What is that? A squirrel? Chipmunk?
sxan
joined 2 years ago
Rust needs to be reduced back to ore, using a reactive, usually coke. Coke is purified coal. Coal is a fossil fuel. You can do it with charcoal, which can be made by burning wood, so it's possible without coal, just not as efficient. This assumes you can gather the rust - it tends to break down and disperse into the environment, but if you broke up concrete to get at rusted rebar and could collect the rust, you could reduce it with charcoal.
Again, it's a matter of scale. We mine iron and deposits because we can get large amounts in seams. If you're trying to harvest rust and reduced it with charcoal, you're producing iron on the scale of making knives and swords, not cars, or combine harvesters, or more rebar.
It's a chicken-egg problem. We have been able to come as far as a have because oil, coal, and iron were just laying around on the surface, in huge quantities. Those are gone, and now you need the big tools first to get at the reserves that are left.
Any worked iron product rusts. If we're talking about evolutionary time scales, any exposed metal - which is most of it - is going to be unusable within thousands of years, and even rebar embedded in concrete will be gone in millions. Heck, our concrete isn't even as good as the Romans', and even that's going to break down in thousands of years.
We've stripped the raw, surface, easily accessible stuff and worked it into things that will degrade. There may be some scavenge, but nothing that can be gathered in any quantity to build an industrial society on. At best, future societies will be like medieval Japan, where iron is rare and steel precious and hoarded, only unlike Japan, there won't be a future where they can import huge quantities of the stuff from China or Australia, because getting to the deposits now requires an industry and advanced mining equipment... which is all made out of iron they won't have.
Gold will be interesting. Again, it's not just laying around everywhere just under the surface. Instead, there will be isolated pockets of huge piles of the stuff. Gold doesn't degrade, but it's all hoarded. There's a bunch in electronics, but in tiny, tiny amounts in each device; trying to salvage that is really hard, and yields trace amounts. No more nuggets the size of your thumb, or your fist. If a future civilization could build a global economy, then gold wouldn't be an issue. Uranium will be hard, as will platinum, and platinum is a useful, but consumable, catalyst, and rare even today it'll be almost unheard of in a perpetually pre-industrial post-apocalypse.
Fossil fuels are going to be the big issue, though. What's left will simply be inaccessible, and without fossil fuels you don't have plastics, industry, fertilizers at scale, global transportation, or the ability to work whatever metal you can find, at any scale.
It's pretty nice, although IME it's really crashy.
Thank you. I don't know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland's population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like "there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times," with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn't day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to "blow up the world" once? But that graph is interesting; it's even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.
I mean, if that's how you get your rocks off, you do you. Personally, I've never found vitriol to be in any way healthy.
The biggest challenge for future intelligent species, and the reason why I know we're the first technological ones, is that we've mined all of the easily accessible metals and all of the easily accessible fossil fuels. Any intelligence arriving after us is going to have to make a civilization without iron, precious metals, oil, or coal. Unless you get into some sci-fi bio-engineering scenario where they're growing high tech, they're doomed to being stuck in the stone age. It's going to be hard for them to escape the planet, defend it from asteroids, deal with super-volcanoes, build advanced calculating devices... all of the stuff we would already find challenging even with all the resources we have.
Millions of years are not enough to replenish the fossil fuels, and the sun is going to start expanding before enough life lives and dies to produce any useful amount of biomass. Before then, more metals will become accessible, in places, but good luck working it at industrial levels without fossil fuels.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but we've given a severe handicap to advancing beyond a rudimentary agrarian society for any successor species; even if it's our own descendants re-arrising from a post-apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.
"You're not obligated to respond", combined with "nobody else cares about your quarrel but you and that idiot" are the two maxims that make my social media experience better. Sometimes I feel like arguing, but if I think someone's arguing in bad faith, I just block 'em.
Life's too short to spend time interacting with morons.
But why would you have thought that? There have always (for recorded history values of "always") been people in Greenland; there have only relatively recently been nuclear warheads. So - regardless of truth - why would you have assumed that there must have at some point been more warheads in the world than people in Greenland? That doesn't seem like an obvious assumption, to me. What made that occur to you?
I wish I'd have come across this in poster form! I'm not sure where I'd hang it at my stage in life, but this is Art.
Calibre is one of the great pieces of FOSS software, and demonstrates everything good about FOSS: it has regular updates; it's been around for simply ages; it works really, really well; it gets updates and new features and yet has never in my memory had a breaking, non-backwards-compatible release... it's stable; and it resists - in its way - the attempt by publishers to steal our rights and ownerships of our media.
I ~~contribute~~ donate to Calibre. I hope that Goyal has a successor lined up to take the helm who can continue such an outstanding contribution when he finally retires from the project.
Edit: clarification
Something like this? The heavy stagger is great, 42 keys is almost perfect, but the thumb placement is -- for me -- horrible. Having to move my thumb to practically under my palm is just terrible ergonomics.
This thumb layout reminds me more of the ErgoDox variants, and is far better placement. Is there a layout close to this?
