazing incidence mirror arrangement (Wolter telescope [1] [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescope

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROSITA

And here's my incantation for screen recording under X Window (also used one like it under MS Windows, but I don't have it on hand):

  ffmpeg -rtbufsize 2147M -f x11grab -video_size 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -r 30 -preset ultrafast -vcodec h264 output.mp4

I second that (I've been using a Markus for >10 years). I only wish it had larger/adjustable armrests; though it's easy to replace them with something home-made (and reuse the mount points).

Dobsonians scale well; here [1] is Dr. Hänssgen's 42" telescope, which can be de/assembled and un/loaded for transport by one person.

[1] http://www.cruxis.com/scope/scope1070.htm

I also often wake up before the alarm, and the delta is on the order of tens of seconds. I'd say I definitely get to become fully awake and start thinking about the upcoming day before it rings. Apparently, just a matter of quite a precise internal clock.

Another situation when it can trigger is when I brew tea. I like a "reproducible" brew, so I'm used to setting the timer to 3:30 minutes after filling the cup with water. When I then go do something else and become engrossed in it, I'll often suddenly realize "Oh no, what about the tea?" I then look at the timer and see there are 5-10 s left.

Me and my brother also played with Lego since late '80s (and we too didn't have many sets). Once we moved from "Castle" to the simple "Technic" ones, I kept dreaming about getting one day the Supercar set or one of the largest ones with pneumatics... and then in, my later teens, I discovered programming - which turned out to be the ultimate, highest form of DYI activity.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to watch people who kept working with Lego into adulthood; e.g., I spent quite a few hours watching Sariel's YT videos. Friction-operated automatic transmissions and whatnot...

By measuring polarization of the received radio-frequency signals. The polarization is affected by magnetic fields ("Faraday rotation", see [0, 1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect#In_the_interste...

[1] https://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/research/fundamental/cosmag

The word is derived from "wrzos" = heather.

Charless Stross has illustrated this in his novel "Accelerando" (strongly recommended!). In the future, even though interstellar travel is technologically feasible, (almost) no one does it - because why the hell would any of the post-human superintelligences want to venture away from the hyper-connected, inner solar system-spanning Network where all the power, resources and fun are concentrated?

I have rewritten my small-ish image processing library [0] in Rust (from C) and liked it! I mainly wanted to learn, also Rust forced me to improve the API a bit.

[0] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/libskry_r

The free, cross-platform program Stellarium [0] will show that (among other things).

[0] http://stellarium.org/

I heard an anecdote from a ninjutsu instructor (a European). He was visiting Japan, meeting with friends; and to one of the meetings he wore a T-shirt with the Nin kanji. Suddenly one of his hitherto very friendly acquaintances changed to being only coldly polite. Later it turned out he was from an old samurai family, which was mostly wiped out by assassins some 400 years ago.

For me, I would like to have the Focus available, lock up a few hundred volunteers somewhere for a few months and have thew rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust or something...

"A Fire Upon the Deep" and its differentiation are referenced in this interesting article [0].

[0] https://ristret.com/s/qk8wpt/philosophy_computational_comple...

Vernon Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky". Includes very well put thoughts on the far future of software. Also his "A Fire Upon the Deep" with a fascinating take on AI, cryptography and more in a slightly alternative universe.