Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Thinking about how people did advanced math before computers reminded me that there's a team of people trying to build the ultimate steampunk computer, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: http://plan28.org/

There are two working & correct Difference Engines, proving his designs sound, but an Analytical Engine would dwarf both of them together & can't be hand-cranked.

@troubleMoney I can do trig, but if I don't have a pushbutton calculator for sines, cosines, & square roots, I can't do it without lookup tables.

@troubleMoney I've seen one of those in operation, but I have no idea how to use it.

I've been so out of it that I didn't see last boost until now, from anyone here or birdsite, and in spite of having a politics/rant account on birdsite.

@anthracite In my experience (tho not with masto), ephemeral caches tend to be neither. Still, holy wow, that was a fair amount!

Yayness for success and experience gain!

I'm trying to think of the most evil thing to set someone's default editor to, and I'm not able to do much worse than making it this shellscript:

#!/bin/sh
cat $1 - > $1

I can't help but think that, if we were to attempt terraforming Mars or any other planet, the first thing we'd have to do is find a way to generate an Earth-like geomagnetic field to stop the solar wind from stripping away atmospheric water & oxygen (or in the case of low-grav planets like Mars, virtually the entire atmosphere altogether).

New challenge already. I just found out that restore(8) works with a ZFS filesystem & UFS dump image, but dump(8) doesn't like ZFS filesystems at all.

LB: Furries ruin everything.