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Cake day: August 6th, 2025

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  • Countries need to reduce their dependency on the US first:

    • The US is the strongest force within NATO, so with Russia getting more aggressive, Europe and Canada need to quickly build up a stronger army.
    • The US is NATO’s largest supplier of weapons, so Europe and Canada need to invest in their weapons industry.
    • The US is the worlds largest manufacturer of CPU’s and GPU’s. While there are non-US alternatives, these are not as good and are designed for custom build electronics rather than desktops, laptops and servers.
    • Most international payments go via the US (even a lot of international payments within Europe). Countries need to persuade their banks to find new ways to do international payments, but the current system is pretty advantages for the banks, so they are reluctant to agree.
    • Most cloud infrastructure is in the US. Other countries will need to move their data out of the US.
    • The US is a large provider of humanitarian aid, and the largest exporter of food. Poor countries will have to find a new way to get those resources.

  • Maybe it’s a work computer and it’s not their choice.

    Than complain to IT, not to me.

    Maybe they’re not a computer toucher and do not have confidence touching computers.

    When someone tells you to install Linux and reply that you don’t know how, they’re often willing to help.

    Maybe they were perfectly happy using these OSs before some stupid new feature was introduced.

    That is a perfect reason why they didn’t have to use Linux, but do have to use it now.

    Maybe they’re tired or stressed or have no time.

    In that case, they’re probably not a gamer, which is the best reason not to switch to Linux. Also, when you buy a new computer, it is probably faster and less stressful to install Linux, than Windows 11 (assuming you want a usable win11, with most spyware disabled).


  • It depends on (sub)culture, but mainly yes.

    Bars were often cheap too, so going to the bar multiple times per week was not expensive. The reason these bars were cheap:

    • Outside of touristic areas ground is cheap.
    • If the local government allows it, the bar can on the owners property.
    • The owner and customers were often friends, so friend pricing would be standard.
    • Health and safety regulations used to be less strict. Allowing for lower prices.
    • The bar was open whenever the owner wanted, instead of on a fixed schedule, making it more easy to combine with a second job.
    • Bars rarely had a menu, they just sold whatever they had in stock. Today customers would be upset if an item on the menu was not in stock.

    Also,

    • Parks used to be less safe and less well maintained, so buying drinks in the supermarket and consuming them in the park wasn’t really an option.
    • The internet wasn’t a thing, so people who wanted to spend the evening gaming had to do so in the bar.




  • I have been using Nix for a year now, and I am not looking back.

    All regular package managers have a problem: Sometimes a system won’t work if a specific combination of packages is installed. To prevent this, package managers block those combinations. However, how does the package manager know which combination would break the system? It is tested beforehand, and a list of illegal combinations is maintained. However, this comes with a problem: How do you test every combination of packages? If a package manager tracks just 1000 packages, there are 2^1000 possible combinations to evaluate. This means that when a package manager becomes more popular, and more packages get added, relatively fewer combinations get tested, therefore increasing the chance someone breaks his system by installing a unique combination of packages, that wasn’t evaluated and apparently breaks the system. In other words: Package managers have a flaw that causes your system to break if the package manager becomes too popular. The common solution is to create a new package manager from scratch that does exactly the same thing as the old one, but isn’t popular yet, and therefore works. However, since it works, it becomes more popular, causing it to no longer work.

    Nix is different. It is designed from the bottom up that every combination of packages is possible. It is impossible that one package breaks another. This creates some other advantages as well: there is no evaluation to see whether packages break other packages, allowing maintainers to add more packages to the repository. The result: even though it is not even close to the most used package manager, it is the one with the most packages in its repository.

    Yes, there are problems. The biggest is that there is no easy mode yet. But that can be implemented later. For now I see Nix (or something similar like Guix) to be the future of package managers.




  • If you’re using lighter cheaper materials No, I’m using the same materials. sloped roofs are simply a stronger geometry, allowing roofs to be cheaper and lighter by using less material.

    No, for the same amount of occupiable space the shorter flat roof blocks less light than a standard 10:12 or 12:12 roof Incorrect. While the highest point of a sloped roof is higher than the highest point of a flat roof, the lowest point is lower. This means that for medium high sun angles sloped roofs provide won’t block the sunlight, while flat roofs do, and for low sun angles it is the other way around. However, there is not much sunlight anyway at low angles.

    The greater surface area of a pitched roof means this is absolutely not true. The hypotenuse is always longer than either leg. That’s a basic math fail. The highest volume-to-surface-area-ratio is achieved in a spherical design, A slope roof that has a less than 45 degree angle is closer to a sphere.

    Do you have any real disadvantages of sloped roofs?




  • I have a similar thing with flat roofs. They are terrible. When you are 5 years old, you already learn to draw houses with a pointy roof. The pointy roof has been invented about a 100 times in history, as people were looking for the best shape. The wave shaped roof tile with 2 waves per tile has been invented about 3 times in history as people were looking for the best shape. The advantages of a pointy roof over a flat roof:

    • Rain flows off. Yes, you can give a flat roof a small inclination, but rain will not flow as well, and if your roof tilts a small bit during the decades, it can become horizontal again.
    • Snow falls off, reducing the chance that the roof collapses under the weight of heavy snow.
    • It is lighter and cheaper, as you can use thinner materials. This is because pointy is a stronger shape than flat.
    • It gives more interior space.
    • It allows more sunlight to reach the street.
    • It has a smaller area-to-vloume-ratio through with heat can escape.
    • Solar panels get a higher efficiency.
    • It allows the roof to be made out of wavy roof tiles which provide the following advantages:
    • Roofs designed with wavy roof tiles can be constructed when it rains.
    • When a tile breaks, you can easily replace it, without having to cut it loose from the tiles next to it.
    • Roof tiles do not fracture upon an uneven heat distribution. Meanwhile, the advantages of flat roofs are:
    • If you design an apartment building, you can copy and paste the interior. (Thus less work for the architect.)
    • A horizontal line is one segment less to draw compared to two diagonals. (Thus less work for the architect.)
    • If a city has the same height restrictions for flat roofed buildings as for pointy roofed buildings, and the architect is too lazy to go to the city council to explain to them that that doesn’t make sense, the architect can design a building with more volume by making the roof flat. In other words: the only reason any architect would design a building with a flat roof is because they are either lazy or they have no idea what they are doing.