Is it vegan if you eat carnivorous plants?

Traditional worm-type malware doesn’t really exist on windows anymore either.

I can’t remember when I last saw fireflies. They used to be quite common 25 years ago when I was a kid. Damn, time flies and I’m getting old. And fire apparently doesn’t fly any more.

Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.

Remember the “chocolate helps you lose weight” study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher’s name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.

Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn’t expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.

Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.

There’s a website (can’t be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It’s ridiculous.

That’s why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.

Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.

At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.

Is there any decent way to run Plasma Mobile in Termux by now?

This.

There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).

So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.

I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I’m on the train.

Don’t want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.

Better north of antarctica than north of arctica.

I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was “just” a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.