It seems absolutely insane to me that you would ever use electronic voting machines. It's just impossible to trust them. Voting needs to be low-tech, paper ballots marked with a pen (pencil would be even better tbh), and a sealed urn. What's so difficult about this?

That's basically the core idea of ML, though, at least that was my main takeaway from reading Lenin. As an anarchist myself, my main problem with ML is that it doesn't seem to provide any actual mechanism for that last crucial step. I don't think a state can be both stable and allow itself to be gradually abolished, it has to be destroyed by revolution.

I think if you want to build a state that you want to disappear later, it needs built-in breaking points for the anarchist followup revolution, while still being resistant to capitalist counterrevolution. And I have no idea how to do that.

That said, I think ML(M) is remarkably effective at what it does, and will form a central part of whatever theory synthesis we ultimately end up with.

Just the other day I spent over an hour trying to fix the formatting on a 10 page Word document (someone else originally made it, don't ask me why anyone would typeset a research paper in Word but here we are).

It's a fucking nightmare, like the software is actively getting in your way, and some of the most important features straight up don't work. What I did would have been a 2 minute job in latex, and most of the issues would have been impossible to create in the first place.

Never again.

There are legitimate circumstances in which you'd use 3rd person pronouns in a forum like this. Whenever you refer to another user (as in someone else than you're directly replying to), you'll probably use that person's username the first time, but then use pronouns for all repeated mentions as long as context allows, especially in the same sentence. So knowing people's pronouns makes it much easier to write well flowing sentences.

Unless that user explicitly asks not to use pronouns, in which case don't.

I just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts, and I really enjoyed it. It has a lot of cool worldbuilding in the background, even though the main plot centers on a small crew on a spaceship. If you're into the more small scale hard scifi of a crew dealing with alien circumstances, you should give it a go.

On the less hard scifi and more space opera side of things I recommend both the Foundation series by Asimov for a large scale story about the rise and fall of space empires, and Ancillary Justice (and its sequels) by Ann Leckie for a smaller scale story about AI and revenge. That one also has incredibly strong world building.

No worries, I might have gone to hard on the prose there. The issue of desyncronization is a real problem, though, and it puts a hard limit on the coherence of any hypothetical multi-system civilization.

I'm doing a PhD in theoretical physics right now, specializing in numerical general relativity, i.e. black hole/neutron star/gravitational wave simulations. So, nowhere near as useful as orbital electronics.

I've never taken a writing class, and I do general relativity as my day job. What does that say about me?

In a strange way, even our isolation gets folded between space and time by relativity. We're not technically trapped in space, since subjectively we can go as fast as we want.

But if you travel for a few years at high rapidity, you'll probably never see those again who you left behind, because centuries or millenia might pass for them. And when you arrive, you'll arrive at a different place than you set out to, because all that time passed there, too. Maybe twice as much time, if you consider that what you set out towards was a image that has to travel to you first.

So the more we spread out in space, the more we are trapped in little pockets of time, shared only by those travelling together.

That episode gives me such mixed feelings. It seems to be at the same time about sexuality and about gender identity, and conflates the two a bunch. Considering the cultural context it was probably intended to be primarily about sexuality, and ended up being about gender by accident because of that conflation. Or maybe more accurately, it tried to use gender as a metaphor for sexuality, but constantly muddles the metaphor by being outright about sexuality again.

It seems to a priori reject the idea of sexual and/or romantic attraction without one party being male and the other being female, which is... unfortunate for an episode about different conceptions of sexuality. Again, I think this is because the episode gets confused about its own metaphor.

On the plus side, it very much presents conversion therapy as an absolutely awful thing, which is great for the era, and it was clearly made with good intentions. It would have been much stronger if Soren was played by a male actor as Frakes wanted.

It's also just a great Riker episode. In general, I love how TNG has this big cast of characters who are all fundamentally good people, and still manages to create interesting conflicts between them, by presenting them with genuine moral dilemmas and have their philosophies play out. Why can't modern shows seem to do this?

I'd say go with arch, it has a really detailed guide on the wiki for setting everything up.

Days like that make you appreciate both how nice it is that linking works seamlessly 99% of the time, and also what an absolute mess your library setup usually is.

you put yourself in an environment where learning is the only choice

That's been my experience with learning linux in general. I've learned most of what I know about linux either by breaking things and needing to fix them, or by wanting to set up something I'd never done before and diving into wiki pages and config files.

Friendship ended with dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdx && sync, now cp image.iso /dev/sdx && sync is my best friend.

I'm not sure a ball would bounce very well at all on the moon, the surface is covered in a pretty thick layer of dust and sand everywhere.

They did drop a hammer and a feather together iirc, which fell at the correct speed for moon gravity, and landed at the same time, because there's no atmosphere.

Edit: there's also great footage of the rover kicking up dust, which (a) goes very high because of low gravity, and (b) falls down again super fast because of lack of air resistance.

The statement "everyone should have healthcare" is absolutely a political statement, as it relates to the way we structure society. Because we don't live in a world in which everyone has healthcare, or even one in which everyone agrees that everyone should have it, it's even a controversial political statement.

And in what world are human rights not a political matter?

Obviously not literally everything is political. The mass of the sun isn't a political matter. The sequence of all prime numbers isn't political. So the term very much has bounds. But as far as aspects of human interaction are concerned, in that realm everything is political. Politics isn't just the exact structures and variables of our current society, it's also the fundamental attitudes that determine which structures even exist. Much of which even a child can understand and have an informed opinion about.

Particulates in the air reflect sunlight, thus cooling the planet slightly. By reducing the particulates, more light reaches the ground, which very slightly warms the earth more. In this way one kind of pollution (SO2) reduces the effects of another kind (CO2).

There's a difference between human interaction in general and a relationship, which I thought we were talking about here. Cutting someone off from all human contact obviously damages that person, but plenty of people live perfectly normally without being in a relationship, some without ever being in one.

I agree with you.

I only really meant to talk purely about the sex, because the chain I replied to was specifically about "ticking the box" by hiring a sex worker. Which I feel inherently already assumes a view of sex as an isolated action that someone really can just "not have done".

In the broader context you are absolutely right, though. Human connection, or the lack of it, is something can change you as a person (but doesn't have to). At the same time whether or not you experience that kind of connection should not be constructed into some kind of identity (that way incel shit lies).

There is no "counting ". Noone is keeping score.

If you feel that an escort wouldn't fulfill the need you have, that's valid, but don't fixate on what other people think about what you have or haven't done.

The whole concept of virginity is bullshit, it's just a thing that you haven't done. You haven't done millions of things, but you probably don't keep track of those with special words, either.

Having sex doesn't change you as a person (it certainly didn't change me), so you probably shouldn't build part of your self-identity on your virginity and pin all your problems on that part in the hopes it will magically disappear and take those problems with it when you have sex. Not saying you're doing that, just generally saying noone should do that.