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It has been argued before [0] that Leibniz notation being embraced in mainland Europe and not adopted in England/UK was the reason England fell about a century behind. First heard of this in MIT Calc undergrad course on YouTube, but would be too tedious to find which video, hence ran a search on the Internet.

[0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7704/was-english-mat...


Neither did I, until I got this lovely idiot who's probably bipolar and probably on the spectrum. They're motivated by food, yes; and we're motivated by unconditional love.


Feynman on mathematicians vs physicist

https://youtu.be/obCjODeoLVw?si=2akBzyo-fC2j90OH

Entertaining viewpoint


Not sure if GP meant the math for just the trains bit. There is an increase in handling, and everytime the container changes hands, it's going to cost (assuming dearly). First the ship has to berth (cost), unloaded using QC gantry (cost) onto an ITV (cost) where it gets stacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) in a yard (cost) and then unstacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) onto a truck/ITV (cost) which takes it to a stacker/gantry (cost) which then stacks it onto a train (cost). This is then probably going to be reversed on the other side of the train destination assuming it's a port.


The handling is an opportunity too, though. Now you can merge cargo from several ships, and split the cargo from one ship to several others.

Rarely do all containers go in one large batch from just one port to another single one.


i don't disagree, but were it that advantageous, there would be islands in the pacific where this happened


There was also IMP/Horde and these days we have rainloop too.


I echo GPs thoughts. I use a VPS with syncthing. While that is also clunky, it works for my usecase while keeping multiple redundant copies across devices.


Depends on what you mean by redundant though, right? Syncthing is generally not gonna protect you from an accidental `rm -r *`, unless perhaps you set yourself up with a permanent head server where everything is versioned but on which files are never edited. (I'll be happy to be wrong)


When buying an expensive (relatively) computer was a big deal in my house, I had a hard time convincing my dad about the iBook G3 which didn't come with a floppy drive.

Apple has been at it since the dawn of time.


I think Apple made a terrible mistake. But I am not worth $3 trillion, so who am I to argue? But I will piss into the wind anyway:

The biggest difference between USB-A and floppy/CD/DVD drive is the network effect. USB-A is an interface between 2 devices, so its usefulness is measured as an O(N^2). It allows all my laptops to connect to any of my peripherals. To replace USB-A, I would need to replace all my laptops and all my peripherals. A floppy drive, on the other hand, is an O(N) device for the most part. Its usefulness is mostly limited to the single device that it is installed. (Sure, floppy disks are shared between computers, but I would say that this is a less frequent use-case.)

The other difference between USB-A and floppy is that the USB-A is "good enough" for almost all use cases. My keyboard, mouse, flash drives, USB-ethernet adapters, all work perfectly fine with USB-A. In contrast, going from a floppy to a CD increased the capacity by 1000X. From CD to a flash drive, we got another factor of 10X to 100X. And much faster random access. A floppy became "NOT good enough" very quickly.

I see USB-A existing for the foreseeable future, the next 10-20 years, because of the network effect, because it is good enough for most things, and because it is slightly cheaper than USB-C.


> To replace USB-A, I would need to replace all my peripherals.

You can get those USB A-C plug adapters for $1-2 a pop. Stick one on the end of each peripheral cable, now they are all USB-C.


1. Servers, I'm partial to openBSD because of a saner IMO /etc and works-out-of-the-box (for me). My coworker is the more freebsd kind and since he does the work, his opinion prevails.

2. I moved houses 3 days ago. Had installed MX linux prior to moving on my desktop computer. Today, no DHCP IP on my computer. Man and apropos didn't help much. Ifconfig, arp don't exist. They require an apt install. I'm clueless as to what's happening. GUI tools didn't help much. So yeah to all predictable systems including windows.

3. VSCode (which when I last checked a week ago didn't work on freebsd either) and a lot of other programs which aren't there on OpenBSD. NetBSD haven't touched, so won't comment.

4. Userland stuff. BSDs in general pitch themselves as complete OSs, but the whole getting X working is like assembling a GUI stack IMO.

5. Continuing from the previous point (yeah, I'm a hypocrite), a few hundred MBs of RAM and very little GHzs on the CPU gets you a fully functional Desktop environment. If a browser is needed, add a bit more RAM and maybe some CPU.

PS: I use really old hardware


Vscode works totally fine, I use it all the time. It's in the packages and ports.


I might be wrong, but VSCode didn't work (for me) on 13.x and I ran across a few forum posts for others who couldn't get it done either. I had very little time to figure out the right "distro", and VSCode was a requirement. Went to distrowatch, and installed the top choice (please don't roast me about it).


Hmm weird. Did you try to just do "sudo pkg install vscode" ?

Don't try to download it from the website, this won't work as freebsd is not a supported platform but it's simply in the package collection and works great as such.


Ps I wasn't trying to roast you at all. I'm happy you found a solution even if it's not FreeBSD <3

In general that's one of the things I like about the FreeBSD community. We don't really have this push to make it mainstream or to advocate it. If you like it welcome to the club. If you don't, that's fine too. We have no desire to see "the year of FreeBSD on the desktop" generally speaking.

I really like that lack of evangelism which is so common on Linux especially because of the distro wars.


> BSDs in general pitch themselves as complete OSs, but the whole getting X working is like assembling a GUI stack IMO.

FWIW, NetBSD comes with X & ctwm out of the box. (But of course it's not the same as a whole DE you get in Debian.)


ifconfig (on most linuxes) has been deprecated because it doesn't support all network features anymore. You're meant to use "ip". It also does some of what used to be netstat/route. And there's 'ss' for the rest of netstat things.


Math stack exchange IIRC is independent of stack exchange



They state on their webpage that they have bought a lifetime supply of those chips. I wouldn't call them EOL


As I have none, it is for me.


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