Somehow it shows that someone who can’t find a place to fit in the whole universe in can still find someone to call home, and I thought that was really cool, but I do realize that it’s only my opinion and not a fact.

But it’s very funny in a very British way that all of this happens, and everything is great and beautiful, and he then loses it all.

British comedy relishes the opportunity to totally pull the rug out under a character whenever they get too happy.

If there isn’t an air of light despair about a character, surely that means there is pain and misery coming their way to fix that soon enough.

With respect to Mostly Harmless being bleak, consider that the first book starts with the destruction of the earth, and the deaths of everyone on it. “Less bleak” than Mostly Harmless isn’t a happy ending, but one that doesn’t so conclusively stomp on every possibility for happiness. Characters should have hope.

It just needs to be lightly stomped on with regularity to remind them that happiness is always temporary, but despair is forever.

But then Eoin Colfer’s “And Another Thing…” did a decent job of showing that in a universe as crazy as Hitchikers, there’s always another path.

As an example, Arthur and Ford are supposed to be friends, but from the interaction in the book, it seems more like they tolerate each other and don’t really appreciate each other’s presence or influence on their adventures. Every time they get out of touch, they don’t appear to feel sorry about it, and when they see each other again, they are extremely British about it. This also applies to the other characters in my opinion.

From the point of view of having lived 23 years in the UK: So what you’re saying is that they’re extremely close best friends who can hardly bear to be apart and get exceedingly emotional about it… in a very British way?

Arthur seems happy to just make sandwiches and doesn’t seem to mourn this loss too much after the initial search.

So you’re saying he’s British. He could be dying inside, and be expressing that by showing absolutely no sign of it and continuing to make sandwiches.

Yes, I’m exaggerating, but so was Adams, and the books were written at a time when this was if anything even more ingrained in British culture.

Also, these are light comedy books, and sci-fi on top of that, neither of which lends themselves to romance.

I’ve published a couple of novels (don’t get excited - they’ve sold more than average, but the average novel only sells ~200 copies; I’ve sold in the 4 digits… low 4 digits…) and one reviewer complained the first one had too much romance. It had some tension. No dates, romantic moonlight walks, or even a quick stolen kiss. The second one had a kiss, and I keep wondering how angry that reviewer would’ve gotten about that. Point being that a certain segment of the key market demographics for sci-fi gets very irate if they have to endure anything resembling romance.

EDIT: Also, to it not having found this yet, just wait a few seconds and try the search button again, and repeat a couple of times if necessary. It usually shows up pretty quickly (but frankly the UI could do with better messaging on that…)

If it’s not connected to the internet, that certainly does take away a significant cause of problems. Good luck

In theory if there are no security holes, a user account can only mess up its own account.

Note that what steps you want to take will really depend on who these users are and what you want to achieve. There’s a vast chasm between allowing in, say, friends or colleagues, vs. letting random people on the internet access it. The latter will mean someone will intentionally look for exploits, which means e.g. regularly applying security updates becomes far more pressing.

If you are letting in random strangers, I’d look into only giving them access within a separate container or ideally virtual machine per user as an extra precaution unless what you’re making available is very stripped down.

And there you have the reason they sued to force Musk to stick to his word of buying it rather than let him off the hook and look for someone else dumb enough to pay that much for it.

Revenue is money in before costs, so yes their revenue is still positive given they are actually charging some people positive amounts. Their earnings are quite likely negative.

It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven’t quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.

Just a few years back, Vernor Vinge’s scifi novels still seemed reasonably futuristic in dealing with the issue of fakes well by including several bits where the resolution of imagery was a factor in being able to analyze with sufficient certainty that you were talking to the right person, and now that notion already seems dated, and certainly not enough for a setting far into the future.

(at least they don’t still seem as dated as Johnny Mnemonic’s plot of erasing a chunk of your memories to transport an amount of data that would be easier and less painful to fit in your head by stuffing a microsd card up your nose)

To me Crystal is too often different from Ruby for the sake of being different in ways that just makes it infuriating to work with because the effort of porting code to it is much higher than necessary, and the main advantage it offer is being compiled. That’s just simply not enough for me to consider switching.

Ruby.

My desktop manager is Ruby. My text-editor is written in Ruby. I’m about to switch to a terminal written in Ruby, and a shell written in Ruby.

It’s stupid that it’s not there, though, and I suspect it will get fixed at some point. Basically, some concerns were raised about people using it to doctor timelines (but they can already do that by setting up a single-person instance and messing with the database), and the new instance can validate the signatures of the posts anyway, so they’re no less secure than posts from other accounts received via federation. If anyone is really concerned they could slap an “imported from …” banner on old/migrated posts so people are aware they were not originally posted there.

Sadly, while you can export everything, you can’t import posts in Mastodon without having direct access to the database and poking about.

You can import following lists, bookmarks, blocks and mutes, though.

"Four score and seven years ago"‍ from the Gettysburg Address… Many languages have or had words for counting in 20’s. They’ve just mostly gone out of fashion.

Wiktionary suggests the common proto-Germanic root of eleven/twelve, elf/zwölf are likely to have been “ainalif” and “twalif” - “one left over” and “two left over”.

They’re both Germanic languages, just like Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish and a few others. Same origin. All of them have variations of tre/dre/drei/thir/þre/þrēo (say them with sounds halfway between t and d as the first sound, and you’ll see how similar they are) followed by variations of ten/teen/tin/tan/ton/tien/zehn as a suffix for ten (again, pick a halfway point between t and z and it’s easier to see how similar they are).

In Old English it was þrēotīene ( þ is “th”), and in Old Norse it was þrettán, same as modern Icelandic, so the first common root is even further back, but you can see the similarity. The *hypothesized proto-Germanic root is þritehun. (þriz + tehun.

But, it goes back even further than that. The Romance languages (tres, trois etc) shares the same proto-Indo-European root (hypothesized to be tréyes) for three with proto-Germanic.

The names for numbers are ancient, and though not always recognisable, sometimes recognizable variants pop up even further away than you’d expect. E.g. Pashto (Southeastern Iran) has dre for three, Sanskrit has trí, Indonesian has tri, all of them descendants of the same proto-Indo-European root.