On my phone, with the coloring and the prompt, I couldn’t at first tell what they were. I was thinking: lizards? When I realized that weren’t lizards, I saw giant scorpion things, and thought, “why the hell is there a ramp??”

Only then did I see chicks.

This photo took me on a wild ride.

Jesus. I long for simpler days, when my deepest fear was prions.

Dang. Yes. It’s such a good idea it’d have been a shock of someone hadn’t already done it.

Hah!

I chose a BA in computer science because it indicated that I’d satisfied the requirements for both - it was literally my choice; I’d done all of the stuff for a BS plus a enough for a minor in a BA. Stupid me thought people would understand that a BA in CS meant you went beyond.

No. No, hiring managers think a BA in CIS is some weaker, non-technical, non-STEM kind of computer thing, like a degree in computer art or something.

So I’ve been lying my whole life; when asked, I say I have a BS in CIS. I wouldn’t say I’m ever exactly worried about being caught out, because it’s easily explainable, but it has crossed my mind occasionally, when filling out applications.

The what now? It’s where?

WHAT‽

That is wonderfully specific!

All saws, or just power saws? Do you have a similar reaction to all kinds of saws, or just specific ones? Table saws, band saws… How about chainsaws?

Holy. Shit.

Ok, product idea: a bra that’s a size or more too large, containing a actual pockets. The pocket would be in the padding, to disguise that there’s something other than breast in there.

A-cups would be envied for their ability to carry man-pocket levels of stuff.

Tell me someone’s already done this. It’s so elegantly beautiful a concept.

I am shocked that so many people are buying pre-made coffee.

Not that they’re buying a cup of coffee at the diner, or getting some syrupy, coffee-flavored suger drink from Starbucks while out and about… but that a bunch of all y’all are buying pre-brewed coffee for your home. I honestly didn’t realize so many people were doing this.

I mean, it’s not even hard, unless you’re doing some James Hoffman pour-over method, at which point you may as well admit you’re doing it for the ritual. But brew a pot, put it in a thermos, and there’s your liter of coffee.

Why? Just, why?

A full beard. Which I never have; it was just that one winter when I was in low key, unspoken competition with my BIL. I am, and have been, as a rule and for my whole life, been clean shaven.

So now on the rare occasions I need to pull out my DL, I don’t recognize me and it shocks me a little.

Yes. It’s always the bandwidth that’s the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.

Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.

It was a play on the post immediately prior (time-wise) to mine, by another user, titled “Outside Prague.”

Although the mist makes it look far away, St. Vitus is really only a short walk from where this was taken.

What amazes me is how much it changed.

When I went, it was a black city: all of the buildings were dark gray, because if the centuries of coal and smog. Then Europe went through a period of cleaning, and buildings you thought were made of dark stone, it turns out, were actual white! Or ecru, or some light stone. Utterly changes the feel of the city.

There is a reason why they do this.

Of course. It also prevents people from getting all improvements that aren’t security. It’s especially bad for software engineers who are developing applications that need on a non-security big fix or new feature. It’s fine if all you need is a box that’s going to run the same version of some software, sitting forgotten in a closet that gets walled in some day. IMO, it’s a crappy system for anything else.

You swapped PKBUILD and APKBUILD 🙃

I did! I’ve been trying to update packages in both, recently. The similarities are utterly frustrating, as they’re almost identical; the biggest difference between Alpine and Arch is the package process. If they were the same format - and they’re honestly so close it’s absurd - it’d make packager’s lives easier.

I may have mentioned I haven’t yet started Void, but I expect it to be similarly frustrating: so very, very similar.

I’m starting to think something like a yay that installs into $HOME.

Homebrew, in theory, could do this. But they insist on creating a separate user and installing to that user’s home directory

Yeah, I got to thinking about this more after I posted, and it’s a horrible idea. It’d guarantee system updates break user installs, and the only way it couldn’t were if system installs knew about user installs and also updated those, which would defeat the whole purpose.

So you end up back with containers, or AppImages, Snap, or Flatpack. Although, of all of these, AppImages and podman are the most sane, since Snap and Flatpack are designed to manage system-level software, which isn’t much of am issue.

It all drives me back to the realization that the best solution is statically compiled binaries, as produced by Go, Rust, Zig, Nim, V. I’d include C, but the temptation to dynamically link is so ingrained in C - I rarely see really statically linked C projects.

Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn’t worth it.

But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run … well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.

There’s a scene in Star Trek: TMP where they basically pull the nose up to the edge of the VGER platform and walk across the hull and off the ship. But the obviously exited from somewhere further back.

I seem to remember an episode where there’s an actual umbilical between two ships, and those extend from the sides.

Given the variety of species and the large number of models just within the Human Federation, you probably can’t reasonably assume docking ports are going to be on the nose. They face one another because the front is usually where most of the weapons are; it’s in case you have to shoot, not in case you have to dock. Plus, if things are so bad that neither ship had a functioning transporter, emergency nose-docking is probably not high on the list of deciding your orientation.

Because it’s aesthetically unpleasing to the audience. I’ve never heard of a canon reason, though; no.

I don’t think it’s for possible docking, either. Although that was someone’s good guess, they’re not going to dock nose to nose, so they’d have to reposition anyway.

Someone could ho out and put a couple of red LEDS in the “head” so you don’t have to rely on chance reflection. Maybe someone else in the house will get a startle.

Self-employed is different. You can deduct all sorts of things the majority of employees can’t.

So let’s go back to coffee and pot. Coffee isn’t deductible because it’s a drug people are addicted to; it’s counted as food. If you’re eating edibles, then… maybe? If they’re, like, pot brownies with some nutritional content, almost certainly. If they’re gummies, IDK. Maybe they count as food as much as candy does. Alcohol has calories, and counts as food, probably as much because it’s so socially ingrained as part of a meal any other reason.

If you’re smoking or vaping, though, a better comparison would be cigarettes. Cigarettes and vapes are not deductible, even for self-employed. And your Xanax example - again - is deducted as a medical expenses, which only counts if you have a prescription.

Another example: you can’t deduct homeopathic remedies, or other pseudo-science supplements. You can’t deduct anything that you don’t have a prescription for as a medical expenses. You can’t deduct acupuncture, because it’s not officially recognized as a legitimate medical treatment. You can’t deduct massages, unless you can get a doctor to actually prescribe you a message, like for PT.

So, going back to your original post: for self-employed, coffee is deducted as a food, not a medicine, and comes out of a daily allowance. Cigarettes can’t be deducted as a food or a medicine, and so aren’t deductible. And unless you have a prescription for pot, or are buying edibles that you’re deducting out of your meal allowance, you can’t deduct it.

Hey! Take some land away from the natives, create a new country, settle the Palestinians there and then keep them supplied with weapons to fight wars against the displaced people who want their land back.

What could go wrong?