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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I ran Ubuntu for a couple of years, and then I switched to PopOS because I didn’t like the direction that Ubuntu was going.

    imo Pop takes everything that made Ubuntu great and makes it better. It’s not bleeding edge though, but it is stable if that’s what you’re looking for.

    I recently made the switch over to an Arch based distro for the first time ever (Garuda Linux is the distro) and I’ve absolutely loved that change too. I feel like Garuda at least, I can’t speak for all Arch based distros, but Garuda is very user friendly, sleek with KDE apps including Plasma, and very powerful. I like to game on my laptop and have definitely noticed some framerate increases after switching to Garuda.





  • Reminds me of an early application of AI where scientists were training an AI to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog. It got really good at it in the training data, but it wasn’t working correctly in actual application. So they got the AI to give them a heatmap of which pixels it was using more than any other to determine if a canine is a dog or a wolf and they discovered that the AI wasn’t even looking at the animal, it was looking at the surrounding environment. If there was snow on the ground, it said “wolf”, otherwise it said “dog”.


  • Vf = Vi + at

    Means final velocity equals initial velocity plus the product of acceleration and time of acceleration.

    F = m(ΔV / ΔT) or F = ma

    The second equation is much simpler and means force is equal to the product of mass and acceleration.

    This can basically be broken down to be “it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden deceleration” which is usually attributed to Eddie Rickenbacker who was an American WWI pilot.

    “It’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop” - Eddie Rickenbacker

    It was also famously paraphrased by Jeremy Clarkson:

    “Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.” - Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear









  • A Void’s plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void’s protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story’s constraint risk fatal injury. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words, said “This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown.”

    I also find it funny that this paragraph from OP’s link also avoids using an individual symbol. I’m also trying to do it in my post, but it’s hard to form any thought without it. I don’t think that I could draft a full book using this constraint, and notably a book that’s so cognizant of it’s own imposing limitation and of it’s protagonists habit of fourth wall smashing.



  • I’m going to take a guess because again I’m not an astronomer or a physicist, just a lay person and an enthusiast.

    What Dark Energy does can basically be boiled down to anti-gravity. It’s not exactly that, we’re not really sure what it is, but that’s what effect it has, it’s repulsive in the same way that gravity is attractive. The theory is that space is expanding and the more space between things (like galaxies) the faster they will move away from each other. It’s also been getting faster since the Big Bang.

    We also assumed that black holes didn’t gain much mass unless they absorbed a large body of matter or had an accretion disk – They do gain mass through Hawking Radiation but that’s pretty minuscule. So I think this study has to do with the distribution of matter throughout the universe and the amount of matter in galaxies.

    If black holes have always been as massive as they are today then we would assume that everything would be much closer together and the super massive black holes at the center of galaxies would have gathered more matter than they currently have. So we made the assumption that there must have been some kind of repulsive force that spread everything out. Instead the black holes had less gravitational force than we assumed and so it explains why they didn’t gather more matter into their orbits and everything spread out across the universe in the way we observe it today.

    Again, I’m just guessing based on my limited knowledge. If an astronomer wants to jump in here, please do!


  • This is craaaazy astronomical news if true! I’ll try to summarize from my limited understanding as I’m not a professional.

    First of all, this article is about Dark Energy, at it’s basics Dark Energy is an unknown force which is why it’s called “dark” and it was named after scientists couldn’t explain why the universe (or spacetime specifically) was expanding as quickly as it is. This paper is the first piece of observational evidence that might “shed some light” on where Dark Energy comes from. From what I can gather, it says that through observing lots of supermassive black holes at the center of loads of galaxies, they’ve determined two things if this observation is correct: black holes don’t have a singularity at their cores, and that black holes gain mass by “cosmological coupling” as they put it.

    First, a singularity means that math breaks down, it usually means that it tends toward infinity and the equation can’t be solved. With black holes, it usually means that spacetime itself collapses down infinitely into a single dimension, which is pretty hard for us to understand and breaks a lot of physical laws like Einstein’s equations.

    Second, “cosmological coupling” they explain is that as the space expands, the black hole also expands. In very simple terms, lets say the black hole has a diameter 2 LY (light years) in space. If after say a million years space expands enough that 2 LY now is equivalent to 1 LY before then the size of the black hole is essentially 4 LY now when using the old universe’s definition of what a LY is.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that because the black hole is essentially “absorbing” spacetime it must gain energy because spacetime does have energy even though we consider it “empty”.

    Because of Einstein’s famous equation e=mc^2 we can determine that energy is basically equivalent to mass, and since the black hole is getting extra energy from this “cosmological coupling”, it’s also gaining mass.

    I think the most basic TL;DR I can give then is: black holes are sort of “absorbing” spacetime as it expands and gaining energy while doing so which in turn leads them to gaining mass. This extra mass has now been shown through observation to account for and completely explain the origins of Dark Energy.

    With that said… THIS PAPER IS BRAND NEW AND HAS NOT BEEN PEER REVIEWED! This is not a discovery yet, it’s way too early to say anything conclusive.