MartianSands

joined 1 year ago

It's unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Hey now, some of us have standards.

We have shitty python scripts

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 35 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They certainly won't be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren't expected to be there

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

No, I'm arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.

Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn't unambiguously better than what it does now.

"What is language" is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that's not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn't open without very good reason, and at best I'm seeing a weak and subjective reason here.

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 35 points 6 days ago (5 children)

The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there's no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn't good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn't ASCII. It's also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just '/' and '\0', I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we'd probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That's going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There's no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn't attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven't federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that's just not possible

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Cuboids are prisms. Specially, they're rectangular prisms

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The assesment that he's the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

Normally that's fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don't spend it?

There are also people who's wealth isn't held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can't neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon's horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn't be comparing like for like

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

In their defense, a judge probably would try and answer basic legal questions to support a defendant who for some reason didn't have a lawyer to ask, unless that defendant had already gone out of their way to antagonise the judge.

Sadly, I suspect there's a lot of overlap between people who are representing themselves and people who have annoyed the judge

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it's not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I'm not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it's not a term you'll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

For example, an aircraft in flight isn't in free-fall because it's being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won't move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

No, even when the engines are firing it's in free-fall. The only forces on the booster or fuel (aside from internal ones like gyroscopic or centrifugal dynamics) are thrust, control thrusters, and depending on the phase of flight drag & aerodynamic control.

Thrust always points roughly along the length of the booster, and drag always acts against the direction of travel, so the external forces acting on the fuel are almost 100% up or down during all phases of flight. The only exceptions are manoeuvres when the attitude control systems is rotating the vehicle, either by grid-fin or thrusters, so any redistribution of the fuel or snow will be entirely driven by those movements, and their own inertia

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