lvxferre

The article mentions what the author sees as two trends behind retrocomputing (reusing the old and escaping the modern world), but I'd argue that the second one should be further split, since there are two modernities that people are running away from:

• unnecessary complexity. Since the old stuff performs the same role as the new one, minus unnecessary delays or elements introducing cognitive load, might as well use the old stuff.
• lack of control. I'm not talking about an AI takeover or shit like this. Simpler stuff: big tech has become considerably better, over time, in bossing you around so you do its bidding, even against your best interests.

For further info, the link mentions this article. If I got it correctly:

Higher pressure compresses the orbitals of the sodium atoms, making them more cluttered together. As a result, the outer electrons - that "should" be in the 3s orbital, surrounding the nucleus like a bubble - are repelled to more energetic orbitals, like 3p and 3d. Those orbitals have "lobes" reaching far from the nucleus, so further away from the other electrons.

But since the sodium atoms are not isolated, and all those sodium atoms are doing this at the same time, the 3p and 3d orbitals from multiple atoms overlap. Orbitals overlapping form a chemical bond. And, since it's damn hard to remove electrons from those bonds to send them elsewhere, electrical conductivity goes down. Sodium becomes first a semiconductor, then an isolating material.

So it's a lot like your usual macromolecules (like, silicon dioxide or diamond), except that those bonds are shared by multiple atoms, not just two. And I don't think that it's a coincidence that all three are transparent, given that those electrons "stuck" in specific molecular orbitals suck major balls at absorbing photons and releasing them back.

Personal predictions:

• high-pressure sodium should be bloody hard, and not malleable at all. Kind of funny given that normal pressure sodium is really soft.
• other s-block metals will behave similarly under high pressure. If exceptions exist, they'll be the largest ones (in this order: radium, francium, barium, caesium).
• aluminium and gallium might behave similarly, but you'll need a lot more pressure to pull it out. (Note: this is completely unrelated to a certain oxygen/nitrogen/aluminium ceramic that was developed recently.)
• d-block metals like iron are probably unaffected.

One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as "infringing copyrights" by multiple countries. The tech itself won't disappear but it'll be considerably harder to train newer ones.

The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.

Ah, got it. My bad. Yeah, not providing anything is even lazier, and unlike "lazy" bash scripts it leaves the user clueless.

Like, this article just reads really badly. Maybe it’s just bad writers trying to reach a word count.

A good way to tell bad writer vs. AI apart is to look for utterance purpose; basically asking yourself "what is the author trying to convey through this odd word/sentence/paragraph?". Humans - even when not proficient in a language - are rather good at that; while LLMs ("AI"), as complex as they are, are just chaining words.

If you do it with your link, most of the time you notice that the author is 1) trying to share some piece of info, and 2) promoting his store. That was likely not written by AI, but by a human being; it reads a lot like a verbose piece of advertisement because, well, it is one.

I like them, even for software installation. Partially because they're lazy - it takes almost no effort to write a bash script that will solve a problem like this.

That said a flatpak (like you proposed) would look far more polished, indeed.

Frankly in this case even a simple bash script would do the trick. Have it check your distro, version, and architecture; if you got curl and stuff like this; then ask you if you want the stable or beta version of the software. Then based on this info it adds Mullvad to your repositories and automatically install it.

I have this extension; it works great, and it has support for other engines (I use mostly DuckDuckGo), and if you really need the results from one of the blocked sites you just click a link and it shows them again. Give the link a check for the list of supported search engines.

I've done similar experiments with my two cats. Both behaved mostly like dogs - the mirror doesn't smell like a cat nor makes noise like a cat, so why bother with it? I was rather surprised with Siegfrieda ignoring it because she tends to watch whatever I put on the computer screen, be it some "cat game" video or even anime.

That lower emphasis on vision became specially obvious when I showed them videos with kittens meowing. They didn't bother with the screen, but with the speakers.

You're welcome.

I think that people being jerks take for granted how confusing this might be, if you're new; we (people in general) tend to take vocab that we already know for granted, as well as solutions for small problems. ...except that it doesn't work when you're starting out, and we all need to start out somewhere, right.

I looked for it for, like, a hour or so, but couldn't find the scanned copies. The nearest that I've found was the online version of the lexicon, claiming that it contains all six volumes.

You have two options: install curl (check @TrickDacy@lemmy.world's comment) or do it manually. Installing curl is the easiest.

If you want to do it the hard way (without the terminal), here's how:

1. Download the file https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc from your web browser.
2. Open your file browser as administrator. There's probably some link for that in the Menu.
3. Move the file that you just downloaded to the directory /usr/share/keyrings/