I think there were people who wanted Hillary, in the sense that they were perfectly fine with settling for her. But, there weren’t many people who were passionate supporters, and there were a lot of people who hated her. And, the way her campaign was run reflected that. It was basically “Hillary: what are you gonna do, vote for the other guy?”

That’s gotta add up to something, even with the inverse-square law fall off

No, it doesn’t, precisely because of the inverse square law.

So it boosts STR, does it also boost INT? Maybe it debuffs WIS?

If the rogue planet is truly all alone in space, you’re definitely right. 4 million times is a lot, but space is really, really big, and solar radiation falls off with 1/r^2.

Let’s assume the auroras are proportional to the size of the magnetic field. That’s probably not true, it’s probably actually proportional to the square root of the magnetic field because field strengths fall off with 1/r^2, but let’s give it the best possible chance of having huge auroras. That would mean that a planet with 4x the magnetic field of Earth would have the same Aurora brightness at 2x the distance. So, something with 4 million times the magnetic field would have the same brightness at sqrt(4,000,000) the earth-to-sun distance, or 2000x the distance. If it were in our solar system, or even just near our solar system, it would be bright. But, space is big.

Since the earth is about 500 light-seconds from the sun, 2000 earth-distances is about 1 million light seconds, or about 11.5 days. By comparison, the closest star to Sol is Proxima Centauri at 4 light years. So, these Auroras would only be earth-like if the rogue planet were very close to some star. It wouldn’t have to necessarily be in orbit of that star, but it would have to be pretty close. If it were out in the space between the stars, there’s just nothing there for the magnetic field to interact with.

Sure, and learning surgery could let them do their own operations.

I think they mean they are putting their faith into the scientists performing the science

It’s not just the scientists, it’s the whole process. You trust that the journals are selecting articles based on their scientific merit. You trust that the journalists reporting on the stories are doing their best to accurately summarize the scientific articles, and that if they get it wrong they’ll issue a correction. You trust that when science makes it into textbooks that those textbooks are accurately summarizing and maybe simplifying the science in a fair way. You trust that teachers or professors who are explaining the science to their students are doing it faithfully and accurately.

The Alpha Wolf theory shows how that sort of thing breaks down. There was a scientific study, and at the time there was no reason to suspect it wasn’t legitimate. The scientist who did the study was accurately describing what he saw. The journal that published it had no reason to doubt it was good science. The peer reviewers did their job well. It just turned out that he was studying captive wolves, and that wolves in the wild didn’t behave the same way. Unfortunately, “wolves live in family units where the parents are in charge” isn’t as interesting a story, so while scientists have been trying to correct the record for a while, there are still people who have been taught by “science” or at least “the modern media and educational system with science at its base” that think that there are “alpha wolves” who take charge of a pack based on being strong and aggressive.

Which means anybody with a Linux gaming PC can probably run any game that works with the Gabe Cube. They might have to tweak a few settings so that the game thinks it’s running on a Gabe Cube, but that’s nothing Linux users aren’t used to doing already.

I think number 2 is the biggest deal here.

Right now Steam runs on Linux, and has now reached 3.2% of all Linux users, which is getting too big to just ignore. But that’s 0.3% of all Steam users running Arch, 0.25% running Mint, 0.15% running Ubuntu, and so-on. Say you’re a smallish publisher like Klei. You might want to release your games on Linux, but it would be a pain in the ass to have to do QA for a dozen different distros, each of which is less than 1% of your user base, especially when nearly every box is customized in some way. But, if the Steam Deck and Gabe Cube take off, they’ll have to support at least one Linux distro. That means that if you’re running say Ubuntu, as long as you can get your system to look enough like the Gabe Cube, any game that works well on the Gabe Cube should work for you.

That could start off a positive feedback loop. More games will support Gabe Cube and Steam Deck, so Linux for gaming PCs becomes more and more viable. With more and more users using Linux, making sure Linux is well supported becomes a priority for publishers. That encourages even more people to move to Linux.

Also, for the other points, it might also be something good for families where one person (say mom or dad) likes building their own gaming PC, but 8 year old son isn’t yet at the age where he can build his own PC, and mom doesn’t want to have to build a whole gaming PC for him too. Now you can just quickly add another gaming PC to the house but without having to do significantly more upkeep and maintenance.

Not immune, but not safer, definitely. A lot of bullshit like that is a south-of-the-border phenomenon.

So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.

What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.

For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:

So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.

As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.

I I I I IV IV I I V IV I IV

Baking is not chemical engineering. Chemical engineering doesn’t even have much to do with chemistry. It’s mostly about temperatures and flow rates, pressure, etc.

Saying “the baseline of programming knowledge could be more than zero” is meaningless. The baseline of chemical engineering knowledge could also be more than zero. It’s also a fundamental part of our society. But, the average person doesn’t need to know how to program, just like the average person doesn’t need to know how to design a refinery.

People do learn some basic computer skills. They should learn more. They should know about files. They should know how to back up their data. And, more importantly, they should learn how to restore data from a backup after something goes wrong. They should know how to properly update their devices, how to tell if their devices are infected, and the basics of managing a home network. They sometimes learn how to do basic functions in excel spreadsheets. That’s about as far as they do, or should need to go in programming / IT. Beyond that, why should the average person need to know how to do recursion, or how loops work?

the general public has failed to learn programming

That’s like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.

There are certain things that it just doesn’t make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.

It never actually seems to work out that way though. Sure, for Y2K there was a short period where there were decent contracts fixing that bug in various codebases, but it wasn’t something that lasted very long.

Managers and owners would much rather pass off a terrible PoS and have their users deal with it, or somehow get the government to bail them out, or hire a bunch of Uyghur programmers from a Chinese labour camp, or figure out some other way to avoid having to pay programmers / software engineers what they’re actually worth.

I did that myself back in the day. Not overly complicated, but a SQL builder.

I think it’s because SQL is sort-of awkward. For basic uses you can take a SQL query string and substitute some parameters in that string. But, that one query isn’t going to cover all your use cases. So, then you have at least 2 queries which are fairly similar but not similar enough that it makes sense just to do string substitutions. Two strings that are fairly similar but distinct suggests that you should refactor it. But, maybe you only make a very simple query builder. Then you have 5 queries and your query builder doesn’t quite cover the latest version, so you refactor it again.

But, instead of creating a whole query builder, it’s often better to have a lot of SQL repetition in the codebase. It looks ugly, but it’s probably much more maintainable.

The canonical video which demonstrates that truth.

You think I’m ignorant because…?

Is that better than them speeding and not paying?

Sure guy.

That’s when we deploy vicious mockery and downvotes. Languages may try to go where they want, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t yank on the steering wheel.