Good points! This reminds me of a thought I had the other day: why do we use the word “novel” meaning “original, of a kind not seen before” to mean “a fictional written work on the order of hundreds of pages”? I’m sure there was a process behind that etymology. Someone could have made up a previously unused word, but novel words sound too silly to get people to repeat them. As an example consider the French Academy’s attempt to get people to say “courriel” because they didn’t like French speakers borrowing the English word “email”. Or probably more accurately: unless you’re speaking French in recent history, no one is in charge of words, and there is no plan.
hallettj
Just a basic programmer living in California
- 5 Posts
- 253 Comments
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Linux@programming.dev•Is it worth upgrading from 24.04 to 25.10?English
1·1 day agoFor Debian on desktop it’s common to run Debian Testing, or Unstable. In that case it’s a rolling release that is always ahead of Ubuntu.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Star Trek Social Club@startrek.website•The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time...English
0·1 day agoI like DS9 for that too. There are lots of scenes where I’ve though, “Oh hey, there are no humans in this scene!”
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Star Trek Social Club@startrek.website•The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time...English
0·3 days agoThis is an interesting take! I’ll admit, I was concerned about whether there will be enough wokeness in Starfleet Academy, and in upcoming seasons of Strange New Worlds. But you’re right, the foundation of what we need is a sense of shared humanity. And when you put it that way, I see how new Trek is showing us that. Thanks!
But I’d still be delighted to see another episode on unionizing!
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Science@beehaw.org•'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at NightEnglish
2·3 days agoThat’s a good one!
I was thinking, Earth’s radiation is solar energy, emitting back into space after being absorbed. So a normal solar panel gets solar energy coming down, and this thing gets solar energy going back up. So “reverse” or “upside-down” make sense from that perspective. But wind and hydroelectric also harvest solar energy indirectly. Should we call the sideways solar panels? So yeah, I think “terral” avoids a rabbit hole of madness.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Science@beehaw.org•'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at NightEnglish
4·3 days agoIt looks like the reverse solar panel absorbs infrared radiation, which is a slow way to shed heat
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Science@beehaw.org•'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at NightEnglish
6·3 days agoBut they don’t have anything to do with the moon. They harvest energy from Earth’s black body radiation
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Comic Strips@lemmy.world•They're in every multiplayer gameEnglish
2·5 days agoYeah, I agree this is reasonable. But there’s a difference between creating an alt account for experimentation vs throwing games to get to or to maintain a lower rank. My feeling is that “smurf” typically implies the latter.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Programming@programming.dev•Authentication in microservicesEnglish
3·5 days agoWhen I’ve done this it’s generally done with JWTs where each micro service is configured with a trusted public key that is used to authenticate the JWT. The JWT can be sent to the client when they log in, and used to authenticate all API requests (forwarding the JWT as necessary for service-to-service requests). It’s also possible to have a gateway mint JWTs after using some other means to authenticate client requests.
Sometimes service-to-service requests don’t have a client request in context to pull a JWT from. In those cases you need another authentication mechanism, like a different signed token, or a shared secret.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Comic Strips@lemmy.world•A Busy, Busy Immigration Enforcement OperationEnglish
24·11 days agoIt’s a gang. The white house has been making up stories that people they arrest are dangerous gang members, notably including Kilmar Ábrego García.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Rust@programming.dev•Is the async_trait still necessary for dync Trait with async methods?English
1·12 days agoI’m not informed on all the details, but a key difference between the
async_traitmacro and a native async keyword is thatasync_traitgives you that boxed, trait object type. IIUC the thinking is native support should not automatically box futures, which implies it shouldn’t usedyneither. UsingBoxanddynis an easy way to make sure the code works no matter what type of future a method returns. But the trade-off is some runtime overhead from heap allocation (due toBox), and dynamic dispatch (due todyn).According to areweasyncyet.rs:
async fn in trait method not stabilized yet
- Workaround is available as an attribute macro: async-trait
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Daystrom Institute@startrek.website•What's going on with Betazoids in Academy? [spoilers]English
0·17 days agoIt seems like some retconning, with the writers deciding that empathic characters are more interesting for storytelling than fully telepathic characters. It can be hard to create drama when someone on screen automatically knows what everyone else knows.
