“Can the US lose in a way that allows the crazies in office to save face in their eyes?” seems an important question to me. Because if the options are the US clearly losing vs. the US clearly losing but nuking Iran so everyone loses…

That almost makes sense, but pi radians = 180°

Right, a triangle “has 180deg,” like I said.

in which case π÷n is infinitesimally small. In other words, substituting infinity for n would be incalculable

That’s not how limits work. Substitution is not the same as taking the limit.

infinite and infinitesimal numbers are impossible to express rationally.

That’s not true at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1/2_%2B_1/4_%2B_1/8_%2B_1/16_%2B_⋯

It’s not about colloquialism or language

Having one word (or phrase) with two meanings is a property of language.

That’s exactly my point, there are two different colloquial ways of talking about angles. I am not claiming there is a mathematical inconsistency.

Colloquially, a “triangle has 180 degrees” and a “circle has 360 degrees.” Maybe that’s different in different education systems, but certainly in the US that’s how things are taught at the introductory level.

The sum of internal angles for a regular polygon with n sides is (n-2)×pi. In the limit of n going to infinity, a regular polygon is a circle. From above it’s clear that the sum of the internal angles also goes to infinity (wheres for n=3 it’s pi radians, as expected for a triangle).

There is no mystery here, I am just complaining about sloppy colloquial language that, in my opinion, doesn’t foster good geometric intuition, especially as one is learning geometry.

I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.

If you take a circle to be the limit of a polygon as the number of sides goes to infinity, then you have infinite interior angles, with each angle approaching 180deg, as the edges become infinitely short and approach being parallel. The sum of the angles is infinite in this case.

If you reduce this to three sides instead of infinite, then you get a triangle with a sum of interior angles of 180deg which we know and love.

On the other hand, any closed shape (Euclidean, blah blah), from the inside, is 360deg basically by definition.

It’s just a different meaning of angle.

See, for example, the internal angle sum, which is unbounded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polygon

Triangle, “has 180 degrees,” subtends 360 degrees.

Circle, “has 360 degrees,” the sum of the interior angles is infinite.

(I’m not actually confused, it’s just that “a circle has 360 degrees” and “a triangle has 180 degrees” is a little annoying in that they use different definitions.)

Global Outbreak World Response Outreach Network, perhaps?

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

You’re thinking of an “educated bed.”

It’s interesting that, with Python, the reference implementation is the implementation — yeah there’s Jython but really, Python means both the language and a particular interpreter.

Many compiled languages aren’t this way at all — C compilers come from Intel, Microsoft, GNU, LLVM, among others. And even some scripting languages have this diversity — there are multiple JavaScript implementations, for example, and JS is…weird, yes, but afaik can be faster than Python in many cases.

I don’t know what my point is exactly, but Python a) is sloooow, and b) doesn’t really have competition of interpreters. Which is interesting, at least, to me.

Yeah, but do they like Huey Lewis and the News?

Hey Paulina!

Open, or standards-compliant local-only gear is the way to go for smart home stuff IMHO. Never had a problem with a Zigbee, Matter, or ESPHome device suddenly deciding it would stop working because manufacturer said so.

I know the “attack helicopter” bit is a transphobic trope, but given how hard those fans are probably working, I think this computer might actually identify as one.

(If this comment is offensive I can remove it/mod can obviously remove it — not trying to be a dick!)

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).