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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Been using a ZSA Voyager as a travel keyboard for work and very satisfied with it. Used a Sofle V2 prior to that but I was concerned about how well it was (or rather wasn’t) holding up to the rigors of travel so I replaced it with something designed for travel and a little more robustly constructed.

    I use a Workman layout and a few years ago switched to using homerow mods so I found the modifier keys on the Sofle to be redundant so I decided to downscale to something a little more compact. Because my usage is for work the number keys get used heavily so I wasn’t willing to give those up by going to something like a Corne. On the flip side I wouldn’t use the Voyager for gaming due to those same missing modifier keys since keys like shift and ctrl are used in a non-modifier pattern when gaming.


  • Yeah that entire article basically agreed with everything I said. Technically broadcast TV does have some limitations enforced by the FCC (because it uses radio to transmit) even to this day, but broadcast TV is basically dead. I actually thought they had shut those stations down a few years ago, but I guess they’re still around. Regardless there are absolutely no government regulations that control what’s shown on cable and streaming services. 100% of censorship that occurs there is a business decision by the TV Networks and has absolutely nothing to do with the government.


  • You can, most networks just decide not to. Broadcast TV (which hasn’t really existed for I think more than a decade now) had restrictions about swearing (and other content) enforced by the FCC as it used a public good (RF bands). Cable TV (and now streaming services) are and pretty much have always been unregulated.

    TV Networks, being companies trying to make money, opt to self censor so as to appeal to the largest number of viewers, but that isn’t anything to do with the government, it’s 100% a business decision.



  • “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said at a fundraising event for his 2024 campaign outside of Boston. “We cannot let him win.”

    The irony of this is breathtaking. If Biden wasn’t running there’d be much less of a chance of Trump winning. I really wonder what would happen at this point if Biden dropped dead of a heart attack tomorrow. I find it hard to believe anyone else could possibly be doing worse than him. Harris might do just as badly because of guilt by association, but at least she wouldn’t do any worse.

    If there’s any justice in the world both Biden and Trump will kick the bucket before the next election, and we’ll actually get a couple candidates that aren’t a few decades past the average life expectancy for once. Maybe get a fresh faced 50 year old for a change. God forbid we get a candidate that we don’t seriously have to worry about if they need a diaper change for once.



  • Yep and that’s fair, but it’s still really critical that those of us that can migrate do so. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Developers won’t feel pressured to support Linux if there’s no sizable user base, but the user base won’t grow until developers provide support for Linux. He even mentions that in that video. There’s a reason I’m only this year planning on switching my primary desktop from Windows to Linux and it’s because of how good Proton has gotten. I’ve already checked every game in my Steam library and while it’s not 100% of the library that runs, everything that doesn’t is something I don’t care about.



  • Nah, Linux still only accounts for about 2% of all users on Steam (active per month) so it has a long way to go still, but at least it’s heading in the right direction. If you count only English speaking Steam users that number climbs to over 5%. If Linux can get to and reliably maintain 10% that’s probably good enough to make it a first class target for even AAA releases, but it’s not there yet. The fact that so many games run fine under Linux these days is almost entirely down to the effort Valve has sunk into Proton making it relatively easy for devs to check Steamdeck support off without needing to really put much work in at all.



  • We don’t need everyone to migrate, just enough that companies and developers feel obligated to support Linux. We’re slowly getting there. Valve throwing their weight behind Linux for gaming was a massive win for Linux. Another important factor is the rise of the mobile first generations and the fact that at its core Android is Linux based. It’s not completely trivial to port an Android app to Linux but it’s at least no worse than porting it to Windows.

    Microsoft may still have a stranglehold on corporate desktops, but they’ve long since lost the battle for servers and their hold on the home desktop is slipping a little more each day. Losing a significant chunk of gamers to Linux would be a massive blow to MS because it has been one of the few really unassailable markets for them historically.



  • I can confirm Samsung appliances are complete trash. Every single one I’ve owned has either died or had a non-replaceable part fail within a couple years. We had a Samsung fridge at one point and one of the door switches failed. No big deal right, easy to replace? No, apparently Samsung used some kind of custom switch instead of the bog standard cherry contact switch that basically everything and everyone has used for decades, and it’s no longer being manufactured.




  • It depends. There’s a lot of areas in coal country that are deeply conservative in part because conservative politicians promise to protect coal jobs and to disrupt renewables. That of course varies by location, but E.G. Texas which has a large oil company presence is going to have a lot of conservative voters who are anti-renewable because they’ve made their career working in the petroleum industry. So while not every conservative is going to be against solar, quite a lot of them are.


  • That can delay things, but ultimately it will be the US against the rest of the world and no amount of subsidies will be able to offset that. We’re already seeing the early stages of that with China having invested heavily in solar. Cheap Chinese made solar panels are starting to drive the cost of solar installs down and China is still ramping up. Between the public backlash against fossil fuels on one side, and increasing economic pressure on the other eventually they’ll cave and phase the subsidies out.


  • Ultimately this is how renewables win. Not because people are pushing for them, but because they’re cheaper and easier. In order to reach that point we do need a certain number of early adopters that are using renewables because it’s the right thing, but we’ll eventually hit a tipping point where it costs you more to use non-renewables and the migration becomes self-sustaining at that point.


  • It’s important to distinguish between lossy and lossless algorithms. What was specifically requested in this case is a lossless algorithm which means that you must be able to perfectly reassemble the original input given only the compressed output. It must be an exact match, not a close match, but absolutely identical.

    Lossless algorithms rely generally on two tricks. The first is removing common data. If for instance some format always includes some set of bytes in the same location you can remove them from the compressed data and rely on the decompression algorithm to know it needs to reinsert them. From a signal theory perspective those bytes represent noise as they don’t convey meaningful data (they’re not signal in other words).

    The second trick is substituting shorter sequences for common longer ones. For instance if you can identify many long sequences of data that occur in multiple places you can create a lookup index and replace each of those long sequences with the shorter index key. The catch is that you obviously can’t do this with every possible sequence of bytes unless the data is highly regular and you can use a standardized index that doesn’t need to be included in the compressed data. Depending on how poorly you do in selecting the sequences to add to your index, or how unpredictable the data to be compressed is you can even end up taking up more space than the original once you account for the extra storage of the index.

    From a theory perspective everything is classified as either signal or noise. Signal has meaning and is highly resistant to compression. Noise does not convey meaning and is typically easy to compress (because you can often just throw it away, either because you can recreate it from nothing as in the case of boilerplate byte sequences, or because it’s redundant data that can be reconstructed from compressed signal).

    Take for instance a worst case scenario for compression, a long sequence of random uniformly distributed bytes (perhaps as a one time pad). There’s no boilerplate to remove, and no redundant data to remove, there is in effect no noise in the data only signal. Your only options for compression would be to construct a lookup index, but if the data is highly uniform it’s likely there are no long sequences of repeated bytes. It’s highly likely that you can create no index that would save any significant amount of space. This is in effect nearly impossible to compress.

    Modern compression relies on the fact that most data formats are in fact highly predictable with lots of trimmable noise by way of redundant boilerplate, and common often repeated sequences, or in the case of lossy encodings even signal that can be discarded in favor of approximations that are largely indistinguishable from the original.