Obligatory: The distro you run sucks. I don’t know which one you use, but it’s the wrong choice either way. My distro of choice is of course the superior one.

EDIT, disclaimer: I’m writing this using USD as a primary example, but it holds true for many other currencies as well.

Because it’s not as freely traded as the USD. The main reason behind USD being so stable is because it’s available “anywhere”. And the reason for this is because it was always freely traded and easily bought by “anyone”. This results in loads of countries having USD as a foreigner reserve. On top of this, US monetary policy (not to be confused with US economic policy) values stability over anything else, resulting in a sought after currency for long term holdings, thus increasing its price.

The Yuan could in theory serve as a world reserve currency as well, but faces some challenges:

• Yuan has traditionally not been as freely available, so there’s simply less of it going around.
• Chinese monetary prioritizes economic power over stability. Trumps whining about Chinese devaluing its currency isn’t completely without merit.
• A strong Chinese economy is a rather recent phenomenon, so there’s not a whole lot of stable history to point to as an argument for buying a huge amount of Yuan as forex reserve
• The currency is subject to whatever the CCP considers best for China, not the currency.

This results in Yuan not being as attractive as the USD. Combine this with it being in the interest of the CCP to keep the currency somewhat low (because that’s in the best interest of their export capacity), and you get a Yuan trading for significantly less than its potential.

I honestly don’t see this changing any time soon. Having the Yuan as the de facto world default currency is simply not a priority for neither China nor other countries. And the ones who control its value have a vested interest in keeping it low.

It is worth noting that a “cheap” currency that can be bought for 1000 jimjams on the dollar doesn’t make it a low value currency. The exchange rate itself does not determine value, only the price. Value of a currency is derived from (percieved) future prospects of the currency. If it’s more or less certain that you can buy 1000 jimjams for one dollar, gbp, or euro 50 years from now, that makes the jimjams a valuable currency, even if the relative exchange rate is high.

Dungeon Keeper comes to mind

I remember buying a CD set of FreeBSD 3.3 back in the day. Partially to support the project, and partially because the alternative was to download it over 33.6baud where I paid per minute.

Nobody tell Grimreaper@sopuli.xyz

A plane I was on crashed on its next trip. Air France 447. I flew from Paris to Brazil the day before, and I flew that route in one direction every five weeks for two years.

It was an eery feeling learning that “our” plane had gone missing (before the wreckage was found). But hey, I am now statistically immune to plane crashes.

Photo of C. Bukowski:

Violets are red
Roses are blue
When you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUE

Depends on your budget, but… discovery flight lesson doesn’t cost a whole lot for an actual aircraft. I live in a somewhat expensive region, and it’s around 100 USD equivalent for an hour.

And if you know someone with a 3D printer, an RC aircraft can be built relatively cheaply (working on this myself, but I already had the radio and receiver)

Instructions unclear. I now have 30000 plumber appointments

I bet you’ve never proofread anything as much as you proofread that comment. Just like I did this one.

I’m controversial

You’ve ended up with +5 in my book, so you must be doing something right. At least according to me.

“At least the dems were taught a lesson”

ssh

Barebones, usually. In general I prefer software that does only one thing and one thing well. Input or output to/from said software can be handled by other pieces software.

I’m a big fan of modular designs where you can swap out any layer with something else, provided that the data interchange is c9mpatible.

Lacking the above, I usually go for softwares with support for plugins/extensions.

Well over 50%, according to a 2024 US “poll”

Not really that cheesy, but Johnson Space Center south of Houston. I spent an entire day there, and visiting the restored Mission Control from the lunar landings was amazing.

Kind of. But I’m also a pragmatic person resulting in a lot of contradictions. Just as an example, I despise authoritarian regimes, but my work email ends with .cn

I consider myself an anarchopragmatist at heart; I would love to have neither Gods, kings, or mayors, but the process of implementing an alternative would most likely be worse than what we have today, at least in my corner of the world.

Yup, I 100% agree. Tapes are often viewed as obsolete, but there is no more cost-effective way of storing data in the petabytes in a safe way than tape.

Hell, at work I have a few live storage clusters measured in petabytes, and being responsible for them can be pretty stressful at times. Data loss isn’t just bad, it is fucking terrifying when its data costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to collect.

I have yet to experience data loss, but I breathe a sigh of relief for every batch of data that has been confirmed written to tape. Because once it is, I know that it is safe and no longer my responsibility.

It’s written to two sets of tape at a time, both of which are read back to confirm data integrity, and once it is, that’s when I know that my live copy is officially not supposed to be a backup.

One set of tapes is stored on board in case something stupid happens with the other set during transport to a literal mountain for storage. There it is re-read and checksummed, confirming that the other set of tapes can be rewritten with the next dataset. (Yes, every tape cartridge is written to twice).

Not sure if it’s still in use today, but the above description was 2008 through 2012. Msdos was used for “gun timing”, which basically amounted to extreme precision when it came to opening or shutting some solenoid valves. The computer had a GPS input and a bunch of serial outputs, and a control line (also serial).

The control line sent instructions of which solenoid to open when, a time reference was determined by the GPS, and you can probably guess what the serial outputs were for.