Thinking out loud, I think the reason those salons became famous is because the participants published, and their publications got a lot of attention. An example that springs to my mind is the Vienna Circle. But maybe a better example is Madame Geoffrin’s salon which hosted French nobles and Enlightenment thinkers. In that case too the attendees either published, or were powerful figures in society.

The format is a smallish group of people discussing ideas, probably with some connecting theme. It seems like historically those themes were broad, like “philosophy”, with a focus on debate. If some of the people involved turn out to be important to society you’ve got yourself a historically-significant organization. If not then hopefully everyone had a good time.

“By and large” is a weird one. It’s meaning is along the same lines as “all other things being equal.” Is it a reference to large sample sizes?

It’s made weirder by the fictional corporation name in Wall-E, “Buy 'n Large”

My wife has worked with lots of people who are not native English speakers who are sometimes taken aback by the idioms. One colleague flat out refused to accept that “FOMO” is a word.

I suggested that she is in a position to make some up, like “Let’s not put fish in the milk bucket.” But she didn’t go for it. I guess she’s not an agent of chaos after all :/

I know there are lots of possible origins for this phrase, but I think of it as “pleases” and “thank yous”. The “k” sound from “thank” followed by the word “you” combine to sound like the letter q.

Mostly from Josh Johnson

No, but I remember overhearing one of my teachers saying it’s actually helpful. That was in the early 90s in California.

I think of sourcehut has already-federated git hosting because to send the equivalent of a pull request instead of making an account you send patches via email using git’s built-in email workflow. Email is federated, therefore that is federated git collaboration.

Yes; first pull the black plastic piece out of the end of the refill. I read that there needs to be a little airflow into the refill for ink to flow, and when the back of the refill is jammed into the pen that can cut off airflow so you might cut a little notch in the end of the refill where the black plastic piece was. I also sometimes trim about 4mm off the end of the refill, or put a tiny bit of wadded paper in the pen for spacing. But I do this a little differently every time I put a new refill in.

Pilot Hi-Tec-C is a gel pen with refills that happen to fit in the Space Pen. It puts down a crisp, fine line.

The problem with the stock Space Pen is that it’s a messy ballpoint. I might be getting worse-than-typical results due to being left handed, but in general I find ballpoints don’t write crisp lines, and the ink smudges on my hand much more than gel pens do. But with the gel swap I do lose the feature of being able to write upside-down.

I carry a Fisher Space Pen everywhere, but I switched its cartridge for Pilot Hi-Tec-C refills. It takes a little fiddling to get the refill in there, but once it’s in it works great!

This is a good thread to have today. This is some encouraging news!

4k for me since my primary use case is programming, and I want to be able to get a lot of sharply-rendered text on the screen at once. I managed to get a 2160 ultrawide that does 72 Hz at least. But I do miss 120 Hz.

I’d rather listen to Raditude than Pinkerton…

I lived in Grenada for a couple of years. It’s a chill, safe place. I had my family there and we always felt safe, as long as we kept an eye out for speeding buses when crossing the street. It certainly checks the boxes you specified. Night life is limited. I’m planning to go back for a vacation in February.

As I recall there is a time of year that gets very windy. I think that’s in winter, but my memory is fuzzy. The internet says February is the windiest, and that matches some of my memories. In any case it’s always warm. I wouldn’t worry about rain. That’s tapered off by December. If it does rain it’s a warm rain, and it’s likely to come in short showers so I don’t think you’d be stuck inside all day.

If you want to be in walking distance to amenities I’d recommend staying near Grand Anse. You can also get public buses there. (They are actually vans.) There are resorts close to the airport, but in those places you’d be dependent on taxis to get away from the resort - which might be fine if you want to be somewhere quieter.

What I’m hearing is shepherds’ pie, but spherical

I made a rendering of a lighthouse on the Dark Ocean in 3D Studio Max. Or I guess it would be better called a darkhouse. Unfortunately that image is lost to time.

I enjoyed Digimon as a teenager. I never got any cards. However I did make a liiiittle fan art.

Aw, thanks! That’s high praise!

I used to organize a meetup for Javascript programmers. It was more about sharing information than about debate, but I think there might be overlap with what you want. The format was a regular meeting schedule once a month where 2-3 people would give presentations to show off what they’ve been working on, teach how to use a new framework, or whatever they were interested in. So in a way it has handing out information from on high, but I think because we had different people each meeting sharing their perspective there was a good element of exchange of ideas between peers.

Now it turns out that people need lots of leadership energy to create room for exchange of ideas. At the beginning I’d get about 6 people at each meeting, few of whom volunteered to step up in front of the group. So what I did was to show up every month, and talked about whatever topic I could come up with. At most of the meetings it was just me talking. When I did get other people to present it was through prodding and hassling. But people were interested enough in the material, and found enough value in just being in the same room with other people with similar interests that people kept coming back. It stayed small like that, growing slowly for maybe 2 years. But then we hit a critical point where there were enough people coming, and people were inspired enough that suddenly we were getting 30-50 people each month, and I had no problem finding volunteers to present. And it wasn’t the same volunteers either - we had a good rotation of different people interested in sharing their ideas. That continued for another 6 years before I moved and passed organizer responsibility over to the next generation.

