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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • If you don’t see any insects on the leaves or the soil, I’d just give it some time. Water it every 2-4 weeks. If it’s a large pot of soil do it every 4 weeks with ~0,5 liters, in a smaller pot do it more often with a smaller quantity.

    In general, it’s better to water rarely, so the top layer of soil is dry most of the time. That way, you’re making the life harder for small flys to lay eggs and nurish from the roots.

    If it keeps losing leaves, don’t panic. Mine had a severe sunburn once and dropped all the leaves. After some weeks it started to recover and grew new leaves.

    I would say, the worst thing you can do is overwater. Mine is in a pretty huge pot (80 liters) and I give it (round about) 1,7 liters of water every 6 weeks in summer and 2-3 months in winter. That way the plant has to grow deep roots to the very bottom to reach the bottom and the top layers are rather dry.









  • rbn@sopuli.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzInfinite Suffering
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    14 days ago

    I go for option 1.

    In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that’d be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either…

    • a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
    • death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
    • or - if it’s an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

    So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that’s just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.



  • Always appreciate any work spent on any FOSS stuff out there but currently I’m a bit afraid that Gecko disappears into unimportance. So I’d prefer more contributions towards that one project rather than opening new ones.

    The issue with browser engines is that it always requires work from two directions. The browser engine must be optimized to render websites as good as possible. And websites must be optimized to be rendered by all the different browser engines.

    And (almost) no one is willing to do the latter for engines with a <1% market share. Already now, more and more commercial and non-commercial websites are only working properly with Chrome or its derivates.





  • If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).

    Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.

    If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.






  • Is there an info on how many tests he gave away? As it’s said to be for personal use, I would expect it to be a two digit number. Let’s assume 50. What difference do 50 tests make for the survival of the nation? How many lives would have been saved if there would have been 50 additional tests? Hard to quantify. Could be none at all but also thousands. If you’re very lucky you might test just the right person at the right point in time. And by putting that one person into quarantaine, you avoid a huge superspreader event. Or all 50 tests are negative. Maybe you even have some false negatives that cause a super spreader event.

    Of course, the more tests a nation has and performs during a pandemic, the better. Fully agree. But it’s hard to quantify the effect of such a small amount.

    Similarly, it’s very hard to quantify the effect of diplomacy. Maybe (most likely!) the gift had no effect at all. Maybe Putin didn’t even use them in fear of contact poison on the swabs. But maybe, they also had some effect. Maybe the gesture subconciously influenced Putin to not do something stupid, do it a little later, or slightly less stupid. We’ll never know. Not even Putin himself knows.

    Independent of the diplomacy part, let’s try to deconstruct the scandal into two parts.

    1. Completely ignore the “Putin” part of this scandal. Let’s assume Trump had a stash with Covid tests for his personal use. Let’s assume someone finds out now that Trump hoarded 50 tests in his drawer all the time that he never used. The effect on the US pandemic would have been the same as giving the same number of tests away. Maybe even worse: If Putin used the tests and broke some infection chain, that might have saved people in Russia from catching Covid that might have travelled to the US later.

    2. Now ignore the “Covid tests” part. If we assume a value of $5 per test, that leads to a total value of $250. So Trump gifted Putin a rare cigar or a nice pen whatever. This is completely normal diplomacy and global leaders exchange such things all the time. Also with nations that aren’t your allies. So from my perspective, the Putin part of the scandal is not relevant and can be ignored.

    What stays is “Trump reduced the number of available Covid tests in the US by 50”. You can call that whataboutism but is this a scandal that deserves our attention in comparison to all the traitorous, imorral and illegal things he did?