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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Well… The effecrive coupling constant changes with energy. A high energy experiment behaves differently than at lower energies. The coupling constant is above 1 for the strong force at low energies, but there is ‘asymptotic freedom’ which makes it below 1 at high energies. For EM it is always below 1. I would guess they reference a ‘bare’ value here.

    The purpose of these graphs are not how they look in our universe though. Rather a common way of doing anthropic style arguments. Without measuring the value of the constants, from the graph we can know from just knowing there are stable carbon and non-relativistic atoms pretty exactly where the values of the constants must be. Similar arguments can be used to pinpoint the cosmological constant from the existance of galaxies.



  • Windows XP had been out for quite a while, and I did not want to use it. Staying on 98SE was not going to be possible forever. Ubuntu was quite new, I had recently started uni, and some friends helped me get started. There was one thing that absolutely amazed me: package repository. Just the concept. Windows at the time, to install stuff was finding random pages, sifting through ads, locate download button, hope it is not a virus. Linux had it solved. So far superior it there was no way I’m going back after that.






  • Are you looking to learn linux more or have a easy living experience, or what is the goal? If you want to get to know linux, learn how to compile a kernel, make your own initramfs and such, then: absolutely! If you want a stable easily maintainable system, then… maybe not. Like it is possible, and Gentoo is very stable, but if you are just starting, then you may make choices that do break when you upgrade. With some experience, this will go away, but expect some downtime in the beginning.



  • TL;DR: yes

    Just from a quick view of the repo, the simplest way to do it would be to look at the playbook.yml and copy all roles you want for a host into a new playbook, say myhost.yaml. Copy not only the roles but all the other keywords as well. Then you go to the inventory and add your hosts where you to execute the playbook against. Then you change the hosts key value in the playbook you made from all to the hosts you added to the inventory.

    That is, add your hosts to the inventory, create playbooks for for them and run. That is the easiest. Read up on how to do groups and organizing your inventory to improve it from there.




  • Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.

    I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.

    I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.

    Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix

    https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

    There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.


  • Får får inte får. Får får lamm.

    sheeps don’t get sheeps. Sheeps get lambs.

    Får = sheep/to get

    var tog vägen vägen? Ute på en åker och åker

    where did the road go? Out in a field and driving

    “Tog vägen” = literally “took the road”, meaning “where did it go”, sort of. And åker = driving and a farm field.

    I got a t-shirt from the Swedish Society for People with Anxiety. It came with a print on the chest.

    “print on the chest” would be “tryck för/på/över bröstet” having the double meaning “preassure over the chest”.

    Then there are endless of jokes from Gothenburg which all do not translate.

    Who is faster, Eminem or Taylor Swift? Eminem, he is a rapper

    “rapper” in swedish is “rappare”, meaning also “faster”.

    In stockholm a snake escaped the zoo and has not been found. The zoo is missing him a lot

    The last bit in swedish would be “saknaden är enorm”, “saknad” being the emotion of missing someone, “enorm” being large/a lot/great. But also enorm=en-orm=a-snake.






  • I used xmpp with otr encryption… maybe also omemo, it rings a bell. This was some years ago. But it was barely usable. Otr refused to connect at times and only unecrypted worked, messages were encrypted with wrong keys or something and history became unreadable. It worked on the desktop, but then not on the phone, only with this and that client, but not those. It was a confusing mess and I had to stop using it. If it works today, thats great.