I’ll spend it with three ladies! Three! …my mum and my two cats.

Valentines here is in the 12th of June, but odds are I’ll spend it the same way as tomorrow. At most we’ll “open the bar”, not because it’s Valentines but because it’ll be a Friday: dinner is a bunch of bar-like snacks, we grab beer or wine, chatting over some cigs. Or solving crosswords together (my mum loves this).

D. cinnabari aka dragonblood tree:

D. trifasciata aka snake plant:

…the resulting hybrid would look nothing like a snake tree :(

Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false?

The original statement implies the technique was widespread across Native American groups. It’s almost certainly false for the ones here in South America; there’s a lot on terrace farming and slash-and-burn, but AFAIK nothing that resembles the companion system of the three sisters. (I wonder if it’s due to the prominence of subterranean crops. Taters, yucca, sweet potatoes.)

The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and the Cherokee/Tsalagi being related hints me it was something they developed.

While “Iroquoian” is still used as a technical linguistic category

I’m guessing this won’t last for long, given some people already call the language family “Ogwehoweh” instead of “Iroquoian”. Example here.

Don’t speak please

How am I going to phrase requests then? sudo make me a sandwich style?

February 04, 2025

I wonder if they gave up, after seeing how poorly Copilot was received.

From my experience, that isn’t an issue; eventually the salt at the top dissolves, and since brine is heavier than water it sinks, so it mixes itself. (Sometimes a gentle shake helps too.) I do it this way because the resulting salinity is a bit more consistent, than when using a brine with a fixed salt/water ratio.

A third option is to eyeball the amount of water you’ll be using, weight it, do the maths on the amount of salt you’ll need for the water+veggies, make the brine separately with that water, then pour it over the veggies. It takes a bit more work, but if you’re worried about the salt not dissolving properly, it’s a good option.

The lowest safe amount is 1.5% salt for the total weight of everything else. So, for example: if you’re fermenting 300g of peppers and cover them with 200ml = 200g of water, you should have at least (200+300)*1.5% = 7.5g salt.

When preserving veggies I usually do this by weighting the veggies and water together then adding the salt, instead of making the brine separately. Salt dissolves easily anyway.

I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

1. You got some experience with that distro and you’re willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.
2. The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.
3. The distro is reliable, and won’t give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.

• Uranus: looking at things from a new angle. Innovation, intuition, ruptures with tradition. Higher octave of Mercury; so if Mercury is ruling network and I/O tasks, perhaps Uranus could rule specifically data creation and writing?
• Neptune: elevating things past the concrete, into the abstract. Inspiration, illusion, refinement. Higher octave of Venus; so if Venus rules desktop and UI processes, Neptune could focus on the windowing system.
• Pluto: changing the nature and “hidden-ness” of the things. Metamorphosis, unearthing, cycles of [con/de]struction. Higher octave of Mars; so if Mars handles CPU hogs, Pluto could handle specifically things that have to do with cryptography.

*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.

Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.

I remember Angela Collier talking about this topic, but basically: the “AI” in question is a different beast from the “AI” in chatbots and image generators. The underlying tech is the same (artificial neural networks), but instead of making the bot mimic human output, you’re asking it to point out stuff.

So for example, you feed it with two sets of data:

1. a bunch of pics of completely normal astronomical objects
2. a bunch of pics of anomalous astronomical objects

Then you “ask” the bot to assign new pictures (not present in either set) to one of those sets.

In my opinion it’s one of the best ways to use the new tech. If there’s a false positive, nobody is harmed — the researcher will simply investigate the pic, see there’s nothing worth noting there, say “dumb clanker”, and move on. Ideally you don’t want false negatives, but if they do happen, you’re missing things you’d already miss anyway — because there’s no way people would trial down all those pics by hand.

It also skips a few issues associated with chatbots and image generators, like:

• since it’s “trained” for a specific purpose, it isn’t DDoSing sites for training “data”. It’s all from the telescope, AFAIK in the public domain.
• no massive training = no massive water/energy cost.
• no concerns related to authorship or whatever.

Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.

Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)

In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.

So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.

Non-photosynthetic plants (like ghost pipes) are typically rather small parasites of other plants, that for some reason lost access to good sunlight (such as being so deep in a forest that other plants call dibs on those yummy photons). I don’t see how it would be the case here, given the fossil in question is 8m tall, and apparently it predates actual (Viridiplantae) trees. And I think the same reasoning applies to a potential Rhodophyta = red alga.

Because of that I think it’s way more likely the taxon in question is related to both, but part of neither. And the reason it’s heterotrophic (as per Wiki article) is because it never developed something similar to photosynthesis on first place.

In fact the size is bugging me. Why did it grow so big? Plants usually do this because they’re trying to outcompete other plants, but that doesn’t make sense here.

My guess is that it’s a relative of red algae and plants/Viridiplantae, but not quite either.

At least one source mentions it produces lignin or something similar; lignin is present in both clades I mentioned. However since it doesn’t do photosynthesis we can rule out belonging to those clades, I genuinely don’t think evolution would favour ditching phycoerythrin or chlorophyll, so odds are it never developed either.

Just as a heads up, you accidentally posted the same question four times.

That said yes, it’s piracy.

Most terrestrial snails are hermaphrodites, so it’s more like they can only mate with their own sex. But it’s a bit more complicated than that; they typically produce sperm earlier than they produce egg cells, to discourage self-fertilisation, so you could argue they start male and end female.

This map is clipping a good chunk of the Southern Hemisphere. When you include it, you also notice the same distortion:

Note how it looks like Antarctica (14*10⁶km²) is 1/4~1/5 of the globe, even if it’s actually smaller than South America (18*10⁶km²).

Very realdom.

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

I wonder if this isn’t the result of natural selection. As in: mosquitoes that are better at detecting humans have better odds of reproduction than the ones focusing on different prey. Perhaps it’s attraction towards some molecules humans release into the air, or even to night lights.