The Betazoids also didn’t have black irises, which has previously been a distinguishing feature - albeit a feature that most viewers don’t seem to notice. Given the many, many franchise references included in the first two episodes it looks like the showrunners are aware of established details, and that both the lack of telepathy and eye color are deliberate choices.
My impression was the president being deaf didn’t have anything to do with the plot, but was probably about showing that deaf people are people who have stories too. The Betazoids delegates signing and speaking to each other might be something Troi has said previously: that it’s rude to communicate telepathically among non-telepaths. But Lwaxana does it anyway because she doesn’t care. Or it might have been to avoid confusion: “they’re empathic with other species, but telepathic with each other? What is going on?” I don’t know what is the significance of taking off the translation device.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Comic Strips@lemmy.world•Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ Creator, Dies at 68 (from prostate cancer)English
29·21 days agoThere’s a pretty thorough write-up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/150bkal/comic_strips_so_i_think_it_makes_no_sense/
That’s not an unreasonable answer. But I find this thread a little frustrating. As I see it, it’s gone like this:
- phpinjected: Why don’t I have a tool to do these non-hierarchical things?
- frongt: You already have a tool that does those specific things.
- hallettj: What could change to make that tool better suited for those non-hierarchical / tagging things?
- frongt: Don’t use that tool to do tagging things. It’s the wrong tool.
Why bring up hard links if people shouldn’t use them for the requested use case? I mean, I do think your original reply was interesting and relevant as a starting point to get to what I think OP has in mind. But that line of thinking does require getting into how to use hard links for a non-hierarchical workflow.
I feel like OP was trying to start a discussion about what might be, if things were different. I tried to reply in the same spirit. I feel like I’m asking, “What if things were different?”, and I’m being told “It doesn’t work that way.” Which doesn’t feel like an especially helpful response to me.
We have hard links, but is there any good UI out there for them? I only know of using the
lncommand directly. Or put another way, do you know of anyone who actually uses hard links in a way similar to how a tagging filesystem would be used? What are the obstacles that prevent this use case from being easy or discoverable enough to be in common use?With a tagging system you can remove tags without fear of losing file data. But with hard links you could easily delete the last link without realizing that it’s the last link, and then the file is gone.
That relates to another issue: in a tagging system you can look at file metadata to see all of the file’s tags. Is there a convenient way to do that with hard links? I see there is
find . -samefile /path/to/one/link, but requiring a filesystem scan is not optimal.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Science@beehaw.org•Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful contentEnglish
2·2 months agoI think publicly operated social media could be a good thing. If you want to remove profit motive, you need an operator that is not motivated by profit. Take a look at how effective public broadcasting is.
Lemmy and Mastodon do much better than the big corporate apps. But currently these are small-scale operations. A state or federal government program would be better suited to scale up, and better able to resist capitalist takeover.
I haven’t tried it, but I know people use it to run Minecraft Bedrock Edition. Although I’m reading reports that that broke recently, so I’m not sure if it’s working at the moment.
Minecraft BE is very frustrating - there is a native Linux build for Android, that works great when you can get it to run on a proper computer. But Microsoft’s authentication system makes it very difficult to do that. Minecraft Java Edition works without problems, and is probably the better Minecraft; but the two editions don’t interoperate without server mods, a lot of people run BE, and the kids want to be able to play online with their friends.
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Star Trek Social Club@startrek.website•I was giving Enterprise another chance, and even Archer was starting to grow on me in season 2. Then season 3 happened and he became a war criminal.English
0·2 months agoI just rewatched TNG season 1, and I found it much more fun than I remembered! (Excluding Code of Honor ofc.) Super goofy, super Wesley-heavy. But fun!
hallettj@leminal.spaceto
Linux@programming.dev•What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands?English
2·2 months agoOh, I hadn’t heard about
choose!I have been using Nushell, and you’re right, it is great at parsing input. Commands like
detect columnsandparseare very nice, and have been supplanting awk for me.


Interesting! I would not have guessed that “novella” predated “novel”. But it seems that the modern English meaning of “novella” being a story with a length in between a novel and a short story is pretty different from the older Latin and Italian meanings. I’m going to imagine there was another process where “novella” picked up that specific meaning.
It happens I watched The Decameron series on Netflix recently, which was entertaining. I’m sure it’s very different from the original book - probably only sharing the setting, and some character names.