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I've been on Ubuntu as my primary OS for the last decade or so. The only Mac I ever owned was a Mac Mini (mid 2011). The machine was working great until it started getting unbearably slow with every OS update unless I added more RAM. Then finally came Catalina which just refused to work. The hardware was still great but Apple decided they won't support it anymore. I vowed to never buy a Mac again.

Linux distributions have gotten much better at supporting new hardware, I have a home built machine that I wanted to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows but it refused to take the Windows OS installation USB disk. Ubuntu just worked on first try so I gave up on the dual boot idea.

As much as I would recommend switching back to Linux, there are still hair-pulling issues to be aware of:

- Some software like Gimp just look awful on a 4K monitor, the icons look way too small and I haven't figured out how to fix it.

- Fractional scaling is still hit or miss on some desktop environments. I use gdm and sometimes you'll see artifacts on the date/time indicator caused by fractional scaling. Firefox will sometimes display the menu on the far right corner of the screen while I have the window tiled on the left of the screen.

- Nvidia drivers were a nightmare during the transition from CUDA 10 to CUDA 11 on Ubuntu 20.04.

- Upgrading from a system where python defaults to 2.7 (Ubuntu 18.04) to a system with python3 by default (Ubuntu 20.04) broke so many things that I just had to do a fresh install of 20.04.

- If you use a printer or scanner then sometimes things just refuse to work until you do some magic invocations and restart the computer or the printer.

In common parlance "artificial" means man-made. Moissanite can be naturally occurring so it's a diamond-replacement or a "fake" diamond when used in rings and jewelry.

Body weight exercises alone are boring but they become so much more enjoyable when combined with some demanding martial arts like boxing, kick boxing, muay thai or mma. The gains become obvious within a matter of weeks if you practice at least 2 times a week. Your lats and abs stand out very fast!

I picked this exact same motherboard for my custom built worstation with ECC RAM and a Ryzen 3k series processor.

It was impossible to find an OEM workstation with those specs so I ended up building it and it's been working with no hassles.

This has been problematic for me after upgrading from 18.04 to 20.04. Every time I apt update cuda or some nvidia package my x server fails to start for several different reasons.

Just today I've already spent 30 minutes trying to start x with this latest cuda update. Too bad I can't switch back to the open source nouveau driver.

I was thinking more of the kingdoms of Kongo[0] and Benin[1] that are geographically closer to present day Gabon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kongo#First_Kongo-P...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Ashanti_wars

The site is from the 14th century. Europeans came to central Africa in the 15th century when there were still many well organized kingdoms and societies there. European interference in terms of guns and the slave trade was a major part of these cultures dissolving.

www.soundtrap.com uses the web audio APIs and WebRTC to build a music making app in the browser.

The quoted article[1] mentions Berlin's Tegel airport being built in just 3 or 4 months. This is an amazing feat! Contrast that with Berlin Brandenburg Airport that started being built in 2006 to replace Tegel and is still under construction and massively behind schedule.

[1] https://patrickcollison.com/fast

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

> But would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism?

Probably yes. Europe and Central Africa were already connected and trading since the 1400's[1]. The kingdom of Kongo sent an ambassador to Vatican in the 1600's[2]. Things would have played out differently if the slave trade in the Americas did not precipitate the downfall of many African kingdoms. The part of Congo where Ebola was discovered would probably not have been called Congo today.

Colonialism's goal was not to trade or bring technological advances but rather to accelerate the exploitation of the continent[3]. Belgian colonialism in particular was vicious at that.[4]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogo_C%C3%A3o

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

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

Nope. Not at all. Even though they are all Romance languages they aren't mutually intelligible. They share many stems but have too many differences in grammar to be called the same language.

You can perhaps argue Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are different dialects of the same language, or say the same for Portuguese and Galician but most linguists, Nordic and Iberian people will be offended by such a notion.

And 50% of the world cobalt production comes from DR Congo, a country that hasn't been stable since the 1990s. A lot of that cobalt money ends up in the hands of international mining companies doing dodgy deals with corrupt top government officials.

I came here to say that! The bonobo is an an indigenous ape of the left bank of the Congo river in the Congo rain forest in the DR Congo. They look indistinguishable to chimpanzees to the untrained eye.

Gorillas are a whole different species and you have at least 4 subspecies of gorillas, none of which look like chimps or bonobos.

Thanks for this. I will check it out

I'm one of those poor kids who got out. My identity project was programming. An friend gave me a an old noisy Pentium II that became my best friend. I spent countless hours, day and night, learning to program. Skipped prom to program, dodged sports in high school, never attended parties. Programming was my identity. I started working before starting college. The prohibitive cost of college made me drop out to focus on my career on the first opportunity I had.

My current job as a software engineer pays well. I live a comfortable life and can afford things I never had but my lack of college degree also causes me to have a very bad impostor syndrome.

Maybe I should save up enough to go back to college and graduate.