I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing

No I’m pretty sure Strictly Ballroom is a completely accurate portrayal of ballroom dancing.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…

Anything can use it, but I think by convention it’s used for http on a non-privileged port.

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

Sounds like the opposite reasoning may have some truth:

“Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.”

Look, if you don’t want to listen to some random dude who thinks reading is cool, fair enough. But if that random dude also runs level three diagnostics on the warp core and can swap polarity on the main deflector dish with one hand tied behind his back? Yeah…you should probably pay attention.

Nah just give them the .tex source and let them deal with it.

It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).

I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.

You discounted space dust.

No I didn’t — it would thermalize and radiate.

This is not my paradox, and it’s not really a paradox at all, as the big bang model explains it nicely. There are many nice articles on the topic of you’d like to read more about it.

Yes. But why is there an absence of light?

If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)

So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.

This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox

Olbers’s paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux’s paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.

The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.

Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It’s about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly — it’s just euphemisms and insinuation. And it’s hilarious IMHO.

I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn’t let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.

(Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I’m just trying to answer the question…)

TIL NASA is woke.

(/s shouldn’t be required but here we are…)