I’m gradually concluding that every decision in computer UI has been wrong. Peak UI happened in the 1990s; it’s been downhill ever since. People think terminals are scary, but come on—asking ChatGPT “how do I do this?” and getting three lines that have worked unchanged since 1989 is not harder than watching some tech-bro explain which menus to click… menus that get rearranged every six months so they can find new ways to wedge ads into your ribbon.

Well apparently fedora w/ kde is wrong or something. I have no idea why.

I mean I use Ubuntu with I3, which is obviously a better choice and all /s.

No, surrounded by love ones is fine, but it’s preferable if you have to have your dignity intact.

Yet, a song that doesn’t know how to end properly is terrible. A book that doesn’t know how to end properly is terrible. You have to learn how to die properly, or your life will be terrible.

I mean, geodetic interferometers already exist and can measure very small deviations. Give them arms the length of the observable universe and they will increase in accuracy, not decrease in accuracy.

If you constructed a circle with the radius of the universe, then measured its circumference and radius measurement accuracy would easily be able to tell the difference between a real circle and a mathematical circle. That is because neither the perimeter of circle will nor the diameter of the circle will be through in empty space. They will be near enough to matter to measure detectable deflections.

From your measurement of pi, we can deduce that you live in an anti-de Sitter space, so all the string theorists will now be sending you emails to test out their theories.

Overly snarky response: Uhhhm. Have you been asleep since, what, 1915 or something? We have extraordinary evidence, and everyone has accepted it, in so far as I know.

Less snarky response: the path on which light moves is the universes instantiation of a straight line. It is “the (locally) shortest path between two points”, the same definition you learned in geometry class. Yet in our universe, two straight lines can intersect each other twice. This is because our universe has at least some local curvature, meaning it is locally non Euclidean. In order to have a mathematically perfect circle you would need to live in a universe without any matter or energy, and with certain other properties.

The universe is non-Euclidean, so no circle made in the actual geometry of the universe actually has the ratio of pi between its circumference and diameter.

Is that the part you are confused about, or did I write something else badly?

[finding people who don’t know that we live in non Euclidean space these days is like finding people who think the sun goes round the earth. But I guess if people can’t be bothered to learn 350 year old mathematics, they also can’t be bothered to learn 100 year old physics. Oh well.]

One thing to be aware of is that if you actually made a circle and measured its radius and circumference you wouldn’t get pi. Not because your measurements would be off, but because the universe does not follow the assumptions mathematicians used to define pi—namely Euclidean geometry. Pi is mathematical, not physical. If real circles and real diameters don’t give you pi that is a problem for the universe, not a problem for mathematics.

And the first time I used nmap on my college network, a professor called up the help desk to report that he had been port scanned.

Then my freind at the help desk told me not to run nmap again and to wait until after dark to pull all the reel to reel tapes out of the dumpster….

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Mostly start up time for me. It just takes the programs longer to launch.