Somewhat but not exactly. You can only go north or south until you hit the poles, but you can travel forever at angle zero starting from the center point. I guess you could call towards the center point “North” and away from it “south”, so the galactic center is the North Pole but there is no equivalent South Pole. But angle zero is more analogous to the prime meridian - it’s a line that goes north-south but there are an infinite number of such lines, and we could have called any of them zero.

I think it would not have a shape, or would rather be a zero dimensional point. For it to be any shape, it would have to have features, but you’ve already defined this as the fundamentally smallest ‘thing’ so it can’t have any features smaller than itself. But you could also probably convince me that it’s a sphere. I’m not sure if mathematicians consider a sphere of infinitesimal radius to still be a sphere or not, but treating it as infinitesimal kinda makes sense to me even if it’s actually finitely small (the Planck length?)

A more interesting question to me is, assuming positions in space are discrete, which I’m not sure follows from saying there’s a smallest possible object, how are those ‘voxels’ arranged? I don’t think that’s necessarily equivalent to asking what the shape of the smallest object would be. Pixels on a screen are in a rectangular grid, but the actual elements are circles in some types of screens.

There are a number of shapes besides cubes that can fill 3D space, but do the voxels even have to all be the same shape? Are we even looking for a 3D tiling, or could it be 4D in spacetime, or even higher dimension if it turns out the universe has more than 4 dimensions? Does it have to tile at all, or could it be entirely irregular while still being discrete? Is there any conceivable experiment that could prove any of these things, or is it unknowable?

The post says I’m the boss, so as a human I’m going to pick my own home galaxy as the reference. Alien species would have their own coordinate systems but it’s not that hard to convert between them, or to specify which reference you’re using. We’ll already be converting between planetary/system/galactic/intergalactic coordinate systems all the time so it’s not much harder to account for a few more.

Within the Milky Way a polar (cylindrical) coordinate system makes more sense than Cartesian - there’s an axis of rotation to define the center and ‘up/down’ directions. Zero degrees is arbitrary but a line from the galactic center to Sol, projected onto the galactic plane, would be an obvious choice as a sort of galactic prime meridian. ‘North’ and ‘south’ don’t really map to a roughly disc shaped galaxy - you’d use distance from center, angle, and ‘elevation’.

On an intergalactic scale, the center of our own galaxy is probably still the obvious choice for a center point. We could use the same axis and meridian - I don’t think the rotation of our galaxy matters on any human timescale, and on the time scales where it does matter, everything is moving relative to each other so coordinates already aren’t ‘fixed’. I’d use a spherical coordinate system instead of cylindrical for intergalactic coordinates, since things are not roughly in a plane anymore.

If you want a fixed coordinate you’d have to include a time dimension, and as the zero point for time I propose the Unix epoch. Not because it makes any sense but because it’s extremely funny to imagine computer systems in the year 10000 still relying on that legacy decision. Though special relativity makes ‘point in time’ rather complex as well - I don’t know enough to know what you’d actually need to make that work.

Of course we already have such coordinate systems for astronomy if you want to know the ‘real’ answer, one of them is pretty close to what I just came up with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_coordinate_systems

During the Reddit API stuff, same as most of the folks here. I tried kbin first but lack of an API or mobile app at the time pushed me to Lemmy instead.

I eventually caved and started using the official Reddit app, but I still check here as well - less content but I like the vibes here. Reddit hasn’t been the same since the protests - might just be bias but I feel like ‘brain drain’ was real and quality discussions over there are a little less frequent than before.

My first VPS was for a Minecraft server so I named it cobblestone. I’ve kept using Minecraft related names for all my machines since then, and I try to pick ones that are at least vaguely related to the function or appearance of the machine. For example my cluster has brute for the master and piglin01-piglin04 for the workers, but those are the only ones I’ve numbered.

The exception is my two Klipper RPi’s, one is octopi since that’s what it originally ran, and the other is named after the model of the printer. For some reason I never named my printers.

I probably wouldn’t use a naming scheme like this for production servers though - I’d either go with functional hostnames or something like the periodic table which you can pick from arbitrarily. My home servers and clients aren’t cattle though, so I like having a little personality to the names there.

