Thanks! I will try and report the results back to you.

Good for the environment? I recycle everything I can. I don’t use plastic bags or single-use cups. I avoid using heating in the winter to save on CO2 emissions (used it for 2 days this winter when my gf was sick). I stave off aircon in the summer for as long as I can to save electricity. I’m vegan (mostly because of ethical concerns but also because meat is awful for the planet in general). I avoid using my car when there’s an alternative (cycling/public transit).

Good for me? I do at least some exercise (stretching, workout, jogging, cycling) every workday and hike on the weekend. I brush my teeth twice a day, floss weekly, and get a full dental cleaning annually, and because of this (and genetic luck I suppose) I never had any issues with my teeth (don’t have even a single filling). I don’t drink alcohol or smoke at all. I avoid caffeine and sugars when possible.

I feel privileged to be able to form those habits, and also often blame myself that I don’t do better. I’m addicted to fat and carbohydrate-heavy foods, can’t bring myself to clean the apartment with any regularity beyond the most necessary, and can’t form a habit of regularly reading books. Sometimes I wonder how other adults manage when they have a 9-5 office job with commute times, kids, etc.

Do I have to build all other parts myself before then? (I’m trying to package it for Nix so that other people can also build it more easily)

Are there any instructions on how to build this all to get the ventoy installer binary that can replace upstream? Or is the project not up to this stage yet? I can go without Windows and FreeBSD support.

AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure

I’ve been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.

It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.

GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem

It’s actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.

It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).

Meanwhile I’m typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.

Linux is not the best “apocalypse” OS, but it sure is better than Windows.

There are ways to deal with this. There’s AppImage for GUI apps (that replicates the “just get an exe from a friend on a flash drive”) and lots of bundling programs for non-GUI apps (I use nix-bundle because I use Nix, but there are other options too).

Lots of distro installers work offline too, by just bringing all the stuff you need as part of the installer.

And one major benefit of Linux is that when stuff does inevitably go wrong, it’s infinitely easier to fix than proprietary garbage.

Don’t get my hopes up

I’ve actually found RawTherapee to be slightly faster for what I’m doing (slight edits to my amateur photography)

TBH this finally pushed me over the edge. It was surprisingly easy - just s/firefox/librewolf/ in my browser config file, and then privacy.clearOnShutdown_v2.cookiesAndStorage = false (I don’t want to log in to all my work accounts every time I restart the browser). I didn’t even notice the switch TBH.

They only dedup runtimes, not individual dependencies.

Not sure I follow you entirely, but I think we agree.

No, not quite. Flatpak is containers - it just stuffs every dependency that an application needs in a directory with no way to deduplicate or update independently. Gobo is a bit more nuanced, since dependencies are shared between applications when the versions match.

I think the main premise is that every version of every software has its own installation prefix. This allows you to mix&match different versions, perform atomic upgrades, etc. You can think of it as a proto-Nix. TBH I don’t see much point in it now that Nix(OS) and Guix exist, or, if you don’t like their purity, stal/IX.

I think it puts some stress on the window, especially if you slam the door shut with too much force. I don’t know how often this actually becomes a problem though, and in any case - you don’t need an electronic door opener regardless.

The article says nothing about opening the doors from the inside; if you are ever in that situation, cybertrucks have a manual release under the rubber mat of the “map pocket” in the doors

I’m genuinely confused as to why you would prefer an electronic door opener. Is it just a gimmick for aesthetics? I’ve heard that it’s to allow for frameless doors (in which it’s better to open the window a bit before opening the door), but I’ve been in multiple cars that did that with a mechanical handle just fine, by simply adding a switch to that mechanical handle. It seems so stupid on so many levels: cost, reliability, repairability, and - chiefly - safety.

I think the more realistic argument is that CEOs have an inherent incentive to take big risks. If they get lucky and succeed, they get credited for the win, can put it in their portfolio and then demand better pay or move on to another company which will pay them more. If they fail, they can quietly resign, take the golden parachute and move on to the next company after a year or two as though nothing has happened. A big salary incentivizes them to keep their job, thus disincentivizing them from taking risks.

Now I said let’s murder them?

You’re advocating for death penalty.

In countries that abolished it, if someone was executed it would be considered murder. So yes, you are advocating for murder.

Interestingly you still only talk about the perpetrators and not the victims.

What do victims have to do with this? I’m not proposing we kill them.

Surviving victims should of course be offered treatment, both physical and mental, as well as fair compensation. It is irrelevant to the question of the death penalty.

Yes :)

Hm, I don’t think the “gravitational force” (as in the thing that pulls you towards the Earth) is a result of a gravitational wave; rather it is a result of you being in a static vector field. Gravitational waves are waves that travel through that field, e.g. the stuff that LIGO is measuring.

I’ve tried thinking about how it would work with portals. The problem is that the definition for gravitational field is g = -∇Φ where gravitational potential Φ(x) = ∑_i(-G·m_i)/||x - x_i||, which depends on there being a single unambiguous “distance between two points” (x and x_i in this case). But think about two points on the opposite sides of one “portal entrance” (e.g. imagine a portal entrance on a wall in front of you, with your friend on the other side of that wall). What is the distance between you and your friend now? If we’re to say it’s the same as it was without a portal, then (1) we get straight back to our problems with energy conservation, (2) there is no physical path between you and your friend that matches this distance as there’s a rift in space on that path. It would also be weird to conclude that it’s infinity - you can just go around the wall in our example and be right next to your friend. So we almost have to conclude that the shortest path would have to go around the portal somehow. Let’s just say that it would be the length of the shortest path around the portal. By the formulae for the gravitational field, this means that the gravity will pull you towards the shortest path to Earth’s center. If you placed one portal on the surface of Earth (let’s assume that the center of Earth is sufficiently far away that the gravitational field can be approximated as uniform in direction and magnitude) and another one somewhere far-far away in deep space (where let’s say that gravitational field is 0 for simplicity) it would look something like this:

Note how while the gravitational potential (Φ) is defined along the red line, the gravitational field would be undefined as there would be no gradient in the gravitational potential.

Now let’s try thinking what would happen on the other side. I’ll assume that our portals are just flattened wormholes with short throats. Thus we’ll just assume that portal entrances are actually “two-sided” (e.g. if they are just floating in your room, you can walk around them and see whatever is around the other portal at all times), and that the distance between them is 0 (let’s not think about how that works for now). Now the distance between an object on “one side” of first portal entrance and “the other side” of another portal entrance is even more messed up - I think the shortest path would technically be one that travels from first object to one of the “edges” of the first portal entrance and then from the corresponding edge of the second portal entrance to the second object. Thus the gravitational field around the other portal would look like this (I’ve added eyes to clarify how I’ve linked up portal sides):

The red line once again means that the gravitational field there is undefined.

Whew, it’s complicated, right?

Now, let’s put the second portal close to the first one. Note that I’m assuming here that only the shortest distance to the center of the earth matters.

The two red lines from before now overlap, and there’s another one - there’s no gradient when the distance to the blue portal and to the earth is the same. It’d actually be longer than what I’ve drawn, and some sort of parabola in those areas, but I’m too lazy to do that. Hanging in the middle of that red cross would be a weird feeling - your top half would feel as though you’re hanging upside down, while your bottom half would feel normal, and your arms and legs would be pulled in slightly different directions.

Although, I think that Newtonian definitions of gravity are playing tricks on us here. We should probably try using general relativity instead, but I am too tired to even attempt that right now, and I’d probably fail given that the fields involved there are a lot more complicated.

To be clear, NVidia supplies Linux drivers, but they are proprietary semi-broken nonsense.