The largest “public” scientific institutions in the United States are the national labs. Most famously, Los Alamos, but also INL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, NREL, NTL and some others I am forgetting. From my experience, their mission tends to be less aligned with “doing science to benefit people,” and more aligned with, “doing science that’s too expensive or risky for businesses to do themselves.” Or, “doing science for ‘national security.’” You see very much the same thing at NASA, where they consult and do science on technologies expressly to benefit the business.

In comparison, the largest scientific institution in Europe is CERN, and is rather equivalent to the US’s national labs. Though I have no direct experience with CERN, from what I have seen from their experiments and practices, they tend to do science more for the sake of science compared with the American labs.

Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of the topic, but the point still stands, “the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit.”

I’m skeptical, but not against it. It’s not an existential threat to humanity as the general populous believes, but it’s also not a silver bullet. Assuming we as a society wish to create more electricity (which is a pretty massive assumption, but a story for another time), nuclear power is the most appealing and effective option. Kyle Hill on YouTube has explained this in great depth. However, the wast disposal is still mildly problematic and always will be. What’s more, the mining is certainly not a solved problem, and brings with it a reasonably high risk of contamination.

Perhaps if I knew a government agency trustworthier than the DOE (or US government as a whole) was involved, I would feel differently. However, I have seen how they have operated currently and historically first hand, and I don’t find their methods satisfactory.

Personally, I think the better method is reduction of energy consumption. When I worked for the DOE, I was told that utilities were bleeding money, and ready to go bankrupt because household appliances had reduced demand that much. So they lobbied for electric vehicles, which has strained the grid in some ways, but that’s a complicated story for another time. But as many of you already know, an EV is a highly ineffective means of reducing carbon emissions in the long-term. While more effective than gas, public transit, bicycles, and changes to infrastructure as the more effective means of reducing carbon emissions long-term.

37 mentioned!

Same boat, really don’t want to keep supporting them, because of the reasons others have mentioned. But I have something like four or five emails, not to mentioned hundreds of relays, it would be really hard to lose if I ditched them as my provider.

Listened to a rather interesting episode of Darknet Diaries the other day about a European cyber crime group. To this day, the FBI has been unable to decrypt the devices. The feds didn’t give too many details about the specifics, but what they did share was quite interesting:

• Five layers of encryption, each with unique passwords.
• LUKS root partition presumably tied to TPM2.
• Veracrypt or truecrypt volumes in userland.
• A custom-made encryption toolkit.

From what I gathered, I think the optimal balance of usability and security (especially for a headless machine) would be the following:

• LUKS root volume tied to TPM to protect against cloning of disk. Also, nothing too valuable ever lives on root.
• More important data stored behind a FUSE encryption layer like gocryptfs, these can be easily opened remotely. You can also tie the password to data hidden inside the LUKS volume for effective two-password protection if the volume is not already behind a LUKS layer.
• If your really concerned, add in additional layers as needed. You can tie LUKS to TPM and FIDO, not sure if you can set up a two password mode, but that would be quite nice. You can also (probably) tie FUSE based systems to biometrics like Howdey or fingerprint sensors if you have them. This could also be setup in a kind of two-password mode for a single volume. Realistically, two layers of encryption is overkill, but it’s more about ensuring multiple layers of redundancy rather than making it harder to crack.
• I can’t recommend systemd because of its numerous security vulnerabilities, but homed does have a neat feature where it will unmount encrypted home volumes when your computer goes to sleep. Not sure how effective or useful it is, but it is a nice feature. Been wanting to see if I can setup something similar on Chimera/Artix with dinit user services.
• Defiantly set up duress key-codes/panic buttons. Likewise, been wanting to write a clone of swaylock with duress code support, but as far as I know, nothing of the sort exists right now.

It is also very much worth noting, even though the FBI never got into the hackers’ computers, they had more than enough evidence to convict the lot. Being the defender of a computer system is always a losing battle.

Absolutely agree. More I said that because it explicitly pisses off the CCP.

LMFAO! The whole thing is some doublethink BS, but this line really got me!

The court noted that the Commission had failed to take into account that ⁠private ​jets could be flown ​on sustainable fuel.

Hello Chinese state-actors, I hope this message finds you well: Free Tibet! Free the Uyghurs! Taiwan is a sovereign state! The nine dashed line is bullshit! China is a capitalist fascist state!

Me, earlier today, referring to Niri as a desktop instead of a “window manager,” which is also wrong as it’s a Wayland compositor.

Yeah, I’m in that boat. I did have some sugar, but it was extremely rare, and IIRC got phased out more as I got older. I don’t think it was ever a hard rule of “no,” but more of a “have very little except maybe on special occasions.” I never developed much of a taste for sweet things to the point I quite often find muffins for scones unreasonably sweet. When I was doing mountain bike races, I had energy chews and bars. In hinds sight, that was probably a poor nutrition choice for my metabolism, and I now I simply have roasted and salted pistachios, with a sugar free electrolyte mix before and/or after the ride.

I also very much seem to be the exception here. Probably my experience more comes down to my own eccentricities. I have the eating habits and body type of a distance athlete; healthy but low weight, diet consisting largely of slow-burning foods like nuts, fruits and starchy vegetables. I am still figuring out what diet and training routine works best for me, but sugar, even as a mid-ride fuel is a hard no-go for me. I like putting in the work to be able to do extreme sports like mountain biking and snowboarding at a reasonably intense level all day long. I listen to my body and I know without a shadow of a doubt touching high sugar and certainly processed foods is not worth it by any means.

Similar experience for my first time having they/them pronouns used IRL… I was mountain biking in full body armor, full face helmet, and goggles. Someone said to their kid, “let them go ahead, they’ll be really fast,” or something. I proceeded to hit 48km/h on singletrack, a speed I haven’t replicated since. So I guess I was given a speed boost by the comment?

I don’t watch YouTube on my phone anymore other than FireFox with uBlock. For me, it’s all a YT feed aggregated by RSS and played by MPV on Linux.

Thanks, that does help some. Eq 22 is what I was reading, and yeah, it’s a weird and confusing derivation. In reading Eq 22 closer, it’s helpful, but not as helpful as I would have liked. What’s funny in reading it is that it’s also in correlation to q, which I would have expected to be calculated in terms of v. sigh maybe it would be better if I went through and derived the equations myself, would probably be more useful that way anyway.

The posts about escape velocity (or speed if you prefer) are correct. To that I want to add the following: Gravitational effects technically never end with distance, only become weaker. It’s also important to note that every object has a gravitational field, it’s just that it needs to be ridiculously big for the force to have any real effect. Gravitational force can be described by the following equation:
where r is the distance between the two objects, and the rest does not matter for us today.

This is the same as the inverse square law of light (this is a pretty good visual):

This means if you double the distance between yourself and a star, the strength of its light reaching you will quarter. This is also very similar to the math used to describe electric and magnetic field interactions, but I won’t go into that today.

This is why scientists are able to measure gravitational waves from collapsing stars and quasars and stuff at the LIGO Gravitational Wave Observatory, just like how we can observe the light coming from distant stars. However, there is a point where the force of gravity becomes so weak as to be inconsequential, just like how at the edge of the solar system, the sun merely looks like a bright star. That is described as the gravitational sphere of influence, the rough approximation of the distance from a celestial body where it exerts the most gravitational force on a given object.

Escape speed is the speed at which an object must travel, given a distance from said body, to escape its sphere of influence. The Earth+moon have a sphere of influence of about 9.29E5 km.