Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you've not got a boot manager, of course.

Looking at how chonky his wrist is, I suspect that "original OP" is quite a big lad and that this isn't his first schnitzel sandwich. Suspect it's more "plump thumb" than a double-joint.

Once you start Vim, you don't even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain't no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Us Scots can say our aitches - always annoys me to hear "an hospital" on the BBC.

Faaking Laanduners - that's who'll be saying "an hero".

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I've grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

As well as running as root, you can also disable kernel-level protections against Spectre and shit like that on Arch, which as far as I can tell doesn't even gain you a single FPS. But no real gamer would turn that optimisation down.

Indeed. Back in the day (by which I mean, up until about when Doom was released, around '93) then one of the "joys" of PC gaming was that you had fuck all memory and had to prepare a "boot disk" for every game, bypassing the operating system, basically to load as little as possible so that there was space for your game to run. Trying to fit the bare essential drivers - sound card, memory extender, CD ROM if you needed it for that game, mouse or joystick if you needed those - was a right fucking adventure every time, and it was always a toss-up whether you could get sound, music, or both, in any particular game.

If you're an old fart, or if you've ever used DosBox to play retro games, you might be familiar. DosBox makes it altogether too easy - loads of RAM and disk space, emulates anything, and it's very quick to swap things out.

A few things changed around that time:

• much more memory, and better processors (486s!) that could use it
• games starting to want hardware acceleration for 3D, and therefore need graphics card drivers, which were impractical to fit on a floppy disk, usually
• Windows 95 / DirectX meant that people wanted to play games by double-clicking them, and there being a "unified" way of accessing hardware, rather than directly writing to VGA- / SoundBlaster- compatible hardware.

I'm no Windows fan, but it was a hell of an improvement.

The concept of a "pure UEFI" gaming environment might sound great - direct access to hardware, what could be more efficient? - but the unfortunate reality is that direct access to hardware is a real pain in the arse. Every game would need a complete copy of everyone's graphics drivers, everyone's sound drivers, everyone's network stack, .,. . Computers are much more complicated than they used to be (although in some ways, simpler too) - very few games would work at all. You might get Terraria in 640x480 in 16 colours and no hardware-accelerated drawing, and maybe some sound effects if you'd a very common integrated sound chip on your motherboard.

The operating system is both a gateway and a gatekeeper to hardware; makes a lot of stuff appear to work the same, regardless of what it is really, and the ones that haven't been enshittified are really quite efficient, do their thing and get out of the way. Even the consoles have an OS for hardware access now, although they're lightweight. I think it would be a very backward step to be rid of them.

Maybe with an autoexec.bat and a config.sys as plain-text files in the game distribution, so that you can still set up your network configuration, CD drive and sound card?

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

-- Carl von Clausewitz

According to this: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202407/1315864.shtml

In the first five months of 2024, Brazil, the US, Canada, Russia and Argentina remained China's top five soybean importers in terms of value. China imported $12.56 billion of soybeans from Brazil, followed by the US with $6.25 billion and Canada with $531 million, according to data from the General Administration of Customs (GAC).

Brazil and Russia (and China, of course) are part of BRICS and will be delighted to strengthen trade links. I hear that Canada have a neighbour who have become a trade liability recently and would be delighted to increase trade with other countries, too?

Beautiful creatures with excellent names.

Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I've been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.

That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, "most of" which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.

Hey! The images of Ryugu that were taken from Hayabusa2. What a sad lonely rock that place is - a loose collection of boulders in an endless orbit, in which it will probably continue without further interaction from now until the end of time. You could sneak a few ghosts onto that place, right enough, and no-one would notice.

As an aside, the Mars rovers are much larger than this - we don't see them side-by-side with people for comparison very often. Curiosity is the size of a car - three metres on a side, two metres tall, and weighs the best part of a tonne.

Heard it doesn't take him much at the moment - the slightest chuckle will probably do.

Maya Bijou with Bambino in "bathroom spinner". You can never be too careful, FGM420.

https://tiny4k.com/models/maya-bijou

It's one of those materials that has an almost complete list of superb properties, with one overwhelming downside. It's cheap, abundantly available, completely fireproof and can be woven into fireproof cloth, adds enormous structural strength to concrete in small quantities, very resistant to a wide range of chemical attacks. It's just that the dust causes horrific cancers. See also CFCs, leaded petrol, etc, which have the same 'very cheap, superb in their intended use, but the negative outweighs all positives'.

One of the 'niche industrial applications' was the production of pump gaskets in high-temperature scenarios, especially when pumping corrosive liquids. We've a range of superalloys that are 'suitable' for these applications - something like inconel is an absolute bastard to form into shapes, but once you've done so it lasts a long time. But you still need something with similar properties when screwing the bits together. For a long time, there was no suitable synthetic replacement for asbestos in that kind of usage.

If you know that the asbestos is there, have suitable PPE and procedures, then IMHO it's far from the worst industrial material to work with. It's pretty inert, doesn't catch fire or explode, and isn't one of the many exciting chemicals where a single droplet on your skin would be sufficient to kill you. What is inappropriate is using it as a general-purpose building material, which is how it was used for so long, and where it was able to cause so much suffering for so many people.

From a UK perspective, a lot of US cars would be illegal to drive on public roads here - too large, too dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. "Dangerous" also applies to some of your other potential exports too. Chlorinated chicken, for instance, isn't considered safe for consumption. So the absence of a market for those goods isn't simply "customer preference".

As a European, we've been too dependent on the US on some things for too long. We need to be more independent. The situation in Ukraine has shown that; we need to be able to support our allies better. But the US trashing their own economy, making themselves into global pariahs and handing over their superpower status to China is what I would have described as "not my dream way" of achieving that.

The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you're targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that's appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A "poor man's gsync", if you will.

Hey! Spoiler alert for Shaz's change of haircut. At least it doesn't show her making sandcastles, I suppose.