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merc

merc@sh.itjust.works
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Some useful resources:

Emoji Moon Phases, you’ll need Waxing Gibbous right now (🌔)

https://starinastar.com/moon-phase-emojis-a-review/

Today’s Wordle Answer:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is-todays-wordle-answer

The Elements sorted by Atomic Number:

https://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/periodic/structure_numbers.htm

Chess Move Solver:

https://nextchessmove.com/

What killed me was trying to feed the chicken while hunting for a YouTube video of a certain length. I did get past that once when I was lucky enough to be asked for a 9 minute 0 second video. Because people upload “timer” videos of exactly X minutes, that was possible. The “26 minute 59 second” video resulted in a dead chicken.

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He’s apparently 38. When was the last time a 38 year old that wasn’t a goalkeeper signed for a PL club? There may have been 38 year olds renewing their contracts (say Giggs?) but as a new signing, wow.

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People worry about microplastics getting everywhere, but what about dihydrogen monoxide? Nearly every autopsy shows that the victim had huge quantities of dihydrogen monoxide in their system.

Some people claim it’s safe, but if it’s so safe, why is it so critical that it not be allowed near electrical appliances and electronics?

And, nobody mentions how incredibly addictive it is. Virtually every person who starts taking dihydrogen monoxide is unable to quit and has to keep taking it for their entire lives. Anybody who goes cold turkey dies within days.

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When you view or edit a text (.txt) file in a text editor like Notepad, you’re most often opening a file in ASCII encoding that uses the ASCII binary values for common letters, numbers and punctuation. The only values allowed in that kind of file are lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation.

You can also view or edit binary files, like executables (.exe), but you typically need a hex editor. If you tried to open a binary file in a plain text editor it wouldn’t know how to handle all the binary values that are not part of the standard ASCII set of letters, numbers and punctuation.

Hex editors show the data in hexadecimal format. They convert the binary data to numbers from 0 to 15 where the numbers 10 to 15 are replaced by the letters A to F. Often to make it clear people are talking about the hex number they add “0x” in front of the number. So, 0 becomes 0x0, 9 becomes 0x9, 15 becomes 0xF, 16 becomes 0x10, and 255 becomes 0xFF. This is an efficient way for people to work with binary data because 16 is 24 or 222*2.

Within binary files, there will still be a lot of sections that are in ASCII. For example, any error messages that have to be printed out for the user to see, like “this program cannot be operated in DOS mode”.

Razor 1911 is an infamous cracker group that has been around for decades. They often “sign” the programs they crack by putting “Razor 1911” inside the files, in a way where you can see it if you open it with a hex editor, but so it doesn’t affect the program.

So, what this is suggesting is that a program that Rockstar has released on Steam is not something they built themselves, but they’re actually distributing a cracked version that was released by Razor 1911.

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I hope people aren’t counting on playing games that require fast reaction speeds. If your jam is turn-based games you’re in luck, you should be good to 100. But, if you’re a competitive online gamer, you’re in for a rude shock if you think you’re going to retire and compete against the 20-somethings.

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most developed countries are learning to deal with a shrinking population

Not really, most countries are dealing with it by increasing immigration. That’s clearly not a sustainable long-term plan.

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They don’t.

The classic work is in the public domain. There’s no longer any copyright protection on it. Publishing the classic work does take a little effort though. There’s the effort of reformatting it for modern book sizes, making sure the line and paragraph breaks look good, etc. Then there are other costs like promotion and distribution. If they do that and publish it like that, nothing in their version is copyrighted either. Someone can duplicate the book exactly and sell copies, and there’s nothing the publisher can do.

But, if they put in Dr. Professor Bethany Hernandez-Leslie’s foreword, that part is a new work, and has a new copyright. Now if someone duplicates the book, they’ll be violating the copyright not on the original work, but on Bethany Hernandez-Leslie’s section.

It’s the same reason that every web site with a cooking recipe has a 10-page essay on how the author’s grandmother came up with the recipe. Nobody cares about that stuff, but recipes can’t be copyrighted, but the other blob of text can. If someone crops out the other text and just copies the recipe, it’s still possible that they could be sued for copyright infringement because it could be argued that the recipe is part of the bigger copyrighted work.

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Zombies might be a threat for the first days or weeks. People aren’t used to killing, especially not things that look human, especially things that might look like a friend or family member. People would hesitate, or screw up, or think they were safe, or whatever.

But, after a short time people would either learn to fight zombies, or they’d become zombies.

Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.

The thing I wish you’d see sometimes in zombie fiction is no zombies. Like, a few months after the outbreak, a group of humans completely eliminates 100% of the zombies from a big island or peninsula so people within that area can live normally. It might require killing a million zombies, but that’s only 1000 zombies each by 1000 people. That’s only about 30 zombies a day for a month per person, which should be pretty easy for a dedicated, competent zombie killer. Instead, the most you get is a small walled town with countless zombies on the walls.

It just makes no sense that you typically see every survivor killing dozens of zombies per hour every day and they don’t seem to be making a dent in the local zombie population.

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Yeah, but that’s because COVID isn’t 100% fatal, whereas zombie bites are 100% fatal.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that people would be more cautious of a Zombie outbreak, it just means that the dumb ones would be awarded Darwins much more swiftly, leaving only the more cautious ones behind.

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