Learning Nus is short for Nusifer made me chuckle

Gitignore settings don’t prevent checking in run configs if that’s what you want to do. Even if someone has the run configs pattern ignored, they’ll get those files with the repo clone. Gitignore only prevents adding files that aren’t already checked in - it’s a guard rail to prevent accidentally checking in so something you don’t want. You can override ignore settings to check in something new in with git add --force <filename>

Global gitignore is for idiosyncrasies of your computer, not for repo-specific stuff. For example if you use an editor that writes in-place backup or swap files (like .swp files with Vim’s default settings), or you’re on a Mac which writes .DS_Store files into every directory, you’re going to want those ignored for every repo. That way you can comfortably work with other people’s repos, even if they’re not configured for your particular setup.

The global ignore combines with gitignore files in each repo. So if it’s an ignore pattern that everyone working with that repo should have, put it in the repo.

Yes, I believe this was made for MacOS users. I don’t need to see your .DS_Store files!

That’s almost what I do with my work journal too. Daily logs with an index. A page for deferred tasks. A page here or there for tracking things that need to be done for a given project. I find the index helpful even if I only occasionally put an entry there.

For my personal journal daily logs are the core feature for sure. But I also get a lot of value from a future log, and a page for the current month with a list of events, and scheduled tasks.

I use bullet journals, and I have one for work. It’s not exactly the same - instead of my thought process it’s mostly what tasks I’m working on each day, and meeting notes. It helps me to organize what I what to get done so I don’t have to keep thinking about what I want to get done. It also helps me to get an idea of where my time went, and is a good place to write down anything I want to refer back to. Like when a coworker trained me on a deploy procedure I took notes, and added a line for that page number to my index.

Yeah, I’m a fan of using minutes instead of percentages. For example instead of 33.3̅% you can write :20 or 20’ - like in the old fixed-point arithmetic days!

I like this better than the French revolutionary calendar’s ten-day weeks. Maybe if they had included more than two weekend days people wouldn’t have hated it so much

There are a lot of us! Especially on English-speaking forums. The US population is close to half of the entire population of Europe.

But there is a trick to almost completely avoid Americans: frequent a forum in any language other than English.

Like bookends!

I’m really questioning whether I’m reading a parody story right now. I know Ars Technica is not a parody publication. What is satire anymore?

Hey, the Helion design doesn’t require boiling water. It “uses the expansion of the plasma to induce a current in the magnetic compression and acceleration coils.”

In the past I’ve been bullish on nuclear fission for a similar reason. But we’re at a point where fission is very expensive, and solar is extremely cheap - even including battery cost it’s now the cheapest form of energy production. When fusion is working it’s also going to be very expensive. Fusion isn’t going to fix all of the problems with fission either - fusion also produces radioactive waste, and IIUC Tokamak designs require a steady supply of metal to replenish the blanket. (Although I thank all that is good ITER switched their blanket material from Beryllium to Tungsten.) We should keep up the research to hopefully get to a point where fusion and fission are cheap some decades in the future. But solar is there now, so current production expansion should be solar.

Yes, solar uses a lot of land. But we have a lot of land to use. For example the US has about 30 million acres devoted to growing corn to produce ethanol. Not food - ethanol. Solar produces far more power per acre than ethanol. Here’s an article on a PNAS study with some details, including this quote:

[I]f farmers took a bold leap and covered 46% of land currently used to farm ethanol with solar panels, that would then generate enough energy to reach the 2050 decarbonization goal for the US.

There’s also a detailed Technology Connections video on renewable energy FUD that I recommend.

The Linux kernel development workflow, the purpose for which git was invented, makes use of emailed patches https://docs.kernel.org/process/submitting-patches.html

Eh, it’s taken extraordinary circumstances to hold the very rich accountable basically forever. For example tobacco companies were found to have been knowingly, aggressively lying for decades about cigarettes killing people on a huge scale. But none of the tobacco CEOs saw any personal consequences. That was well before 2001.

The first Gilded Age ended when monopolistic trusts were broken up, but that only happened after a rare confluence of factors: wealthy misbehavior became so obvious and egregious that public outcry reached a high point; and at the same time William McKinley was assassinated, putting Theodore Roosevelt in the presidency. Republicans had put Roosevelt in the vice presidency to make him stop causing trouble for them - they didn’t expect him to end up with actual power. That’s what it took to get some control over the country’s most influential businessmen. But even after Roosevelt’s trust-busting campaign, the consequences for the very rich were that they became somewhat less rich.

You do sometimes see CEOs serve jail time, like Elizabeth Holmes, and Martha Stewart. But those are people who just aren’t on the same level as the CEO of the nation’s sole energy company (in the case of Monsters Inc.).

My kid and I had a related question, since we’re watching Starfleet Academy, and have seen Discovery, but not Picard. Are there still Borg in the 32nd century? How does Picard leave the Borg situation at the end of that series?

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.

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.

For 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.

I like DS9 for that too. There are lots of scenes where I’ve though, “Oh hey, there are no humans in this scene!”