Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

I was writing up my problem set answers once, and it involved the (complex analysis) residue. I wasn’t sure if there was a shortcut (as opposed to \mathrm); googling latex residue did not produce the search results I was hoping for…

This is obvious though — currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

…but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn’t care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you “believe” in it, which is the beautiful thing about science — so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

Now, taking a step back, maybe you’re right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that’s getting into a whole “sociology of science” discussion.

This is all based, most likely, on Griffiths’ textbook. Quoting here from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1b97gt/magnetic_fields_do_no_work_but_magnetic_cranes/ :

The statement “magnetic fields do no work” is incorrect. Griffiths has mislead a generation of physics students on this. A correct version of the statement is that “magnetic fields do no work on objects with no magnetic moments” which is rather trivial. One could also correctly make the same statement about electric fields. However, electric monopoles are very common, so a situation in which there are no electric moments never occurs in normal circumstances.

tl;dr: use Jackson ;)

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It’s…complicated.

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.

I prefer the phrase “testicular manifold.”

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

Indeed, the 1st and 3rd worst offenders for plastic per capita are administrative regions of China (Macau and Hong Kong) https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/plastic-pollution-by-country

There’s a bulk food store near me and it allows BYO containers (or you can use one of their compostable bags). It’s great! A little bit more work (you need to tare your/container write down the empty weight), but you get your goods in the container of your choice.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Sounds like he was a mantis and was posting while copulating.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

As someone from San Francisco, I’d suggest at least looking into it as an option. (I’m a straight white guy though so maybe not the best source here…). In particular https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_District,_San_Francisco

For some color on the type of neighborhood it is, here’s a recent incident. Unfortunately it involved some violence, but the good guys won (I don’t think it should be triggering…): https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/11/nudists-save-tourist-attack-castro/

Of course, San Francisco being in the US, I wouldn’t blame you for trying to find somewhere else. But California (and SF in particular) is very different than Trump country.