Yeah, this is a really nice feature; on the couple of rare occasions where an update completely borked things I was able to go from unbootable to everything back up and running in half an hour.

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

Being absolutely terrified of the ambient noises in Doom.

Yeah, when I was a kid and Doom had first come out, I got scared to death when I walked around a corner and ran into my first pinky; it was horrifying!

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.

I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.

Even Buffy eventually moved away from the MOTW format, and after a while I got sick of the ongoing convoluted arcs and lost interest in it. (I still need to watch the musical episode though…)

Is the main advantage of RISC-V’s that it is a free and open standard, or does it have other inherent advantages over other RISC architectures as well?

I don’t know much about Void Linux. What is it’s selling point that makes it unique?

Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn’t care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it’d be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.

There are lots of possible choices of universal gate sets. However, if you are starting with Clifford gates, then it turns out to be sufficient for you to add support for a T=sqrt(S) gate; essentially T and H have the property that these two gates by themselves are sufficient to efficiently approximate any 1-qubit gate arbitrarily well (by combining these discrete rotations about the two different angles in the Bloch sphere in specific ways via the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem), and being able to perform an arbitrary 1-qubit gate and having access to an entangling 2-qubit gate (CNOT) lets you extend this to an efficient arbitrarily good approximation of any gate on an any number of qubits.

The home page for it is here. It’s based on a result known as the Gottesman-Knill Theorem which shows (constructively, i.e. providing a concrete algorithm) that quantum circuits consisting solely of Clifford gates (that is, CNOT + Hadamard + Phase, hence CHP) can be simulated efficiently classically.

Or, alternatively, since they are already making the (reasonable) compromise of working with a restricted gate set, they could expand their gate set to the Clifford group and then use the CHP algorithm to scale to much larger systems.

Cute, but the set of quantum gates is so limited that simulating them is trivial, and in particular you don’t need to sample multiple iterations to estimate the probability distribution because you already know it exactly.

So, I know that this doesn’t quite have the same nostalgia feel of the original, but there is a group of fans who have been creating free remasters of the games in the King’s Quest and Quest for Glory series.

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.