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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The default actually works pretty well these days.

    Messing with the EFI partition, for instance by attempting to have two of those on separate disks, will probably cause you more pain than Windows will. As far as I understand, only one EFI partition can be configured in BIOS as the boot partition, so you will have to change the configuration in BIOS whenever you want to boot to the other OS.

    Windows does have a history of changing the default EFI bootloader once in a while; however your chosen bootloader is still there, just not marked as the default anymore. A Windows app like EasyUEFI will let you change the default back.




  • One funny thing about humans is that they aren’t just gloriously fallible: they also get quite upset when that’s pointed out. :)

    Unfortunately, that’s also how you end up with blameful company cultures that actively make reliability worse, because then your humans make just the same amounts of mistakes, but they hide them – and you never get a chance to evolve your systems with the safeguards that would have prevented these.





  • Oh man flying to planets manually is TOUGH, the physics engine is just realistic enough that doing it manually takes more skill than I care to develop.

    Just use the autopilot. Yes, you have to be careful about not starting it when there’s something else between you and your destination. But for real, use the autopilot.

    Mind you, you are still going to die a lot because the universe is as amazing as it is unforgiving. You WILL die in that one specific way that will be your own damn fault because everyone does sooner or later. It’s okay, and it’s fun.

    And it’s very, very worth it.










  • Macron’s party got disastrous results and got trounced by the far right in the European elections.

    He had been selling himself as the shield that protected France from the rise of the local far right party. With these results, he has lost his credibility, and therefore his government did as well.

    Therefore he’s calling out-of-schedule French parliamentary elections that – I assume – he hopes will reelect his party and allies ahead of the far right. It might work: the far right party polls strong at around 30%, but has few allies, and may not be able to form a coalition government. If Macron himself can, that will strengthen his legitimacy.

    Needless to say, this is a risky gamble.


  • Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

    Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

    And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

    It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.