My point is that a club like this needs a lot of energy and attention. It’s going to grow slowly. But it will grow if you keep at it, and put in the work. We reached that point where the group became sort of self sufficient in that I didn’t need to be the one making presentations anymore, and I didn’t need to actively seek out volunteers to present. But I still had to put in the work to make sure we had the meeting space available every month, show up to let people in, work out the meeting schedule, get food. Anything like this will die if there isn’t someone holding it together through force of will. But it’s worth it! It was a great experience!

I know you said you want your club to self-manage. But people need structure. If you ask people to show up and have stimulating discussion they’re going stand around awkwardly not knowing what to talk about. Something like a presentation followed by discussion gives structure that helps people to open up, and explore their own thoughts. Or since you want multiple perspectives maybe a debate or a panel format would work better for you. Get 2 or more volunteers to talk about a specific topic. I highly recommend lining up panelists ahead of time - you’ll have a rough time getting volunteers on the spot. If you prep your debaters ahead of time by asking them to present different views they might be less likely to simply agree with each other. Once your scheduled panelists get ideas flowing it will be easier to encourage attendees to step up to speak. You might have a debate or panel followed by open discussion, or rotating panel seats that people can step up to and leave as they feel inspired. But again, based on my experience I suggest being ready to be the one person standing up and debating yourself for maybe many meetings before the club finds a self-organizing energy.

I’m quite happy with Thunder.

I bring my kid to school on a bike. I follow the right-of-way rules at the 4-way stops and at left turns. But every day there are 1-3 drivers who wave me ahead, and refuse to move until I go first. I don’t care what the rules are - I just want consistency!

What helps me most is to find a comfortable rhythm, which is a combination of stride cadence and breathing. I’ve read advice on counting strides, and matching breaths to certain steps. It’s hard for me to coordinate all that so I go by feel. If you’re not feeling comfortable maybe try going slower.

When your legs don’t want to move it could mean that your muscles aren’t warmed up. You might feel better after taking it easy at the start of the run. Or your muscles might be tired from recent exercise. Either way make sure you’re hydrated.

This happens to be the plot of the book series, The Accidental Minecraft Family

My favorite is Time Surfer. The core mechanic is basically the same as Tiny Wings, but the theme, artwork, levels, etc are all very different. I especially enjoy the chiptunes!

I also have a slimfold micro that I’ve been using so long I don’t remember how old it is.

There was a post earlier today complaining about questions that aren’t open-ended, and therefore don’t adhere to the community rules. So here we are with a question with many possible answers (which makes it properly open-ended).

The artificial sounds are legally required at low speeds, at least in the US and Europe. In the US electronic sounds are required at speeds below 30 kph. In the EU I think it’s 20 kph. At faster speeds the sounds of wheels on the road and such make electric and hybrid cars basically as loud as ICE cars.

There are very specific rules about the noises. It looks like there was some effort in the US to allow user-selectable sounds, but it didn’t work out. I found some info here, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/07/13/2022-14733/federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standards-minimum-sound-requirements-for-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles

There are other galaxy clusters. Gravitational binding is not unique to the local cluster. From Wikipedia,

Notable galaxy clusters in the relatively nearby Universe include the Virgo Cluster, Fornax Cluster, Hercules Cluster, and the Coma Cluster.

The expansion of the universe is very tricky to explain. Oversimplifying can lead to an explanation that seems to be contradictory.

Good to know! I’ll put the Ibis and fruit bat on my Australia bucket list, along with a Huntsman. Although the latter are so widespread that I’ve probably already seen some living in America. But I’m guessing the Australian Huntsmen are a bit different from the North American ones.

I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.

I’m not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I’m very happy with it!

Yes, I use passphrases for stuff like my password manager, my computer login, and my disk encryption. For my login (which I type a lot) it’s four words; for occasional stuff like disk encryption it’s six. I’m sold on the argument that a passphrase is way easier to memorize compared to a comparably-secure random password.

The number of possible passphrases is the number of words in the dictionary you use to generate passphrases raised to the power of the number of words in your passphrase (assuming a small chance of reusing the same word in a passphrase). I use this command to generate a random phrase using my stock OS word list:

grep -v '[^a-z]' $WORDLIST | shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom | head -n5 | paste -sd ' '

grep -v '[^a-z]' $WORDLIST filters out words with apostrophes or other weirdness. On my system the filtered list is 77,866 words.

For four words, 77,866 ^ 4 ≈ 3.7 × 10^19 possible passphrases.

Compare that to randomly-generated passwords. I’ll assume that random lowercase & uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols add up to 46 characters. The number of combinations is 46^n where n is the length of the password. A four-word passphrase is the same order of magnitude as secure as a 12-character password, which has about 9 × 10^19 possible combinations.

I’m sure that if you make up your own passphrases instead of randomly generating them then the security is much lower.

I find ngrok useful enough to pay for. When I want to demo some software I can run it locally and set up a temporary tunnel. When I used to have a VPS I would do this with SSH port forwarding, but I’m told that tunneling TCP in TCP can lead to some weirdness.

I used to have a dyndns subscription to get a stable domain name for my home router. It’s kind of another way to do the same thing - instead of a tunnel I could forward a part.

The original story is from the SR-71 pilot’s perspective https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blackbird-speed-check-story

In which case you’re probably using a predefined 64-bit floating point number, which I think is accurate to 15 digits.

I’m a fan of Pitch Meeting. I feel like Honest Trailers is too mean.