It’s not really about the devices. It’s about DRM. Amazon has to keep a way for owners of old devices to be able to download books in a format the devices can read, and the DRM is trivial to remove from those files. By obsoleting them, they close the loophole and can only offer downloads that are harder to crack.
OP isn’t referencing “the imaginary numbers” as in the set of numbers that are multiples of the square root of -1. They’re referencing the fact that in grad school, you’re told “forget everything you’ve been taught about math up to now. We’re going to start with a couple of basic assumptions, and extrapolate all of Cartesian Algebra (the math taught in preschool through undergrad) from those assumptions. Now, let’s see what other algebras we can create by changing those assumptions.”
The only two “numbers” that need to exist to derive all of Cartesian Algebra are zero (additive identity) and one (multiplicative identity). All other numbers are just convenient identifiers that can be extrapolated rather than assumed, hence the overly simplified “all numbers are imaginary”.
This is similar to other STEM subjects, like how in Physics you’re taught Newtonian physics, then you’re taught why Newtonian physics is just a tiny subset of relativistic physics, and then in grad school you are taught everything you know is just a tiny subset of quantum mechanics. What’s taught in undergrad is “good enough” for your average person to do really complex things in typical day to day life, but for someone dedicating their academic career to the subject, they need to learn the dirty, overly complex details to have a true understanding of the subject.
Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it’s own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.
With root, YouTube URLs will open in the app by default. Without root, they won’t. Otherwise, there’s not a huge difference.
This is clearly humor, but for anyone wondering what the actual connection is, it’s that Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire founder and CEO of Canonical (the company that maintains Ubuntu), is from South Africa. He liked the word, and decided to name his new Debian fork after it.
Now, to figure out how to get an invite to Tildes…
Have you looked into Rebble? I’m still wearing my Time Steel as a daily driver. I’ve yet to find a newer smartwatch that hits all the features I care about.
I was thinking something similar. I use Arch because it’s easy and user friendly for me. I also come from a history of using Slackware in the mid-90s, to Gentoo in the mid-00s, to Arch in the mid-teens. So whenever anyone asks how I got to where I am with Linux, I generally recommend that they don’t follow the same path of pain, and start on something that’s actually user-friendly like Mint or Ubuntu.
Originally the machines were going to use human brains for processing, but apparently the explanation was deemed too technical, so they changed it to some mumbo jumbo about power, which also let them use the nickname Coppertop.
A partner of mine has an above-range microwave with the worst implementation of this that I’ve ever seen. When you mute the button beeps, it mutes the entire microwave. Food finished cooking? Silent. Manual timer set? Hope you’re looking to see when it hits zero. There’s no way to silence the buttons without muting all alerts completely.
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.