It's a tad surprising he's survived all this time. While I had him, i
- Went through a term of active duty in the army
- went through college
- lived oversees for a few years
- lived in 4 different states, and twice as many apartments and houses
He's one of the few possessions I've managed to keep ahold of despite a fairly nomadic life, but now he's pampered.
Anyway, with the recent cartoon about merch, I'm wondering what other people have. I never got a t-shirt, and it wouldn't have survived until today if I had.
Has anyone ported, or recreated, urob's timeless homerow configuration for ZMK to Vial, or to vial-qmk?
I have a Piantor Pro, built by BeeKeeb; it is a QMK keyboard, and specifically uses vial-qmk. Vial, or flashing directly from the vial-qmk repo, is the only way I've ever successfully flashed or configured it.
I've never been able to use the homerow for anything other than layer switches because they're the only things I can put a long enough delay on that I don't get unintended modifier hits. urob's Timeless Homerow mods for ZMK looks like just the thing, but given my failure to flash the board with anything other than vial-qmk (including vanilla qmk), I'm assuming ZMK is going to be a no-go.
Is anyone who's a fast touch-typer using homerow keys for MACS with Vial, or vial-qmk, and if so, what's your magic sauce for avoiding mis-keying?
Edit 2025-05-19
I was looking at Paul Getreuer's very nice page mechanical keyboards, where he discusses homerow mods on a variety of firmwares, and it mentions using the *_T Quantum keys for homerow mods as being better than tapdance. Maybe it is, but it doesn't completele solve the mis-strikes; they're what I used when I hacked together my version of Miryoku for Vial. They were better, but not foolproof, and from reading urob's description, the ZMK mods go a lot further than Vial's *_T mods. So I'm still looking.
Quick followup
I went back and reviewed Paul's notes, and I'd had Permissive Hold disabled, because it'd brought me nothing but grief in other configs. After enabling it, my 5th run of typioca came away slower than normal, but not unacceptable:
Having only to focus on the new shift location helps; I slow way down when I need layer shifts or in environments like Helix, with heavy ACS and arrow key use. That'll improve with practice. I'm also still getting a lot of accidental layer shifts with those thumb keys, but I think I can fix that with a layer shift delay. I also do not like the repeat delay on some thumb keys that having the layers introduces; backspace, in particular, is a PITA. Again, I hope that this is fixable by tweaking the layer switch mechanism -- I may have to resort back to tap-dance for layers. The key win is that the home row modifiers seem to be working well, and that was my main blocker.
The upshot is that I believe, for now, that my question is answered. Hopefully this post will help someone else on the same journey.
Here's my Vial config. It's basic (not "programmer") Dvorak for the Piantor Pro, with home row mods and heavy right-hand dominant. It attempts to preserve inverse-T movements (arrows) and layer shifts on the right hand; I use a track ball, and use keyboard mouse movement only rarely, so that's a layer relegated to the left hand. There's a layer dedicated to switching to QWERTY, for games, that's not currently bound to anything; I used to have it bound to LShift+RShift, but I'll need to find a new home for it since that's no longer possible. I'm attaching it mainly as an example that's working for me.
Rook provides a secret service a-la secret-tool, keyring, or pass/gopass, except backed by a Keepass kdbx file.
The problem Rook solves is mainly in script automation, where you have aerc, offlineimap, isync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, restic, or any other cron jobs that need passwords and which are often configured to fetch these passwords from a secret service with a CLI tool. Unlike existing solutions, Rook is headless, and does not have a bespoke secrets database full of passwords that must be manually synchronized with Keepass; instead, it uses a Keepass db directly.
Rook is in AUR and in Alpine community (a MR has been submitted for the new version); binaries are available from the project page.
There have been several releases since my last announcement for v0.2.0, 7 months ago. The major thing is that I've added built-in support for the Linux keyring, which makes it much easier to use; since it improves security, I'm hoping this will encourage users to use the feature.
Here are the rest of the changes, collapsed for brevity:
Added
- built-in support for the kernel keyring on Linux.
- Go 1.24 landed in Alpine, so off we go!
Changed
- autotype and getAttr now detect if keyctl is available and in use, and automatically uses it to get the pin. (which should be superceded by
---keyring) - the kernel keychain instructions are now independent of external environment variable management, such as herbstluftwm
- Use Go 1.24's
go toolfor manpage generation, via go:generate.
Fixed
- --keyring may not be used with open; this is now prevented, and documented. It never worked, but it would be seen by the server as on
openfailure. - --detach and -P didn't play nicely; now they do
- URLs in the README (thank, mlc-man!)
getPassword()was prompting on STDOUT, which is bad for piping the pin- --detach never worked
- logging was going to stdout
- some log messages were not being logged, but just printed out
- PIN authorization had a lot of bugs
- build assets now contain man pages & other documentation, and arch image CI is fixed
I liked the "vintage" comment, so going back even further to Bakshi's inspiration for Avatar.
I've read that Bakshi tried to get Bodé to collaborate on Wizards but it didn't happen so he just did his own version. I can't find that source again; I'm pretty sure it was in a biography of Bodé, though.
In any case, the homage is clearly evident.
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I admire your bravery, and your determination. I hope you and your family, your friends, and your community stays safe and well.