palordrolap

Wait until you learn the original joke dialogue was "Are you worried about mad cow disease?" and "No, I'm a tractor.". I kind of messed up on the first line previously because either work with the punchline.

Orcas are in the dolphin family which is a branch of the whale family, specifically those with teeth rather than baleen. Compare how humans are in the ape family which is a branch of the primate family, specifically those that are less arboreal and lack tails. If we can say humans are primates, we can definitely say that orcas are whales.

Sea-star Cee-kay? Presumably the oddly named daughter of a disgraced comedian.

(I only joke because I tend to censor myself in the same way.)

Two cows in a field. One says to the other "Have you heard about mad cow disease?" and the other says "Holy s--t a talking cow."

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn't its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I'm not sure I'd be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

m'user

Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is a microcosm that doesn't make much of a difference one way or the other. We can stab at the tankies all we like, but it wasn't their influence in the Fediverse that caused the result, even if they did manage to hoodwink a few into voting for fake tan man.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne'er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren't ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it's theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus' dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there's an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you're a hypothetical IT manager and you're going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you're ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

I admit it's been a while since I did the calculations so I must have misremembered the speed of sound part.

Trying again now (with less brain than I once had) I think you could still get a few million intercommunications between stars hundreds of light years apart within their lifespans, and stars only a handful of light years apart could be even more chatty.

Dammit I must have clicked outside my subscriptions again.

So anyway here's a reminder that if you take a stellar lifetime and map it down to something like a human lifetime, the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.

This means that stars, at least in close proximity to each other, could theoretically be having conversations (by means of light across vacuum) that to them, don't seem to take all that long at all.

And they have all that boiling mass doing who knows what and so much real time to think...

I've been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the "fantastic new idea" of bringing tactile controls back.

And there'll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren't quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.