Chobbes

There’s a few programming languages that aren’t based around English, but they’re pretty rare and I’m not sure many people use them. It’s kind of sad because it makes programming much less accessible if you’re not an English speaker… But it’s also sort of a blessing because it’s easier to understand code you might have to interact with because it’s probably written in an English-ish language with the Roman alphabet, and you’re not stuck trying to read Japanese or Arabic or something to understand a library. I have mixed feelings on it. It’s convenient for me as an English speaker, but it also seems kind of unfortunate. I’ve heard that computer science is a field which is having a pretty big impact on the spread of English in the world, but I haven’t found a citation for that and I’m not sure I believe it.

That’s very different than every grocery store, though. Might also be different in Canada.

I’ve got bad news for you…

Sometimes your place of work might have electronics recycling bins or something, but for the most part you’re expected to go to a special eco centre to recycle large electronics and batteries and stuff like this. Often you even have to pay a fee for them to take these items, which seems incredibly stupid to me because it just encourages everybody to throw them out with the normal trash.

You may find some stores in some places that will take this stuff, but as far as I know this is not commonplace in much of North America. There are also some services where you can pay a fee for somebody to collect an item. We did that for a swollen lithium cell recently.

Hey, you appreciate your monkey’s paw wish and enjoy your android.

Of course, but it's somewhat nasty when all of a sudden is_even doesn't do what you expect :).

You know, I was going to let this slide under the notion that we're just ignoring the limited precision of floating point numbers... But then I thought about it and it's probably not right even if you were computing with real numbers! The decimal representation of real numbers isn't unique, so this could tell me that "2 = 1.9999..." is odd. Maybe your string coercion is guaranteed to return the finite decimal representation, but I think that would be undecidable.

No, they are not. They are not end-to-end encrypted but they are encrypted between your PC and your service provider, between service providers and between service providers and receivers. End-to-end encryption is needed to defend against your service provider or entities that can order your provider around but not against random hackers snooping around in your network.

This is true AND untrue at the same time! It's true that most e-mail providers will talk to other e-mail providers with TLS, but it's trivial to downgrade the connection in most circumstances. If you can man-in-the-middle e-mail servers you can just say "hey, I'm the e-mail provider you're trying to talk to, I don't support TLS, talk to me in plain text!" and the senders will probably oblige. There's a few standards to try to address this problem, like DANE (which actually solves the problem, but is unsupported by all large e-mail providers), and mta-sts which is a much weaker standard (but supported by gmail and outlook). In practice there's a good chance that your e-mail is reasonably well secured, but it's absolutely not a guarantee.

This is such a weird take to be honest… it’s weird to want CS lecturers to work in their free time, it’s weird to expect their applications to be better, and it’s weird because this is something that many lecturers and programmers already do… so I don’t get it, and it feels disrespectful to all of the volunteer foss maintainers?

I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.

Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).

I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.

There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.

You mentioned you’re not really hosting things, but… wouldn’t the easiest solution be to host radicale somewhere so you can just sync your calendars with all of your devices using CalDAV? That seems far cleaner than using syncthing and other services + radicale to sync the calendars.

How do you feel about chicken or tuna salad?