Watching Hong Kong get amalgamated into the rest of China after it was returned by the British has been so sad. They’ve raged. They’ve fought. But slowly they’ve been consumed.

It’s not sinking. It’s not a boat that sprung a leak. It’s staying exactly where it’s always been. It’s getting submerged by sea level rises.

Saying it’s sinking makes it sound like a local phenomenon. Sea level rises are global.

Of course, but the metric you choose for “effectiveness” is critical. In the current situation the metric must be “removal from office”.

You need to meet it’s bigger brother, the swan.

Where I live we get white swans, Canadian geese, and Egyptian geese. Egyptian are smaller and absolutely fine. Canadian will get angry and tell you to fuck off Swans are 50% bigger and will run you out of the county.

Space Ace!

Not some people.

At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.

I’d always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn’t a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn’t as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.

Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn’t consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she’d have just committed the process to memory.

Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn’t understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn’t judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn’t feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There’s only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we’d both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I’d found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you’d only report the bigger one, but if not you’d report both groups.

I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.

Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I’d told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn’t accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she’d missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she’d paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.

This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.

Penny had worked really hard for that D.

In Europe, European cars are a better choice than Teslas.

Cheaper and better EVs are here from lots of European, Korean, and (to a lesser degree) American brands.

It’s been a long time since was “the only choice”.

Stay on the ground floor. Defenestration is much safer then.

Oh no, not the oil!

/s

They know they can’t compete at the new game, so want to play the old game.

Trouble is, the new game already started.

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Manjaro:A_Different_Kind_of_Beast

Although Manjaro is Arch-based and Arch compatible, it is not Arch.

Manjaro package repository

Stable branch - There is no solid rule indicating when Stable branch is snapped from testing. It can be anything from one to four weeks…

Testing branch - Testing branch is snapped from unstable at irregular intervals - …

Unstable branch - Unstable branch is synced several times daily from Arch stable

Manjaro Unstable is Arch Stable

I would expect Steam to report Steam OS as Steam OS.

They managed to differentiate Manjaro to it’s own entry after all. It’s Arch based too.

Mrs Merton: What was it that first attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels billionaire Jeff Bezos?

I’m quite impressed Arch comes out on top

EU leaders will now have to decide whether there is sufficient support to take action.

All EU governments are facing immigration crises which are fueling the rise of nationalistic factions. They could take an action here which would stop a population being forcibly displaced. Can they not draw a line between the two?

Yes, you have the support at home.

Dictators can’t look old and frail.

Moisturize me!