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I envision a wonderful future with this happening.
  • We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

    Ursula K. Le Guin

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    Images to animated GIF offline and FLOSS ( Linux )
  • Op this is the guide you need! I’ll leave my link up as comparison in quality of the guide a knowledgable human produces vs that predicted by an ml model

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    Images to animated GIF offline and FLOSS ( Linux )
  • ffmpeg is my go to for things like this but I can never remember the necessary incantation on the command line. Fortunately ChatGPT tends to get you most of the way there a lot of the time, I would normally asks something like the following and start from there:

    How to convert a folder of png images into a gif using ffmpeg?

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    Labour wins majority in UK General Elections as Tories lose two-thirds of seats
  • Last I checked ~18:00BST

    Party     Seats    Votes       %
    Lab        412   9,725,117   33.8
    Con        121   6,824,610   23.7
    Reform       5   4,103,727   14.3
    Lib Dem     71   3,501,004   12.2
    Green        4   1,941,220    6.8
    Indep.       7     841,835    2.9
    …
    

    I am personally glad that the next government is not going to be stuffed full with bigoted nationalists from Reform. I can’t help but marvel though at how wonky the system of voting is that let the Lib Dem’s get an order of magnitude more seats than Reform with 600k fewer votes. Reform got just under half Labour’s vote share and only slightly over 1% of their seats.

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    How to write Hello World
  • It’s a the right shift assignment operator so x >>= 4 right shifts x by 4 and assigns the result back to x. The code editor is displaying single double wide symbol (ligature) instead of the three character long operator >>=, I discovered today these are in fact well loved by some coders.

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    How to write Hello World
  • LGTM. Though do people really code with ligatures turned on?

    Edit: Ok so there are some big advocates of ligatures, I’m going to have to give them a second chance. I’ll try for a week, and either way that Fira Code font looks great.

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    Stonehenge sprayed with paint by environmental protesters
  • Maybe it’s that this is a better a metaphor for the destruction of the common cultural heritage of the environment? Not many people can relate to or are inconvenienced by a very expensive private boat sinking.

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    Gettysburg report
  • Thanks for the notes, I found it was surprisingly difficult to emulate the style. The above was already after several rounds of nonsensification and I was thinking I had gone too far but on reflection should have gone further.

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    Gettysburg report
  • Folks, let me tell you, Goldilocks. Goldilocks is a fantastic story. Tremendous story, okay? She walks into the house, right? And there are three bears. Can you believe it? Three big, beautiful bears. She tries the porridge. First one, too hot. Way too hot. Who makes porridge that hot? Disastrous. Then the second one, too cold. Nobody likes cold porridge. It’s just wrong. But the third one, folks, it’s just right. Perfect. Tremendous porridge. The best. But you know, what Goldilocks did, breaking into that house? It’s a crime. But the media doesn’t talk about that. But you have to wonder, are those bears even here legally? We need to know who’s coming into our country. And that’s why we need our great police officers, they’re tremendous. They’re doing an incredible job. But the media, they don’t want to talk about that. They want to focus on negativity. So unfair. We’ve got to support our police, folks. They’re the ones keeping us safe from those rioters, from Antifa. Just terrible people, really. And what about our Second Amendment rights? The right to bear arms, folks. Very important. We have to protect that.

    And let me tell you, if those three little piggies had been allowed to arm themselves, maybe they’d still be here today. Imagine that, I mean the first little pig builds his house out of straw. Not good. Devastating. The second pig, sticks. Better, but still not great. If they had proper protection, maybe the wolf wouldn’t have been such a problem. Just think about that. So, the third pig, he’s smart. Genius. He builds his house out of bricks. Solid bricks. Huge house. Tremendous. The wolf comes, and he huffs and puffs. But he can’t blow it down. Can’t do it. Just like the border. We need to build that wall. Keep out the bad guys, the criminals, the drugs. We can’t have them pouring into our country. Just can’t have it. And this pig, he stands up to the wolf. Defeats him. Wow. It’s symbolic, you know? It’s about migrants, so many. The wolf is the story, it’s the threats coming over our border. And we need to be like that third pig, building big strong defenses. Solid defenses. Making sure we’re protected. And the pigs, they all end up in the brick house, safe from the wolf. Wow, like we need to keep our country safe from all the threats out there. Tremendous story. The best. And we’ve got tremendous people.

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    Up-to-date, FOSS, Linux-ready alternative for avidemux/VirtualDub
  • One great use I have found for ChatGPT and family is helping me divine command line one-liners for standard shell programs. Generating commands for tools like ffmpeg are also reasonably successful and saves a lot of time digging through man files

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    TIL that powerful jets of high-energy particles created by supermassive black holes must be pointed at Earth to be called a Blazar
  • If the angle of the jet is more then a little off axis the jet may still visible if it is sufficiently powerful and it passes through a scattering medium (interstellar dust?) the wiki page for blazars shows just such an example in the M87 galaxy

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    Sand Batteries vs Water Batteries
  • It looks like their current generation of systems are electricity in, via resistive heating, then heat out via hot air. Efficient electricity out would appear to be an active research area for them, but it would also seem, that there are still a number of applications where on demand heat at several hundreds of degrees is still very valuable.

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    Sand Batteries vs Water Batteries
  • There is a sand battery start up in Tampere (Finland) that is heating to 1k Celsius so by the OPs calculations that would still give it a small edge over water but with the added bonus of the intrinsic insulation - very handy in the cold winters. They have a pilot plant that is being developed to support the municipal heating network.

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    Is Open University (UK) a decent option for an online-only Master's in Education degree?
  • The OU has always had strong distance learning teaching, I have a family member who pivoted to a new career thanks largely to getting a degree with the OU. Also completing a degree through a remote program from and provider is a great indicator of your resolve and tenacity and can easily be a great selling point to future jobs etc.

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  • Amazon are getting a bit too creative with where they hide stuff

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