> You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
> On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore.
Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis?
Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brother to a plane crash when he was 10:
> “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
> I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
> He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
His interview with Anderson Cooper, where they go over this (amongst other things), is worth checking out (see ~12m43s):
> Then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it means to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. […] It's about the fullness of your humanity: what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? I'm not saying 'best', because you can be a bad person but a most human. […]
It is very hard to prevent a proposal from becoming a RFC. You have to generate ongoing opposition for longer than the supporters. FWIW, here is the LibrePGP proposal:
Observing the OpenPGP schism mess I think I have gained some insight as to why some RFCs become so bloated. For example it has been recently pointed out that there are 60 RFCs for TLS (with 31 drafts in progress)[1]. The RFC process seems to be more optimal during the design phase. Once we have an established standard there should to be some way to force those that propose changes/extensions to provide appropriately strong justifications for those changes/extensions. Right now it is a popularity contest and there will always be more people out there in favour of changes/extensions than those willing to endlessly fight against those changes/extensions. Because cryptography is so specialized and obscure, the users tend to get left out of the discussion.
And anyone can put forward a draft. Here's one for "IPv8" with increased security where "manageable element in an IPv8 network is authorised via OAuth2 JWT tokens"
> It is very hard to prevent a proposal from becoming a RFC. You have to generate ongoing opposition for longer than the supporters.
I don't think this is really true. A huge fraction of proposed documents just go nowhere, and it's really quite common to see a new proposal get presented and be shot down by one or two people (Source: I've been one of the people doing the shooting down on more than one occasion)
It is a standard proposal, which is why it's in the standards track. The point was that it is not the only (the) standard, and not the universally accepted one.
- As a practical matter, anything that is a Proposed Standard RFC is a standard. In principle, there is a two-level system with PS and Internet Standard (down from three levels) but most WGs don't bother to advance specifications past PS. For example, TLS and QUIC are both PS.
- RFC 9580 obsoletes RFC 4880, so from the perspective of the IETF, it supersedes it. Of course, this doesn't make people do anything.
Meta: with regards to significant digits, it may depend on application, but this article reminded me on NASA's 'take' on π (pi):
> To start, let me answer your question directly. For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't use more decimal places. […]
> 3. Let's go to the largest size there is: the known universe. The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask (and answer!) a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient. […]
Digital precision quickly outstrips accuracy in any number of things - eg digital calipers that read down to the ten thousands of an inch on a device that isn’t accurate to a thousandth.
> With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?
For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.
One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.
Some server stuff is hit too! I learned about this pattern through the BGP daemon 'frr'. No idea how many server packages are/may be captured by Snap, but it's worth being aware of. Imagine my surprise. Remove it and bam, no networking.
Doing a quick test on 24.04: on a system without snapd installed, `apt install frr` installs packages and not any Snap stuff. Will have to see about 26.04 when I get a moment.
Thanks for digging in, as I mentioned earlier in this thread/another [lost track], I haven't messed with this in at least two LTS releases. Good to see it's aware at install time; this wasn't always the case.
How about the inverse, purging? At one point, removing Snap would lose BGP announcements [through the loss of the 'frr' software/service it was managing].
Anyway, I'm willing to believe most of my install/dependency-resolution pain was inspired by [and limited to] 18.04 or whatever was immediately after. We had a fleet of systems inadvertently moved to Snap, only learned through a loss of announcements on removal.
edit: Tested on a 24.04 box I had laying around; removing Snap does indeed still rip out things one might want:
Likely fine in your case, where if memory serves, you're removing Snap in the image/provisioning stage. Cooks in busy kitchens may still be surprised, however. The real problem appears solved: 'you' get the software 'you' asked for.
Awesome, this must be a recent thing, when I last checked about a year ago the latest drivers from restricted were a couple versions behind. Many people always complained about it on reddit, AskUbuntu etc, which is where I found out about the PPA.
We deployed 570 and 580 in the April-June 2025 time frame, so I'm not sure what you were looking at, but they've tried to keep up with the latest for a while.
> What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap […]
Because of business needs, if you're stuck with using Ubuntu (at least in some situations), an `apt(-get) purge snapd` helps. It's in all of our auto/post-install stuff.
None yet. Any discoveries made with a possible impact risk would end up on the NEO Confirmation Page for follow up. As soon as an observation arc is long enough and gets a provisional designation, impact risks would be calculated and displayed at both NEOCC and JPL Sentry. We also do impact probability calculations and visualizations at Asteroid Institute.
I am really not sure how a "space program" would have saved the dinosaurs. It would not save humankind today to launch any sort of rocket or missile that we have on hand.
The business of deflecting or disintegrating planet-killer asteroids is still the stuff of science-fiction and speculation. The reality of physics is that a sufficient mass with sufficient velocity is not something we would be able to send off-course (enough to make a difference) nor could we detonate it into little harmless splinters.
I have this mental image of an asteroid scientist sitting in his little research room, being incredibly jaded... "Asteroids are so INTERESTING. Their history, their chemical composition... but no, nobody cares about that, the first question everyone has is 'Will it impact Earth...'"
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
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