Fun coincidence from Newton’s not quite right theory of gravity combined with his not quite right particle theory of light.

Realistically, I would grieve the loss of my children, who would never be born if I didn’t line things up just right to cause them to happen again. I’d spend more time with my parents, who are getting along in the years, and I’d make the most of my time with them while they’re healthy and happy.

There are a few specifics where I’d try to get some loved ones out of trouble before some critical tipping point that would later cause a bunch of heartache and stress.

There are general things about money and politics I’d probably do differently, knowing about how stocks have performed and what not, but that’s not super interesting to me, because I’m mostly content in my personal life (including my career) and wouldn’t want to upset that balance by doing anything too different from what brought me here.

The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.

Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.

Even if my needs were met I’d still spend a lot of my time achieving wants. Not just stuff I can buy or pay for, but things that bring me satisfaction and contentment. So I’d probably still have a job, just with a little flexibility towards prioritizing job satisfaction over pure pay.

I made an alt on each of the big instances, because I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to use long term. Then I just kinda stuck with them, each following slightly different topics, and therefore having different opportunities to participate in discussions.

I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.

Oh I actually know this one. Mostly historical accident and path dependence.

In medieval England, kings wanted to make sure that taxes and fines to the crown were properly paid, so they had their own officials in each county, who reported to the King rather than to any local officials. Sheriffs were responsible for tax collection, law enforcement (both arresting people before they could be tried and carrying out the rulings of the court). But they’d have to wait for the king’s courts to actually come to town and hold trials and what not, so in the meantime the king’s financial interests weren’t necessarily aligned with the sheriff’s.

So coroners were appointed to watch over county matters and represent the king’s financial interests whenever the courts came to town.

When someone was convicted of a capital offense, their property escheated to the crown. That was an important source of revenue for the crown, so coroners would determine whether a dead body was the result of a crime or not, in order to make sure the crown wasn’t missing out on some convict money.

Both the Sheriff and coroner positions survived the transition into American governance, but independence and democratic reforms meant that these previously crown-appointed positions needed to become elected positions. Most states kept Sheriffs and Coroners as county officials, and preserved some of their traditional roles and duties. Many coroners offices were renamed to “medical examiner” but basically still preserved the role of keeping stats on deaths. And without appointment by the crown, most states just chose to make these elected positions.

So I gotta ask: what’s your plan for addressing your stress levels and your lack of sleep? A prescription from your doctor doesn’t squarely address those issues, and they should probably be addressed.

Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.

Executive actions that don’t need Congress:

• Enforce existing federal healthcare standards such that abortions required for health and safety of mother are included. The Biden DOJ is currently litigating whether emergency rooms must perform care for stillbirths, miscarriages, and life/health threatening pregnancy complications as part of EMTALA.
• Grant support around abortions (but not abortions themselves, because that is forbidden by federal law), such as sick leave or even reimbursable travel expenses for military servicemembers or other federally insured beneficiaries to obtain abortions. This is why Senator Tuberville blocked a bunch of military promotions for almost a year last year.
• Ensure federal licensing for services and drugs that may be used in support of abortions: FDA approval for drugs used in abortions, prescription-by-mail regulations, interstate telemedicine standards, etc. The Biden DOJ is currently litigating several of these issues.

The president also has the veto power for blocking any new federal restrictions on abortion or birth control or IVF.

With Senate approval, Biden can also appoint judges in the judicial vacancies to where there are more abortion-friendly judges in the system.

If Congress gets on board, there can also be legislation for rolling back some federal restrictions on abortion: the federal government runs major health insurance policies (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare) and actual hospitals/providers (Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, military hospitals), which are currently forbidden from administering or insuring abortions. Congress could also guarantee the right to seek telemedicine across state lines, including the right to seek abortion pills by mail.

You could always refer to the other time Dan Harmon referred to the same trope, with the Community episode where Abed is trying to tell the story through flashbacks, annoying everyone around him.

I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.

The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.

This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.

It doesn’t scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.

I wouldn’t describe it as a reversal, the actual serenity prayer as stated already has the “courage to change the things I can,” so anything that is within the speaker’s ability to change should already be covered. And the last part, the wisdom to know the difference, already asks to have the ability to discern the two categories, and seeks to avoid accepting the things that can be changed.

It’s clever, but doesn’t actually say anything the serenity prayer itself doesn’t already say.

No, he literally had to buy the domain back from Paypal in 2017. Paypal owned the domain for years, even after firing Elon in 2000 for trying to switch to it.

One of the areas where YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Twitch really excel, compared to things like PeerTube, is storing a shitload of file formats with all the different options of resolution/quality and codec. When a user uploads a supported file, YouTube automatically generates files containing h.264 video in mp4 containers at several different resolutions/bandwidth/quality settings, and then processes the more popularly viewed videos into more bandwidth-efficient codecs, like VP9 or AV1 (at the cost of much more processing/server load, which is why they only do this for videos that reach a particular threshold of views).

Then, when someone views a video, it seamlessly sends the “best” video for that person’s resources and supported codecs, including stepping up or down in quality mid-stream based on the performance of that connection.

Decentralization of these functions is a complex task, because not everyone will have the right hardware to do these things efficiently. Intel, AMD, and Apple CPUs support different hardware acceleration for video encoding or decoding, while Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple have different GPU support, too. So transcoding and related functionality tends to be much more device-dependent. It’s not an insumountable problem, but in the meantime we’ll just basically live with less efficient quality-per-bandwidth settings on PeerTube videos. So that’ll exacerbate the cost of storage and bandwidth (or the quality) in a service that relies on user-donated storage and bandwidth.

If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though

That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:

• April
• August
• December
• February
• January
• July
• June
• March
• May
• November
• September

In my mind, default is UTC unless otherwise specified.

Oct = 8
Nov = 9
Dec = 10

In metric time there are only 10 months per year