English does have some very good bits:

• easiest adjective declension rules of any language, ie. none.
• verb conjugation rules can be scribbled down in their essence on the back of a napkin and there’s not that many exceptions; probably the easiest of any Indo-European language.
• no “grammatical” gender; only pronouns are changed for gender and they’re mostly as expected from biology
• no polite vs. informal forms of “you” and rules to remember
• loads of words, for subtle nuance and meaning

…and some less good bits:

• loads of words, to confuse learners.
• the spelling rules are the fever dream of a madman. Many words are distinguished by stress, which is not marked. Want to learn the language by reading it? Ha ha no. Also, loads and loads of vowel sounds compared to most languages.
• massive reliance of “phrasal verbs”, where the meaning can’t be guessed from the parts. A “hang up” and a “hang over” have nothing to do with hanging and nothing to do with each other, despite up and over describing similar concepts
• grammatical concepts that don’t exist in other languages, like “do support” for forming questions or negating a statement. Mood and tense of a sentence might be difficult to parse for some learners as that’s indicated by “trigger words” rather than anything more concrete
• the native speakers do like to come out with some nonsense, too.

Alas no. Sur-rip-tish-yis-ly. Apparently you can blame Latin for sub + rapere = “secret snatch”.

Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.

I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.

Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.

Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.

Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.

I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.

Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.

Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.

Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.

Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.

The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.

Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.

Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

• load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
• manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.

You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.

Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.

If you lose, physical scars. If you win, emotional scars.

To be fair, they sent out the email when they first did it. Just their internet connection is a bit slow.

Good shout, Emperor. Appreciate all that you do.

Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you’ve not got a boot manager, of course.

Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Us Scots can say our aitches - always annoys me to hear “an hospital” on the BBC.

Faaking Laanduners - that’s who’ll be saying “an hero”.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

Beautiful creatures with excellent names.

Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.

That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.

Hey! The images of Ryugu that were taken from Hayabusa2. What a sad lonely rock that place is - a loose collection of boulders in an endless orbit, in which it will probably continue without further interaction from now until the end of time. You could sneak a few ghosts onto that place, right enough, and no-one would notice.

As an aside, the Mars rovers are much larger than this - we don’t see them side-by-side with people for comparison very often. Curiosity is the size of a car - three metres on a side, two metres tall, and weighs the best part of a tonne.