Erwin

What's fascinating is that this is the difficulty of English translation -- which uses a different start letter and different words than the Polish one:

  Cyprian cyberotoman, cynik, ceniąc czule
  Czarnej córy cesarskiej cud ciemnego ciała,
  Ciągle cytrą czarował. Czerwieniała cała,
  Cicha, co-dzień czekała, cierpiała, czuwała...
  ... Cyprian ciotkę całuje, cisnąwszy czarnulę!!

I enjoyed the 2009 book Ultimatum about this scenario -- what could you do to make a global polluter to stop if they were endangering the world? https://www.amazon.com/Ultimatum-Matthew-Glass-ebook/dp/B002...

I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.

Tales from Earthsea aka "Gedo Senki". Badly reviewed but I enjoyed it.

Jeff Bezos has a 233 billion net worth. It's not because Amazon users overpaid by a 233 billion but because his share in Amazon is highly valued by investors.

My own Amazon investment in my pension has also gone up by 10x in the last 10 years, just like Jeff's. Where did the value increase come from?

Is this idea of the stock market good for us? I don't know, but it's paper money until you sell it.

Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.

For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.

The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.

Ah, this is like the "trickle down" theory of piracy.

Spending some months with a TDEE spreadsheet can be helpful but requires logging a lot of CI and weights -- if you go to any online TDEE calc you might overestimate your activity level.

I was surprised that running 6h/week and 15k/steps a day gave me an TDEE activity level at barely above "Light Exercise" and I need about 2460/day.

The "Moderate" activity level is if you actually work construction and haul bricks all day!

I found the backslash as separator of multiple statements on one line curious. I guess that's because I was used to BASIC on the Commodore C-64/128/Amiga and later the magical Amos Basic, so there were more differences in some of the other dialects.

That was an amusing post to see pop up here, as I believe I came up with the "copyover" name when I copied Melvin Smith (aka "Fusion") idea about "hot reboot" from his "MUD++" code base to the popular Diku-based MERC/Envy etc. bases -- that was 2000 or probably earlier. Whether Melvin originally got the idea from somewhere else I don't know.

That version just used exec, and closed all files but network descriptors already logged in, the mapping of fds -> login names was saved in a file. When the new copy started up, it would log the users on existing file descriptors. Today, using explicit file descriptor passing (so you don't accidentally keep files open) or a long-running proxy would be preferable.

Back then C/C++ were often used by the developers, and we were at best CS students. There were surprisingly few segmentation faults, but I remember a few mysterious memory corruptions...

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

In EU, you see the total and per-night inclusive all of fees and taxes when searching and comparing.

If you search for an area without dates, it comes up with some arbitrary dates and applies the fees and displays per night cost accordingly.

So it's technically possible. They just don't want to.

Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/

I'm curious whether their "Locality Groups" concept can be implemented using stock AWS. Imagine you have 1000 type of tasks that can be called millions of times by users; each node can do any task but resource usage would be better if same task was performed on a node that already has done it. Sticky sessions is not it, as the same task can be initiated by different users.

https://koinly.io/ is a popular recommendation here in Denmark. Denmark may have the worst possible taxation for crypto: every time you sell, use or convert your crypto, that's an event where you have to calculate your gains or losses. Gains are taxed like personal income (so up to 53% tax), but losses can only be deducted at 26% they do not offset the gains directly. A school teacher speculating in crypto ended up losing his investment and owing $400,000 in tax.

Svalbard is larger than I thought, but not as large as the projection tricks you to: it's 1/6th the area of Norway shown below. On thetruesize.com you can drag Svalbard around and compare it to other countries, it's roughly the size of all of Ireland.

Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" S1E03 episode has one take on what would happen if we could effortlessly record -- and replay -- everything. As with most Black Mirrors, there are some dark but believeable ideas.

Incidentally, it was written by Jess Armstrong who later created "Succession".

The Danish Church is allowed to veto buildings of wind turbines if they were within the 28x the height of the turbine. This is quite a long distance if you consider the 160m tall 14MW Siemens (though I think that may be offshore only).

There are more than 2000 churches in Denmark. Only the minister of the interior could override that veto.

The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths.

These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.

Virtual envs are actually quite simple -- they contain a bin/ directory with a linked python binary. When the python binary runs, it checks it sibling directories (it knows it was executed as e.g. /home/user/.venv/bin/python) for what to load. You don't need the activate shell scripts or anything, just running that binary within your venv is enough; the shell script is just for convenient of inserting the bin directory into the $PATH so just "python" or "pip" runs the right thing.

I think the 1977 Icon language is where the generator concept originated. It had many other cool features I have not seen in other languages since: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)#

Denmark has had a private school system for decades, and 15% of students go into the private schools (as a parent you pay a portion of the costs so it is not necessarily extremely expensive). "Private" mostly means that you still have to teach specific basics, but you can do it in your way like Montessori.

One advantage of the private schools is they can kick out students they cannot manage easily, while the public schools have to keep everyone. Some recent strutural changes in the public shools are said to have declined their quality, enough so that many government ministers, even of the left wing, are sending their children to the private schools.

I guess it's one of those Nordic myths -- like high minimum wage (there is none in Denmark).

Remember Replika and how people got quite attached to that chatbot?

I imagine in the near future you'll be able to sell your and your friends' chat history to a company building a more advanced, realistic chatbot. Do you want to have a group of friends to hang out with? Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot.

Or maybe there's enough emptieness in your life that you go deep assume one of those friends' identity. Go visit that restaurant "you" always adored; the other guys will not come but will send you hilarious messages saying how they got delayed and tips on what to order.

This feels like something right out of Philip K Dick -- both Blade Runner and Total Recall had realistic false memories.

Many years ago, on the Womens' International Fight Day, the Goethe Institute in Copenhagen set up a specialized photo booth just for this sort of thing and the pictures are online. You'll find some more info if you search its Danish name, "Kussomaten".

It's funny because we have labelled "TV Inspektion" vans all over the place -- but those are for robotic camera examination of a stuck sewer line!

(After many years of public broadcasting being charged if you have a TV -- or even a PC or mobile phone with TV capability -- the charges now go through the normal tax system, so you no longer have to worry about the real TV inspection people asking to come in to see if you have a TV!).

Gander's role in 2001 was made into a musical, and it's quite a touching and heailng piece of entertainment if you were around back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcI1EKE01S0 -- certainly best on stage if you can find it, but also available on Apple TV.

Stockholm's Arlanda Express is 299 SEK (24.18 GBP) each way and around 40km away. For a 17 minute trip with the train!

I was surprised by how much I was surprised by the very first fact -- that air molecules move around at extremely high speed of 450m/s, but just bump into each other cancelling this speed out, and this speed is based on pressure & temperature.

And it's due to this speed, despite air's low density, the force air exerts is enormous -- equivalent to 10 tons per square meter. Somehow, the human sandwich does not explode nor implode due to equivalent pressure coming from the other side and inside.

I used TiddlyWiki for a while, but it was too fiddly. E.g. saving to google drive was a hack. Obsidian, at a very low price, gives me a reliable app -- Tiddly wiki, running within the browser, often got slow when I had a few hundred diary entries.

I thought it would be the memory segmentation system introduced by the 286 processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_descriptor & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Descriptor_Table

There was a lot of unusual things back then; now I think memory is flat so your stack address 1234 is the same as your code and data address 1234 (the exception being thread-local variables).