I use Debian on my servers, Arch on my laptop and desktop. Different tools for different jobs. I tried Debian on my laptop a few years ago but it wasn’t a good fit for me - my hardware was too new for the stable kernel, and the Wayland/wlroots stuff was too far behind. As a server though, especially since I’m mostly running Podman containers, stable and slow-updating is great! I use unattended-upgrades and haven’t had a problem yet.

I haven’t spent much time with Fedora but I’d probably like it as a desktop OS - fairly fast updates, and sticks pretty close to upstream without a ton of custom theming for example. I would miss the AUR, but Flatpak covers a lot of what I need, and Distrobox could handle anything else.

No, I just printed the case files from the GitHub repo.

Not sure about swipe typing specifically, but there’s been some pretty interesting and weird attempts to invent better touchscreen input methods since at least the Palm Pilot era, probably on the Newton too even before that. There’s also some crazy stuff from the world of wearable computing that’s even more niche.

There are some similar boards with 3x6 layouts - ffkb and vulpes majora, both by fingerpunch, support 3x6 with a center trackball. I do miss the extra keys a bit with 3x5 layouts - when I eventually design my own board I think I’m going to do a 40 key layout.

There’s less finger movement needed (for any alternative layout) compared to QWERTY so in theory it could be faster. In reality it seems to not make that much difference - typing speed records are still mostly set with QWERTY, and personally I think I’m about the same speed as I was with QWERTY, or a bit slower.

It’s noticeably more comfortable though. I’m not sure there’s any actual ergonomic benefit, but it just feels really nice to type on. I don’t regret learning it but I don’t exactly recommend it either - it was a lot of effort for a small benefit.

If you’re deep enough into the ergo keyboard hobby that learning an alternate layout sounds fun to you though, then I say go for it, it’s an interesting challenge.

I’ve only been using it for a day so I’m still figuring that out. Something about it feels a bit ‘off’ compared to my Elecom Deft Pro but I’m not sure if that’s a hardware or software issue - could just be a smaller ball is harder to get the same accuracy, could be the cheap BTUs I’m using. I’ll probably try printing a different trackball holder that uses static bearings to see if I prefer that.

Colemak-DH? I switched using the Tarmak series of layouts, which change a few keys at a time from QWERTY until you eventually get to Colemak(-DH). Took about 5 weeks to do the gradual switch, then a couple months before I got speed back up to around where I was with QWERTY. But with that method I stayed at a good enough WPM the whole time to not lose any productivity at work.

I’m not either (besides Minecraft and such) so my personal experience with Linux gaming has been pretty good. There’s some jank with needing to pick the right Proton version and adding command line options, but I’m not sure it’s any worse than Windows - I’ve had to reinstall my graphics drivers way too many times. But there’s a large portion of gamers that almost exclusively play the big multiplayer games, and Linux is definitely not ready for that group.

It’s pretty good for single player games on Steam but a lot of multiplayer games use anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, and some launchers don’t work well. And of course if you use Game Pass for PC you’re out of luck entirely. Most VR headsets also won’t work on Linux.

So it really depends what kind of games you play. It’s kind of similar to the Adobe situation. I suspect most gamers will have at least one deal-breaker that forces them to keep at least a dual-boot around. But many people could use Linux most of the time, including for games, and that’s already pretty exciting for Linux fans.

Weird esoteric issues happen on Windows too. I had a bug where I couldn’t create a new folder from Windows Explorer, which I never figured out and didn’t resolve itself with reboots or even Windows updates. I probably could have spent a half day tracking it down and fixing it, but someone less tech savvy would probably have had to reinstall Windows. Instead I just popped a terminal and used mkdir whenever I needed a new folder until I upgraded to Windows 11 and that resolved it.

Point is, computers just suck sometimes regardless of what software they run. Or I’m just a magnet for ridiculous arcane bugs, you decide.

This might come across as Linux fanboyism but I currently have Linux, Windows, macOS, iPadOS, Android, and FreeBSD all running on various devices around my house and they all suck in their own unique ways.

All these are fine for daily use if you have the Linux knowledge to use them. By ‘not suitable for daily use’ they mean special purpose distros like Knoppix, Tails, and Qubes. It’s somewhat confusing wording though.

This put a minus on Debian because updates are slow but didn’t have one on Devuan or RHEL. I would not take these results too seriously. There is also no reason to rank Devuan and Artix as high as it did when I said I don’t care about systemd. The only reason to pick those over the upstream distros is for the init system.

It did recommend Arch as my top choice though which is what I’ve been daily driving for years.