In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

I started down the path to atheism when I tried proving that my faith was the correct one and got stuck when I realized that all the other religions also think that they are the correct one and the greatest predictor of what you believe is simply what your parents believe, so what exactly made me so sure that I was the right one?

To clarify, it is not that you won’t see content from other instances, it is that your instance only stores content from another instance when someone on your instance has subscribed to it. So if you decided to subscribe to a bunch of things on other instances with hashtags matching your interests, then you and other people would start to see this content showing up when searching for the hashtag on your instance.

Unlike Twitter, hashtags don’t perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it’s federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don’t share your interests.

If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.

In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it’s more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that’s just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don’t have a basis for comparison. :-)

I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it’s basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.

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The problem is that fusion research does not tend to receive a lot of funding, especially relative to the huge challenges it presents. Even the National Ignition Facility, where this milestone was reached, was only built because it was needed for nuclear weapons research, with advances into using fusion for energy generation being essentially a side benefit (at least, from the perspective of its government funders).

The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.

OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.

Watch the show and then read the books. In my opinion the show is fantastic and incredibly enjoyable (except for ending the series in what is obviously the middle of a significant plot thread, which is annoying) but the books are even better and spoiled the show a tinsy bit for me.

Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.

Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.

(In fact, in the later books a “corrupt” version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)

Speaking personally, it’s consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I’ve installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn’t true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)

I also really like its “Refresh Install” feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I’ve used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.

I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.

In fairness, I am also jealous of their Supercharger network, having had some bad experiences on the very few occasions when I’ve needed a DC fast charge and it seemed like nothing around was working. I hope that it gets upgraded to support CCS in at least some locations so I can start being able to use them.

Huh, I have a Niro EV and it tries pretty hard to extrapolate the range based on the current conditions, so for example if it’s colder outside than the range is less (because it needs to keep the batteries warm), and if you switch on air conditioning or the heater then it immediately lowers the range to account for the extra drain. Occasionally it gets the range prediction wrong, but it really does seem to try to do its best. I just assumed that all EVs work this way.

I actually liked the premise of the Ori because basically up to that point they were fighting people who claimed to be gods but were really just aliens with advanced technology, whereas with the Ori they were fighting beings that basically were gods so it was a whole lot harder to convince anyone to side with them. The biggest problem I had with it was that the show seemed to run out of money before they could properly tie everything up, a bit reminiscent of the final season of the Expanse (over which I am still very bitter, though at least it motivated me to read the books, which do satisfyingly tie everything up). In particular, in the episode

they have basically a huge dramatic victory that merited some kind of visually impressive spectacle and instead all that happened was basically that they just turned to each other and said, “Well, so I guess that means we succeeded. Yay.”

For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.