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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • It’s all tied to the old military thinking.

    Russian soldiers are not fighting for Russia. Russian soldiers are fighting for their generals. Similar to how Roman armies worked, or… well, really like any army worked until we got to the nationalism level that eventually lead to WWI. One of the most effective ways the generals got their troops to follow them was allowing them the “spoils of war”. Good ol’ raping and pillaging.

    By comparison the Ukrainian army is unified in their fight for Ukraine. They’re not fighting for a person, they’re fighting for their people. All the fighting happening inside Russian borders isn’t to secure loot, it’s to end the war so they can go home.



  • Converting miles to kilometers and vice versa is a fun exercise to do in your head

    The Fibonacci sequence (where every number in the sequence is a sum of the previous 2 numbers) has a ratio of Fib(n)/Fib(n-1) converging to the golden ratio phi (~1.618) as n approaches infinity.

    A mile is 1.609 kilometers, so the ratio of phi is an extremely close approximation of that.

    What this means is you can easily use the Fibonacci sequence to quickly convert from miles to kilometers using adjacent numbers in the sequence

    1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …

    So you can quickly see something like 5 (or 50, or 500) miles is approximately 8 ( or 80, or 800) kilometers.

    Also, yiu can quickly do easy multiplication or division to figure out other approximate distance.

    Say, for 6 miles. 3 miles ( * 2) = 5km ( * 2) = 10km.

    For 11 miles, 55 miles * 2 = 110 miles / 10 = 11 miles, and 89 km * 2 = ~180 km / 10 = 18 km [actual conversion is 17.703 km, so, pretty close]

    You can do similar approximations by using other multiples.





  • Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn’t play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom’s old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.

    If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.

    So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.


  • I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.


  • That still doesn’t make sense. All this does is enable the PS VR headset to be used with a PC to play steam games. It gives people that already own a PS VR another option for usage: plugging it into a PC and playing VR games they purchased through steam. It lowers the barrier to entry for the user to experience PC VR games by being able to use hardware they already have on hand instead of having to purchase an Oculus or Index. Valve still gets their software sales cut because you can only use the PS VR to play games in your steam library on PC.





  • My guess on #2 is Europe is increasing posturing against Russia as they continue to escalate the situation in Ukraine, so this accomplishes:

    • signaling to Russia that the UK is not a passive nation
    • Will be popular with the mid to late life Midlands voters who don’t really have anything to be proud of in their life other than “we used to be an empire”, without having to actually shoulder the burden.
    • Will be unpopular among the 18-35 year old voters, who are historically the lowest turnout demographic, and will actually have to shoulder the burden.

    For what it’s worth, I actually think forced conscription (with alternatives) is actually an idea that can work well and help build a better more cohesive society where all people despite their differences participate in their “citizenly duties”, but it has to be done right: military service can be an option, as well as community service in things like fire departments, Emergency medical services, even working in government services like the NHS or community centers that have options for mentor programs, etc. Basically anything that teaches young adults to give back to their community which can hopefully turn into a lifelong habit. But you can’t start the policy as some bullshit military posturing. It has to come from a place of “we’re doing this to make our community better”. Also, you can’t make day 1 implementation only start with the current young adult generation and have everyone older than them grandfathered out. EVERYONE shoulders this. Anyone voting for it needs to know they’re all going to be participating in this (pro-rated based on age up to 65 or 70, but still those above should be encouraged to participate despite no obligation). But that probably sounds like communism or something.