In all honesty, I love both rakfisk and lutefisk. They are fantastic and wildly underrated food. I will die on this hill.

Oh, and sursild, sennepssild, and all that other good sild stuff. That’s also awesome.

The swedes can keep the surströmning to themselves though. That shit is not fit for human consumption.

culturally appropriate tasty

Screams in northern Scandinavian

This is so delusional I’m almost lacking words. The reporter saying “Critics would say Isreal started the war by attacking Iran about 48 hours ago” puts it perfectly. The way she just completely waves that off is just crazy to me.

Israel bombing Iran and killing hundreds, and then acting shocked when they strike back is like some sick “shocked picachu” moment. It’s like they can’t comprehend that this time they hit a country with an actual military that can respond, and that their own citizens will suffer and die for it.

One might even say that dampening is making things damp!

I second this! I was in the US for a while and quickly realised that doing constant conversions was a PITA, so I learned some rough reference points in imperial.

I think it’s good to get some small and some large reference points, which make it easy to guesstimate other things based on what you know. Mine were (given in metric here):

• A glass of beer is 0.5 L.
• A big barrel is about 200L (0.2 m^3).
• My walk to work is 3 km, a long hike is 25 km.
• A very short person is about 150 cm, a very tall one is about 2 m.
• I can deadlift about 100 kg, and bicep curl around 15 kg.
• A potato is on the order of 100g, while a watermelon is around 2kg.
• 70 C is a nice sauna, 25 C is a nice summer day, 10 C is chilly, 0 C is sleet-temperature, -10 C is powder snow cold (depending on where you live the colder temps might be more or less relevant)

Figure out some similar things for yourself, and it’ll be relatively easy to think along lines like “That walk was a bit further than my way to work, so it’s probably about 4km”, or “that box was heavy, but far from 100 kg, so it’s maybe around 30 kg.”

Bonus points if you try some guessing like that and double check afterwards to tune in your feeling for different measurements.

I think you’re missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.

Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.

Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.

By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.

Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It’s banal, but I can’t help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.

This brings up the second point: We don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It’s enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).

I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the “chaotic but deterministic” theory.

EXACTLY! I can’t believe that I’ve basically forgotten how the function of “social media” at a point in the not-too-distant past was actually to help real people stay in touch and organise real social events… how did we even end up where we are now? There was a golden age for a couple years where stuff like facebook brought a net positive to the world. Just makes me sad to think about where we ended up…

Tbh, to me, a replacement for facebook is what I’m looking most for. I used to use facebook a lot to organise stuff with different friend-groups, and now that most people don’t ever use it, that’s a lot harder.

Facebook was the de-facto primary communication channel for organising events or coordinating hobby groups. It honestly makes me sad that they broke it to the point where I have a hard time inviting old friends that live out of town to a summer party or something. Likewise, I have a hard time being invited to stuff because I practically never check facebook.

Friendica may take over facebooks role at some point, but it’s nowhere close yet. I made an account just to be on there for if/when it starts taking off. I hope the gap is filled sooner rather than later.

There’s a reasonable probability that I’ll be heavily downvoted for this, but it’s my two cents, so here I go. For clarity, I’ll in the following use “male” and “female” to refer to biological groups identified by their reproductive organs (by far most people can clearly be identified as one or the other), and “man” and “women” to refer to groups of people that identify as such.

Sex (the action) is pretty fundamentally tied to your reproductive organs. As such, I think it makes most sense to define “straight” vs. “bi” vs. “gay” in terms of sex (the attribute). I would say that a male that is exclusively attracted to females is “straight”, while a male that is exclusively attracted to women “bi with a strong preference for women”, and that a male that is exclusively attracted to males is “gay”.

My reasoning here is twofold: First, a male that is attracted to women can have a range for how “female presenting” the woman has to be before they are interested. Some will only consider women that have gone through surgery and full hormonal therapy attractive, while others will find women without any surgery or hormone therapy attractive. This brings up the second point: A lot of sexuality becomes a lot easier to talk about (and de-stigmatize) if we accept that sexuality is a continuous spectrum. If we accept that, it makes sense to me to use one word for each extreme, and a more fluid language for the bulk of the spectrum. I know plenty of bi people that have more or less strong preferences towards one side of the spectrum, and some that are completely agnostic. I think a lot of stigma can be removed if we’re more open to people being “just slightly bi”, while we can keep the language clear by reserving “straight” and “gay” for the two extremes.

Finally, if we use “straight” to refer to e.g. males that are exclusively attracted to women, we open an unnecessary can of worms regarding males that are attracted to people who identify as women, but don’t present as female. In short: Sex (act) is fundamentally tied to sex (attribute), so it makes sense to me to define sexuality in terms of sex, rather than gender.

These two are not interchangeable or really even comparable though? Make is a program that generates non-source files from source files, cmake is a high-level tool to generate makefiles.

If you’re writing anything more than a completely trivial makefile I would heavily recommend learning cmake. It makes your build system much, much more robust, far easier to maintain, much more likely to work on other systems than your own, and far easier to integrate with other dependent projects.

My primary experience with plain make was when I re-wrote a 2000+ line make-system in a project I maintain with about 200 lines of cmake, because we were setting up some CI that required us to clone and build some dependencies, which was an absolutely PITA to handle cross-platform with plain make, but was trivial with cmake.

PS. The cmake docs suck for anyone that hasn’t used cmake for 10 years already.

I don’t mean to say that C++ is in any way without faults. If performance is crucial, that can definitely be a reason to forgo some of the guard-rails, and then you’re on your own.

I guess my issue with the “C++ is unsafe”-trope, is that it usually (in my experience) comes from people not having heard of all the guard-rails in the first place, or refusing to use them when appropriate. They write C++ as if they were writing C, and then complain that the language is unsafe when they’ve made a mistake that is easily avoided using stl-containers.

As I said: There are tools in place in modern C++ that are designed to catch the errors you make. If you are using a raw pointer when you could have used a reference, or accessing an array without range checking, those are choices you’ve made. They may be valid choices in your use-case, but don’t go complaining that the language is “unsafe” when it gives you the option to code with guard rails and you choose to forgo them.

Memory unsafe C++ is a choice. With modern C++ you have no excuse for accessing raw pointers or arrays without range checking if memory safety is a priority.

What you say is true, but doesn’t really answer “Could someone take down Wikipedia [without completely shutting off the internet]”. For obvious reasons, shutting internet access completely off isn’t going to happen short of an insurrection or a war.

Shutting down Wikipedia specifically is much harder. As others have pointed out, there are many thousand copies of Wikipedia lying around on peoples private devices. If Wikipedia were actually taken down (blocked by the government in some sense) hundreds of mirrors would likely pop up immediately, and it would be more or less impossible for the government to go after each individual site that some person decides to host, short of just cutting internet access completely.