@EliahKagan you can use that convention which you prefer then

@Zanna Will do. :)

@EliahKagan I don't think I know anything about this, but, I do believe that the past and the future are real

I don't know if it's even related, but, somewhere (it might have been in The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind, which is probably my favourite popular science book), that most of the interactions in particle physics are symmetrical or the same whichever way around they happen or something like that, and so physicists find it difficult to say what time is or what it's doing

except for the second law of thermodynamics, which seems to have a direction

that is, the thing that changes over time is that disorder increases

for some reason I find this law hilarious

I'm always finding stupid ways to joke about it

About the second law of thermodynamics specifically?

yes

Why do you find it hilarious?

I don't know, I guess I'm just very silly. It makes me laugh that we can explain huge swathes of phenomena with reference to the general laziness of the universe.

I enjoy this picture of the world we get... how life on Earth is this magical little bubble of low entropy, all those chloroplasts making amazingly reactive oxygen and that oxygen getting grabbed and used by organisms before it can just boringly react with a lump of rock or something

and all those organisms doing exciting entropy reducing things like housework

and how nothing at all is possible without housework

or, perhaps I should call it social reproduction or perhaps not hahaha

In that book of his I read recently, George Monbiot mentions that when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations he went to live with his mother, who fed him and cleaned up after him and all the rest of it

but he never noticed the household as a sector of the economy. Her hands remained invisible even to him hahaha

the requirement for energy, the humble uses of energy, are taken for granted in all sorts of funny ways

@Zanna There was a book about that that came out a few years ago.

ohhh yes he mentioned that book, sorry I forgot the source

@Zanna I don't think there are entropy-reducing things. :)

Because entropy increases as a result of those processes, and does so faster than if those processes did not occur. It is just also displaced, so that it can decrease locally.

yes

like the fridge heating up the house

but the important thing is that it's cold on the inside!

:)

housework takes a lot of energy

@Zanna Is the universe lazy, or is it hapless?

hahahaha that's even funnier

I love the lazy language. Like an electron will get excited, then it will relax

and excitingly emit a photon

but photons are incredibly non-lazy

How so?

because they try every possible path simultaneously!

But everything does that! :)

maybe the universe isn't lazy at all

apparently the vacuum is just seething with energy

but I'm lazy

sometimes I don't even try one of the available paths

It seems to me that you may be being overly hard on yourself. Compared to a photon, your de Broglie wavelength is very short. Also, you are interacting with a lot of stuff.

debian stable is ancient.

ubuntu is somewhere between debian stable and unstable

hahahahaha very

hahaha my Lubuntu seems a bit unstable

somewhere in the middle of my to do list is "fix laptop"

The name is a misnomer. It is not really unstable

but I tend to attack the to do list from either end

@jokerdino but is it edgy?

that would be experimental

I was using fedora for a bit because I was liking GNOME and I wanted a purer GNOME experience which was not much available in the deb world

how did that go?

I loved it. GNOME shell was so much extensible.

like, what fun stuff could you do with it?

why did this end up in the past tense?

It might look stylish but it had a lot of useful components

stylish and useful!

For example, I had hamster plugin, Getting Things GNOME and one other thing interlinked.

it was working seemlessly with the shell

I could note down a task to be done in GTG and have it time tracked on Project Hamster.

when 25 minutes were up, pomodoro will ask me to take a short break

you were doing pomodoro back then?

in 2011-12 I think

maybe much later

I was into Fedora around 21 or 22

@EliahKagan For context, I recommend making, or considering, columns for those biconditionals, because it demonstrates an important feature of logical equivalence.

that's like centuries ago

around GNOME 3.14

so why did you stop?

hm, I had it installed on external hard drive and it died

:(

would you try it again now if you could?

since your task management system died, have you got anything done at all?

@Zanna Yes

cool!

@Zanna I am basically Rip Van Winkle.

I learned about it when I did the Learning How to Learn course

that's good

yes it's very good! I recommend it

@jokerdino I had to look it up, but that's hilarious, sorry I ruined your joke by missing the reference

maybe one day I will get to it

XD

@Zanna no worries, I overuse my three jokes on a daily basis anyway

if only there were some way to like, kioskify your computer so that you couldn't avoid doing it

just think of how productive the rest of your life would be after that

the stuff should tell me the things I would want to read and watch and otherwise catch up on important things on a daily basis

@jokerdino I used to live with a person who used my computer and left like 20 windows open with stuff for me to read

this was before the days of tabbed browsing

also, I used to catch up with all the articles and podcasts and stuff I wanted to read on a daily basis, but then I got into Goodreads and I just wrote book reviews in all my free time

then I got into Ask Ubuntu and wrote Ask Ubuntu things in all my free time

now, somehow, I don't have any free time

I just can't figure out what I have done with it

looks like a temporal nightmarish issue

I'd say it's down the back of the sofa, but I don't even have a sofa these days

@Zanna Like, the microscopic behavior of a physical system as it evolves in time is to walk haplessly from one (micro)state to another, entirely oblivious to what macrostates we observe the system to occupy.

my favourite philosopher Sara Ahmed talks happily about hap

it could be the hap in haphazard or the hap in hapless

but I think hap is definitely a fun thing to have

@jokerdino this sounds quite achievable

like, maybe you can find that stuff

how many of Canonical's projects are yet to be dropped by them? I can only think of Launchpad, bzr and Ubuntu.

are they still doing MIR?

I don't think so

But, that thought is based solely on my not having heard anything about it for a long time, and Wayland being used on a couple of versions

I'm not sure where I should start moving this conversation to the island, since it started out being about that closed question

I think it can be moved starting from there. I will do this shortly if there are no objections.

Thank you!

Resistance is futile.

You don't want to visit the island?

← 63 messages moved from Raiders of the Lost Downboat

@jokerdino I think so, though development has slowed.

github.com/MirServer/mir

Landscape remains actively maintained.

There's the livepatch thing.

Byobu is maintained and widely used.

SchoolTool hasn't had a new release in a long time but remains widely used and, I presume, supported.

Ubiquity is actively maintained, though you might consider it just part of Ubuntu, since as far as I know, OSes that do not derive from Ubuntu don't use it.

But I think curtin counts -- I believe it is designed to be versatile and usable by other OSes.

Snaps are a big one, since they're both designed for use on multiple operating systems and do actually work (and are actually used) for that purpose.

But a lot of Canonical stuff has fallen by the wayside. Bzr is far less used than in the past; like many version control systems, it's waned in preference for Git. There are operating systems that still use Upstart -- Chromium OS, I think -- but it's no longer used in Debian or Ubuntu and probably never will be again.

They dropped Unity 2D, I guess as part of a plan. Later and unplanned, convergence, or the existing path toward it, was abandoned in favor of desktop, cloud, and IoT focus, and Unity and Ubuntu Touch were dropped.

I think juju is still around.

Yes!

And MAAS.

Oh, Canonical is behind LXC and LXD, right?

Yeah, I think so