He’ll just snort two more lines and cartwheel back onto the stage

If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat

That’s an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don’t use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.

The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (²³⁸Pu, usually as PuO₂), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can’t be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (²¹⁰Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can’t be extracted.

⁹⁰Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn’t used as RTG fuel today.

the waste it produces is highly problematic.

It’s a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU

According to KYM, it’s “Stop Doing Math”.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/where-did-the-stop-doing-math-meme-originate-ironic-infographics-warning-against-higher-education-explained

It’s all fun and games until somebody mixes up pinus contorta with the ol’ dick twist.

Like most things in life, it’s somewhere in the middle. Some of the criticism is factual and valid. Some, a matter of taste (mostly relating to GNOME). Some arises from negative personal experience. Some is just elitist bluster.

The best thing to do is to be rational and critical. Never dismiss an opinion outright without separating the truth from the bullshit.

Damn, that amounts to corporate disparagement…

I’m supposed to be doing a lot of things, but I live to disappoint.

Nix is setting up a Rube Goldberg machine that brings you freshly made coffee straight to bed every morning: a lot of extra effort for the same cheap instant coffee.

Put that in your /etc/profile and you’ll never have trouble with activating Linux.

I’m both fat and tall. None of my fucking clothes have consistent sizes that fit. I’m not the least bit surprised that the clothing industry’s greatest minds were defeated by breasts.

Managers will still expect you to do 60% of your work on 60% of your keyboard.

It wins by default but only because I never liked the Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky-like infinitely scrolling threads and only use Discord to follow some artists.

“For your attempted unaliving of the monarch, you are sentenced to summary forever sleep.”

Bringus Studios presents: Installing SteamOS on literal fucking roadkill

Others have answered, but I’ll say it anyway.

The name paracetamol is used in most of the world, and by the WHO. Acetaminophen is the adopted name in the United States, Canada, and Japan. US pharmacies also use APAP. The most common trade names are Tylenol and Panadol. They all refer to the same stuff.

Regular use also fucks up your organs. Paracetamol (Tylenol) kills your liver, and ibuprofen kills your kidneys.

Damn, someone should’ve told Dr. Frasier that it’s just a weapon of terror…

Leaded fuel. Avgas is 100-octane leaded gasoline that is still being used by most small aircraft piston engines. Lead-free alternatives exist, but production and supply infrastructure is nonexistent.

You’ll encounter math eventually. It could be as simple as implementing linear interpolation for a custom type, or understanding why a type is not suited for a particular application (e.g. never use floating points to represent money). If you delve into low-level networking, you’ll need a good understanding of binary/decimal/hexadecimal conversions and operations. If you go into game development or graphics, you won’t survive without a deep understanding of vectors, matrices, and quaternions. Any kind of data science is just math translated to a machine-readable language.

In my opinion, knowledge of the basic concepts is more important than being good at actually performing mathematics with pen and paper. For example, if you need to apply a transformation to a vector, nobody expects you to whip up a program that does the thing. Instead, you should immediately know:

• what a transformation is (translation, rotation, scaling, projection, etc),
• that each transformation has a corresponding transformation matrix,
• that you’ll have to deal with inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and
• that you’ll have to combine the transformation matrices and the original vector.

That abstract knowledge will give you a starting point. Then you can look up the particulars – the corresponding transformation matrices, the method to convert between inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and the process of matrix multiplication. I know because I failed calculus.