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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • There’s multiple things you’re mixing up here. There’s the “up” in the global coordinate reference frame. This could be based on the local system, though that makes entering and exiting the system a tiny bit more difficult. More likely it’d be based on galactic coordinates.

    There’s also the ship reference frame in the comic. This probably won’t be oriented towards the global coordinate system. It’ll be oriented towards whatever the engines, sensors, and gravity need. Because the ships will all be in orbit, their orientations will probably be changing constantly relative to other ships and the global reference frame. There’s no reason to orient in a single direction and lots of reasons not to (it wastes energy, points your sensors away from the things you want to see, etc).





  • I’m not the one who posted the initial response, I’m just explaining what they meant.

    Also, this isn’t intended to be dismissive or insulting because I recognize that everyone comes from different backgrounds and experiences, but it’s pretty widely known that different crops have different labor costs. Everyday is a chance to learn something new though. Here’s a quick overview from UC Davis on the subject.

    I’d also recommend the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies if you want a more personal, on-the-ground understanding of (some of) the human costs of agriculture. Understand that no book can cover everything though and there’s much worse costs than anything it covers.

    None of this human cost is inherently related to concepts like monocropping either. Rather, they’re related to the economic and political context agriculture exists in, especially how those impact current mechanisation capabilities. Harvesting things like cereals is so efficient in large part because of the huge demand from livestock agriculture for cheap feedstock to justify the development/purchase of things like combine harvesters.

    Some crops aren’t heavily mechanized though, and modern agriculture hires cheap laborers instead. These tend to be the expensive things at the grocery store for fairly obvious reasons, but not always. If you’re buying Spanish produce in Europe (e.g. bell peppers), there’s a reasonable chance it was harvested by migrant workers working under inhumane conditions in a greenhouse. Things like coconuts tend to have slavery and animal cruelty in their supply chains and that’s the basis for a good chunk of cuisine in South Asia.

    Another way to directly tie specific crops to their human costs is to look at the daily dead body reports by US border patrol. They tend to spike a couple weeks before/after certain crop harvests. Strawberries and tomatoes show up particularly strongly in this kind of analysis, which is why I mentioned them. You can also see the spikes from things like grapes, lettuce and beans.





  • WSL is just a well integrated VM running Linux. It’s mainly intended for CLI tools, but there’s nothing preventing you from e.g. running an X server and having programs appear in the Windows “window manager”.

    The super key is largely inaccessible though. It’s tied very deeply into Windows, which is still the one talking to the keyboard.


  • I’m not assuming it’s going to fail, I’m just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we’re not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.

    As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I’m not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I’m aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.