Directly from the nginx home page:

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

Australian here, in Finland. Holy shit it seems everyone smokes like chimneys here.

Never really thought about how much smoking has declined in Aus over the last 20-40 years, but yeah coming over here has been an eye opener.

As an Australian I find the name Freddy quite apt then.

There is an old saying in Aus that runs along the lines of, “even Blind Freddy could see that…”, indicating that the solution is so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

Having your Freddy be Blind Freddy makes its useless answers completely expected. Maybe that was the devs internal name for it and it escaped to marketing haha.

But, critically, it’s not a fucking CAPACITIVE BUTTON, and I’ve never accidentally hit it once.

Yeah. I use resume a fair bit because you can set it to the speed you want and if your cruising gets interrupted by a slow truck, or roadworks, or by passing through a town, you can just press it and the car will accelerate back up to the set speed. Not like a rocket, maybe a couple of km/hr per second.

But still, like you say, easily-triggered capacitive buttons for critical functions, holy shit that is a bad idea.

You’re right, I try to use {insert cryptocurrency that I’m heavily financially invested in} for my every day transactions as much as possible, you should too, and you can get amazing returns as well! It’s win-win nobody loses ❤️

Maybe a large fries ,and we could all have one… or even two fries each!

What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track (with occasional accidents), but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.

that works how the article describes, where it will accelerate you to whatever the last cruise control speed was.

That’s what the resume function does normally?

That is:

• You switch on and activate cruise control
• You’ve tripped it while active by pressing the brake

At this point cruise control is still “hot” and pressing resume will turn the cruise control back on, usually with a speed interlock so you can’t activate it at a dead stop.

If the car has “one pedal driving” then inadvertent activation could be pretty surprising, and would require you to lift your foot off the accelerator and hit the brakes. Coupled with the rocket-ship acceleration of most EVs this could easily cause an accident I guess.

Your rods and cones in your eye and the nerves that transmit the information to your brain have signalling limits, they can only fire so fast and they have a time to reset. It depends on lighting and what you’re focused on as well.

Which is why film can get away with 24 frames per second because in a dark theatre and a bright screen 24 fps is enough to blur that signalling so that it looks like decent motion. Only thing cinematographers had to watch out for is large panning shots as our peripheral vision is tuned for more rapid response and we can see the juddering out of the corner of our eyes.

I could see the 60Hz flicker of crt monitors back in the day if I had a larger monitor or was working next to someone with 60Hz. Not when I was directly looking at it, but when it was in my peripheral vision. The relatively tiny jump to 72Hz made things so much nicer for me.

Yeah basically you can only signal “on-off” so many times a second in a vga cable before the ons and offs get blurry and unusable. So you can trade lower resolution for a higher frame rate as long as you keep the total number of on-offs below the limits.

This was a binary configuration file of some sort though?

Something along the lines of:

IF (config.parameter.read == garbage) {
     Dont_panic;
}

Would have helped greatly here.

To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.

If it said, “hey I don’t know a huge amount about X” then you could work with that. But it will blithely say “no problem” and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don’t know the terms in the area you’re working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.

You’re never going to live in a world where you’re allowed to fly without photo id amigo

Move to a different country.

Eg in Australia I can book a domestic ticket and have two interactions after that:

• x-ray/security where they scan my carry on
• boarding at the gate where they scan my pass.

No photo ID - or any ID really - needed. Now there’s enough dribs and drabs of information when I book the ticket and etc etc that they can identify me, but there’s nothing stopping someone from booking a ticket for someone else under their name.

I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.

If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.

Seriously, give me any supported argument why it would be beneficial to send humans to the moon (and Mars) instead of just robots.

Robots, in particular mining equipment robots that everyone seems to be jazzed up about, they need maintenance. Earth bound mining equipment has minor service intervals of 250 hours of operation, major intervals every thousand hours, machine-stopping breakdowns occur on a bathtub curve but there would be a dozen or so before the first 4000 hours of operation.

For reference, 4000 hours of operation is less than half a year of 24/7 work.

Even with the addition of a few hundred million per machine in hardening and robustness, the environment they will work in is much, much worse than earth. Seals will need frequent replacement, the parts that do the digging need replacement, hoses will burst or leak, etc etc wtx.

On the moon you could (probably) laboriously tele-operate repair robots with the 2.5 second lag you’d have to Earth.

Mars? Not possible.

So I look at all these plans, where they’ll send ice mining equipment to mars to run for two years unattended to make fuel and what-not, and with my 30 years of experience in the mining industry on earth, I just say, “that must be some good crack they’re smoking”.

Someone is going to have to go, just to repair and maintain all the machines.

Big stainless steel hook , when anyone asks tell them it’s for your sex swing. The actual sex swing is optional but recommended.

Otherwise look at fancy lights. You’ve got other lights in the room but maybe look for one that throws light horizontally, not downwards , at least it will still have some utility.

Or a light with an elaborate shade, there’s those types with a pull string that give you endless patterns as they shift between two shapes.

Throw a smart light bulb in there so you can muck around with colours and brightness.

A few things:

• Look up the appropriate safety equipment and use it. Eye and ear protection at a bare minimum. Power tools are loud, get a nice set of earmuffs so that you’re not startled every time you turn them on. Gloves… there are cases where not having gloves is safer, eg around drills where you can be caught up. Long sleeve shirts should have the sleeves buttoned or rolled up, jewellery should be removed, long hair should be tied up and under a hat.
• Clamps and big tables/base plates. Don’t be afraid to clamp whatever you’re working on down tight to something big and sturdy. It gives you the opportunity to use two hands on the tools.
• Always get in the habit of unplugging power tools when working on them. If your drills and what-not need a spanner or chuck key to change blades or bits, cable tie the tool you need to the power cable just behind the plug. It forces you to unplug it when working on it.
• Finally, look at getting an inline, foot operated safety switch. It’s like an extension cord with the switch in the middle. Nothing works until your foot is on the switch. Use that with your tools if you don’t feel confident, and especially on older tools where switch interlocks and etc weren’t that great.

Once you’ve got all that, practice. Things are a lot less intimidating when you’re working with things that are clamped down, with good safety gear, and everything is controlled.

I have a Samsung A71. It permanently lives in its protective case which gives it good bumpers around the easily-breakable edge-to-edge screen. It’s now 4 years old and has survived numerous tumbles and drops over the years.

Occasionally I have to swap the SD card in it and I am always astonished at how thin and light and fragile it is when not in the case.

I would quite happily have an actual similar size phone to what “I have now” if the battery size was bumped up another 50 percent.

There’s geological, and then there’s ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, “should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?” doesn’t really make much sense. There isn’t anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn’t one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

Especially after all the

“RANDOM_FRIEND wants to get in touch with you on Threads™!”

“RANDOM_FRIEND just posted something on Threads™! Check it out!”

Etc etc

spam on Facebook and the interleaving of Threads™ teaser posts amongst Facebook posts with half a sentence and then “…” and any interaction with it prompts you to join threads so you can read the rest of that sentence that hooked you in…

Or the “easy and fun™” way that every Instagram account has a Threads™ account just waiting to be activated by you.

I wonder how much of a user base they would have without all the jamming it down user’s throats.