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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • My favorite tips are:

    You can filter the output of a command. Most commands return parameters like (output, error) so you can filter them by number like 1>/dev/null will filter the output and only show the errors, and 2>/dev/null will filter the errors and only show the output. Also if you want a command to run silently but it doesn’t have it’s own built-in quiet mode you can add &>/dev/null which will filter everything.

    Bash (and other shell’s I assume) can be fully customized. In addition to the .bashrc file in your home directory, there are also a few common files that bash will look for like .bash_aliases, .bash_commands, .bash_profile or you can create your own and just add to the end of the .bashrc file ./YOUR_CUSTOM_BASH_FILE_NAME

    Inside that file you can add any custom commands you want to run for every bash shell like aliases and what not.

    I personally often use a simple update command like so alias up='sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y' which just makes running updates, upgrades, and clean-up so much easier. Just type up and enter your password. I have previously added in things like &>/dev/null to quiet the commands and echo Fetching updates... to make some commands quieter but still give some simple feedback.

    There’s also the basics of moving around a terminal command as others have pointed out. The easiest and the one I use the most is if you hold CTRL+LEFT_ARROW the cursor will move entire words instead of one character at a time. Very helpful if you need to change something in the middle of a command.






  • I really think that consciousness is just a combination of Narrow AI – that is, AI that is only good at a very specialized task. For example, we have a part of our brains specifically to process the raw data from our eyes, that’s a Narrow AI designed for that express purpose. When you combine all of the AIs that would be necessary for sight, smell, taste, touch, etc, as well as maintaining bodily functions, immune system, and other autonomic systems, you’ve essentially got an AI that can run a body.

    However, at the point, that body would rely purely on instinct and only react to it’s environment. Add one more layer of Narrow AI whose purpose is to extrapolate the given information and make educated guesses and you’ve got the potential for intelligence. Because now you’re not just reacting to the environment but you’re actively thinking of how you can use all of those other Narrow AI that control your body to shape your environment, which is the basis of intelligence.


  • Star Trek really has 2 different genres, there’s action/adventure and there’s real hard sci-fi where philosophy is at the forefront. Voyager generally appeals more to the action/adventure fans, whereas the previous iterations appeared like the entire series was heading in a more philosophical direction with TOS to TNG to DS9 increasing in their thoughtfulness. VOY was seen as a huge backslide to people who were tuning in largely for the philosophical aspect of the show.

    Considering there was and still are very few popular philosophical and thought provoking shows that challenge the viewer’s world view and biases, I think it’s fair to be upset that the new direction of the show is to dumb down everything and focus more on the action.

    Of course, that’s not to say that Voyager was completely devoid of any philosophical debate, but I don’t think anyone can make the case that it’s equally as intelligent as TNG and DS9.




  • I’m going to take a guess because again I’m not an astronomer or a physicist, just a lay person and an enthusiast.

    What Dark Energy does can basically be boiled down to anti-gravity. It’s not exactly that, we’re not really sure what it is, but that’s what effect it has, it’s repulsive in the same way that gravity is attractive. The theory is that space is expanding and the more space between things (like galaxies) the faster they will move away from each other. It’s also been getting faster since the Big Bang.

    We also assumed that black holes didn’t gain much mass unless they absorbed a large body of matter or had an accretion disk – They do gain mass through Hawking Radiation but that’s pretty minuscule. So I think this study has to do with the distribution of matter throughout the universe and the amount of matter in galaxies.

    If black holes have always been as massive as they are today then we would assume that everything would be much closer together and the super massive black holes at the center of galaxies would have gathered more matter than they currently have. So we made the assumption that there must have been some kind of repulsive force that spread everything out. Instead the black holes had less gravitational force than we assumed and so it explains why they didn’t gather more matter into their orbits and everything spread out across the universe in the way we observe it today.

    Again, I’m just guessing based on my limited knowledge. If an astronomer wants to jump in here, please do!


  • This is craaaazy astronomical news if true! I’ll try to summarize from my limited understanding as I’m not a professional.

    First of all, this article is about Dark Energy, at it’s basics Dark Energy is an unknown force which is why it’s called “dark” and it was named after scientists couldn’t explain why the universe (or spacetime specifically) was expanding as quickly as it is. This paper is the first piece of observational evidence that might “shed some light” on where Dark Energy comes from. From what I can gather, it says that through observing lots of supermassive black holes at the center of loads of galaxies, they’ve determined two things if this observation is correct: black holes don’t have a singularity at their cores, and that black holes gain mass by “cosmological coupling” as they put it.

    First, a singularity means that math breaks down, it usually means that it tends toward infinity and the equation can’t be solved. With black holes, it usually means that spacetime itself collapses down infinitely into a single dimension, which is pretty hard for us to understand and breaks a lot of physical laws like Einstein’s equations.

    Second, “cosmological coupling” they explain is that as the space expands, the black hole also expands. In very simple terms, lets say the black hole has a diameter 2 LY (light years) in space. If after say a million years space expands enough that 2 LY now is equivalent to 1 LY before then the size of the black hole is essentially 4 LY now when using the old universe’s definition of what a LY is.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that because the black hole is essentially “absorbing” spacetime it must gain energy because spacetime does have energy even though we consider it “empty”.

    Because of Einstein’s famous equation e=mc^2 we can determine that energy is basically equivalent to mass, and since the black hole is getting extra energy from this “cosmological coupling”, it’s also gaining mass.

    I think the most basic TL;DR I can give then is: black holes are sort of “absorbing” spacetime as it expands and gaining energy while doing so which in turn leads them to gaining mass. This extra mass has now been shown through observation to account for and completely explain the origins of Dark Energy.

    With that said… THIS PAPER IS BRAND NEW AND HAS NOT BEEN PEER REVIEWED! This is not a discovery yet, it’s way too early to say anything conclusive.


  • I don’t really get the appeal of strongly typed languages. Can’t you just use try/catch blocks, and/or use functional programming and return early if the data structure of whatever you’re working with isn’t what you expected?

    I guess it can help older code easier to maintain because the expected data structure is right there, but you could also just include it in a comment above the function.

    I personally find TS slows down initial production of a project and raises so many unnecessary errors.

    Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing? Because I don’t really get the appeal. I mean, I do on some level, but I don’t really understand why so many people are absolutely obsessed with TS.