DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

It might be; I’ve only ever used in on Wayland to make up for Discord using its ancient version of Electron. If the canary branch Discord works for you though I’d stick to that, I was just offering another option for either yourself or people reading the post!

Related to the Discord Canary comment, Vesktop is a third-party Discord client that’s properly supported Wayland for quite some time now. I’ve been using it ever since swapping to Linux full-time to make sure streaming works correctly.

Germany was always the second strongest imperial power in Europe behind Britain from 1871 onwards, and without the English channel that would be debatable.

The Nazis’ initial success in WW2 is entirely dependent on France falling apart the second they were invaded and the Reich getting to loot the entirety of it and the low countries to keep their economy alive. Had France put up even token resistance Germany would have imploded within a few months and the European half of the war would’ve been a minor footnote in the history books next to Japan invading all of Asia.

The derpy eyes really pull the whole snek together

It was 100% because the existing Electron version they were using was ancient, a giant pain in the ass to update, and represents exactly zero revenue for them so they hadn’t bothered putting anyone on fixing it. Every tech company has the ticking time bomb in the corner like that.

Ionization chamber smoke detectors have a tiny grain of Americium in them, which is radioactive. However, the radiation is almost entirely alpha particles which are relatively low risk as they don’t penetrate skin particularly well.

They are also still sold, though you should buy the other kind (which use light beams instead) because they’re significantly better at their jobs.

Commit to the bit. The bit is eternal.

He is a finn, what do you expect from him?

Continued use of the swastika in his military and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge how many Soviets the Finns starved to death in Leningrad while working with the Third Reich, presumably.

The curvature of spacetime does wild shit to how you would expect physics to work. If you want to fall into a gravity well, you have to slow down or you’ll just slingshot past it.

Who isn’t racing out the door at 5pm? I trade labor for wages, I’m not sticking around for unpaid overtime just to make some investor who’s never worked a day in his life even richer.

A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting “RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!”

The goat pastures call to us all.

I nearly had a heart attack until I read the word “ARM” at the end.

It seems like ARM Arch is doomed for whatever reason.

Consciousness is not part of the observer effect (which is itself named in the most infuriating way possible, specifically because it makes people think that the universe is somehow aware of when something sentient is looking at it). “Observing” a particle requires interacting with it in such a way that you meaningfully affect its current state of being, whether that be deflecting it in a different direction than it was going or changing its velocity, and therefore it is impossible at a quantum level to be a passive observer that does not influence the outcome.

In the case of the double slit experiment, if unobserved light will act as a wave with interference and if observed then it acts like a particle. The reason for this is both complicated and simple: light behaves as a wave due to probability. There’s no way of observing a photon without influencing it, so therefore the best we can do is say it has a certain probability of being in this collection of spaces, which in the case of photons is a wave (because it can travel in any of a number of directions outwards from the photon emitter in the experiment, but all going away from the emitter and towards the wall the slits are cut into). For the purposes of this probability wave, the start position is the emitter and the end position is the wall behind the slits, so averaging out a large number of photons will recreate the interference pattern on the wall.

However, if you observe the photons at the slits to try and figure out which slits they’re going through you have influenced the photons and thus collapsed that probability wave into a particle, and in the process created a new probability wave from that moment onwards which has the same end position as the original wave, but now starts at the individual slit. From its perspective, there is no second slit, so now the wave acts as if it is in the single slit setup because from its perspective it is, hence the loss of interference.

Nothing here has anything to do with consciousness. You can recreate this experiment with no one in the room and it will behave exactly the same, and has a sound (if very confusing conventionally) mathematical cause.

On a side note, string theory is effectively unfalsifiable and therefore completely useless as a scientific theory.

Space is an ocean. That’s why there’s space whales.

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up of it being any good.

Famously impossible thing to detect in historical records: massive amounts of uranium-235.

Time doesn’t slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you’ve slowed down, but from where you’re sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we’re using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. “The speed of light” as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn’t change; it’s a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of “I 'unno.” The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we’ve tried so far. They’re still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there’s always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading “Here There Be Dragons”.

Nothing improves morale like the on-call having to unfuck production for the third time that hour because mUh VeLoCiTy decided code review and testing in CI was too slow.

Techbros are fucking cultists.

There’s a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.