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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I will gladly die on this hill.

    Obviously! Well done. Your definition is delusional and at odds with science and common language use, yet you won’t back down. That takes commitment. It also has me questioning whether you believe in light outside human perception (since it’s also measured as a wave). You are the embodiment of this fun thread! And I genuinely enjoy thinking about both positions.

    But I think I’ll stick with the Wikipedia and dictionary editors, and the likes of Britannica which states:

    Sound, a mechanical disturbance from a state of equilibrium that propagates through an elastic material medium. A purely subjective definition of sound is also possible, as that which is perceived by the ear, but such a definition is not particularly illuminating and is unduly restrictive, for it is useful to speak of sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear, such as those that are produced by dog whistles or by sonar equipment.


  • I appreciate your hill. But several sources disagree with you.

    Wikipedia: “In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.”

    Oxford: “1. vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.”

    Webster: “1.c: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing”

    Cambridge: “something that you can hear or that can be heard”

    These don’t seem to require the ear for the vibrations to be sounds in and of themselves. Only that it would be detectable by an ear if an ear were present.

    Upon what do you base your assertion that it is the hearing of the thing that is the most essential requirement? (And given the thread I think it’s perfectly reasonably for the answer to be something like “because it’s my hill dammit!”)






  • Ha! Well I was just having a laugh. Expecting that you would prefer “you should damp your expectations” and that my construction should mean “make your expectations wet.” And it turns out dampen is ambiguous. It means both moisten and dull, deaden, make weak.

    Not only that, but most every form carries both meanings, and the “weaken” sense for the word damp predates the “humid” sense. Because the noun came first and it was specific to suffocating fumes in a mine that would extinguish candles, and people.

    So my take now is that dampening means both “making weak” and “humidifying, moistening.” Only damping is specific to motion/energy. And I can’t recall encountering anyone using damping to mean “making wet.”





  • For flexibility and size I like external m.2 enclosures. I have some from Sabrent, Orico and Rosewill. Of them all the Rosewill is the smallest, has the nicest build quality, and seems to dissipate heat the best.

    So I would recommend a Rosewill 9SIA072GJ92919, and add an NVMe SSD of your choice.

    I think your MacBook is Thunderbolt 2, so you won’t get full speed but it should still be plenty fast. And this enclosure will give you TB3 speeds if you upgrade your PC later.






  • Copy on write is the difference. As I understand it, a btrfs snapshot takes no space when it’s created (beyond the file system record). The filesystem is always writing changes to file chunks as a new copy of the chunk, which is then recorded as a replacement of the old chunk (which is still present on-disk). So a snapshot tracks all of these later changes, and the file system keeps the old file chunks preserved as long as you keep the snapshot. That’s why you can mount a btrfs snapshot. It just shows you the volume through the lens of all of these saved changes.

    When you delete a snapshot you are then marking these preserved chunks as free space. So that is also quick.