Yes to the days of the year - only sensible way to do it. Added bonus that the first day of each month is always a Monday, which makes it easy to calculate days-of-week in your head. Also, two days holiday at new year every leap year, yeah.

Metric seconds is a bit trickier. Most units of measurement have ‘time’ in them in some way.

The SI is obviously that way - length is defined as metres per second of light in vacuum, mass by fixing the Planck constant in kilogram metres squared per second. But Imperial units, besides the fact that they’re usually defined in law in terms of the SI, also have a lot of their derived units include time - mph and psi for instance.

Unless you’re wanting to redefine basically every unit of measurement in your new system, then you need to stick with the second, which means you’re stuck with ~86400 seconds per day, because that’s how fast the world turns, and there’s no particularly better way to subdivide it.

Although if your new calendar could also fix the damned mess that is time zones at the same time, I’d be willing to give it a shot.

Proving a thing that’s only known empirically is extremely valuable, too. We’ve an enormous amount of evidence that the Riemann hypothesis is correct - we can produce an infinite amount of points on the line, in fact - but proving it is a different matter.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Considering the random branches of science that have gone into making better hard drives, I’d be willing to put money on ‘understanding dark energy’ => ‘higher density data storage’ as one benefit of the tech.

But yeah, we understand more things, we’re in a better position to understand even more things, and some have applications you benefit from every day.

Here in the UK, we usually end up with Aldis and Lidls very near to each other. It makes sense, since they occupy the same kind of ‘big warehouse locations in customer shopping estates’, although it would be nice to have them a bit more spread out.

That does mean you can get the best of both very easily - Lidl for bread and cooked meat, Aldi for smoked mackerel and potato salad - and have two different ‘middle of Lidl’ selections of random goods. Absolute result…

Scottish: got the painters in.

Some things cross language boundaries.

Strictly, ‘like to eat’ and ‘like eating’ don’t mean the same either. ‘I (personally) like to eat’ and ‘I like eating (in general)’. Maybe you’re a chef and you enjoy watching others eating? Admittedly, that makes more sense when talking about eg. swimming or cycling, when you may enjoy the sport but not doing the activity.

Nice observations on other ways that English is a mess, though - I’d not appreciated those before. You can make them worse by negating them - all those sentences need ‘do’ support, with different forms of ‘to do’ to agree with the rest of the sentence.

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

Yeah yeah, I know RAID.

If OP can’t afford the storage for ‘just a bunch of disks’, then paying twice as much for 100% redundancy in RAID10 is doubly unaffordable.

Also, consider what is being stored here. It’s music files that we obtained from a torrent. We need sufficient raw performance to read a few megabytes per minute so we can listen to them. As a bonus, we may wish to upload the torrent again, and can use any spare capacity for that. What benefit are you going to obtain from your very expensive storage solution?

RAID6 can lose any two drives, but at most two. RAID-10 can lose only 1 drive with guaranteed no data loss. Losing two might lose the cluster, if you lose a drive and its mirror. Yes, if you’re really lucky, you can lose up to half, but ‘feeling lucky’ isn’t how we plan data storage. Doesn’t matter, we’ve got a backup - download the torrent again ;-)

Looks like you can get refurbished 26TB drives for about £340, so 12 of those. PCIe -> 6x SATA adaptors run you about £40 each. Molex to SATA power adaptors about £5. So £4200 will let you store all that with a bit left over for postage and some duct tape to make a storage bay out of the boxes it all came in.

I’d probably want a few more drives for RAID6 and some hot spares, but if you go JBoD then at least you can just download the torrent again ;-)

The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

Got the most actual quoted lines from the book of any film version, plus you’ve got all of Dicken’s direct-to-reader moralising delivered by Gonzo. And as well as being very faithful to the book, it is a superb film as well.

Michael Caine excels as Scrooge, too. I wouldn’t say that he was better than Alastair Sim was in his version - that’s a performance that would take some beating - but there’s not much in it.