Thank you for the implementation advice, that was my next question.

I have an old drive I installed Win 10 on a few years ago. It was a fresh build, so it would have been the only drive in the machine when I installed it. The software I need is already installed there and in a working state.

I also have a new machine with a new drive. I installed Mint on the new drive while it was the only drive in the new machine.

My plan is to move the Win 10 drive from the old machine to the new one. In the BIOS, I would set the Linux drive as the default boot option. When I need Windows, I would boot into BIOS and select the Windows drive as a one-time boot option.

Am I on the right track?

Who cares if the program takes ten seconds to run instead of one when it only needs to run once and coding it in Python takes a few hours instead of a day or two in C?

If you need performance that badly, by all means, use C. If you have ten ideas for simple programs and just want to code them real quick without fighting the compiler and worrying about all the little shit that C demands from you, then there’s nothing wrong with using Python.

Everything in life is a tradeoff. Use the right tool for the job.

The joke is the person making the comment. “Ha ha, look how ignorant they are.”

Dude, it’s a fictional creature.

According to its technical definition, yes, a meme is an idea that transmits from person to person. According to its colloquial definition, no, when most people use the term “meme”, they’re referring to a screenshot. In the 2000s, though, it mostly referred specifically to image macros.

Yeah, they existed, but they weren’t mainstream and were mostly just simple image macros. In 2004, if you talked about memes in public, it meant you browsed 4 Chan or Something Awful, which made you a loser to most people.

Yeah, it’s a pacing thing for me too. Ace Combat 4 was great because the next most expensive plane was the next best plane, it had whatever weapons it came with, and its role was clear. Ace Combat 7 had this crazy upgrade tree, aircraft upgrades, different sub weapons; too many choices, I want to fly planes and blow shit up, not make a spreadsheet to figure out the optimal upgrade path or ideal plane for the next mission

Honestly, I think it sounds like those games just aren’t that much fun to you. It sounds like that particular gameplay loop feels more like a checklist of chores instead of a day at the playground. And that’s perfectly fine. Nobody is requiring you have a good time while you play Metro Exodus.

Personally, I don’t like those kinds of games either, and it took me a while to realize it too. Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Farcry, the Wolfenstein remakes, Dying Light, they all feel like the same bland slop after a while, just with slightly different paint. It’s chasing map markers, ticking boxes, and filling up bars, all rather tedious stuff, with just enough gameplay sprinkled in to keep you engaged until the next room.

If you’re really determined to find a way to like those games (and you really don’t have to, there are plenty of games without those things) I would suggest playing games and coming up with your own challenges, missions, or new ways to play them. Play Jak 3, go into the wasteland with no vehicle and role play Mad Max or something. By doing this, maybe you’ll find ways to make your own fun you can apply to those other titles.

The name “dark”, in reference to dark matter or dark energy, has nothing to do with light or photons; it refers to the fact that they can’t be detected. We haven’t been able to build any kind of device that can measure either or even determine whether they are or are not present within a certain area of space.

As far as we know, they either exist somewhere within our universe, or the equations we’ve “proven” to represent the fundamental reality of the universe as we know it are wrong in some way.

If you ask me, either prospect is equally exciting and interesting.

The universe is expanding. The rate at which it’s expanding is increasing. It should be increasing a lot more; something is holding it back, some kind of energy. We have no clue what that energy is or where it comes from because we can’t detect it. We only it know it has to exist because nothing else makes the equation balance. Since we don’t know anything about it other than it (theoretically) exists, we call it “dark” energy.

Relativity tells us that matter and energy are equivalent. Therefore, all energy has a corresponding particle. Particles have mass. All things with mass are “matter”. We have no information about the matter corresponding to dark energy, we only know it (theoretically) exists. Since we don’t know anything about it, we call it “dark” matter.

If you know pretty much nothing and thought of this as easily as you did, I’d say it’s certain that scientists who have dedicated their whole lives to answering that question have also had the same idea by now or understand why the idea is flawed.

In a perfect world, the corporation is worse because the government is regulated by the constitution and represents the will of the people.

In the world we live in, it’s a distinction without a difference. Snowden showed us all how the US government spies on us. Currently, tech companies do the spying because 1) they’re better at it and 2) it’s technically not illegal because the 4th ammendment only binds the government, not citizens.

Just wanted to add, the reason JavaScript is on the web is because it’s designed to keep running, no matter what errors occur. This is the opposite of what’s desired from most languages, but the reason it’s a priority for JS is because the web page HAS to work.

This is the reason for a lot of JS’s quirky behavior, such as type coercion. In most cases, 1 + ‘cat’ should absolutely produce a terminating error. But, you don’t want someone visiting your site to have the page crash, so it’s preferable to return bad data than to terminate entirely, so you get ‘1cat’ as your output.

Came here to say this.

.50 AE and .50 BMG are worlds apart. Hell, even the difference between .45 ACP and .45-70 is pretty big.

Yeah, I think I meant Sodium-ion

It’s pretty easy to cry about bad math, but it’s a lot harder to figure out the right math.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to do it for you again a second time.

Power consumption varies. Use the average monthly power draw from the solar array, let’s assume for demonstration purposes 1,000 kWh/month.

Multiply that by the cost of 1 kWh from the power company, let’s say 20 cents.

In one month, that means you saved $200.

Let’s assume the solar equipment costs $1,000.

The answer is 5 months, or 5,000 kWh.

Sorry, I’ll make sure the free work I do for you is better quality next time.

It’s really hard to give a less-than-book-length answer without simplifying a LOT, but I’ll do my best to be as accurate and comprehensive as I can while still offering a somewhat brief answer.

What you’re ultimately getting at is a concept called “abstraction,” which basically means “letting the language worry about it instead of the programmer.”

A computer operates using ones and zeroes, also called “binary”. These patterns of ones and zeroes are interpreted as either data or instructions depending on which processor register they’re sent to. Representing data this way is inefficient and difficult to read for humans. For single-digit numbers, it’s fine, but for sentences, paragraphs, entire programs, representing them in binary takes up a lot of space, so we “abstract” binary by representing it as hex code (base 16, zero through ‘F’). This allows us to show the same data in a more condensed way. This is only one kind of very simple abstraction.

Modern programming languages aim to abstract as much of the coding process as possible. Languages like Assembly that abstract very little are considered “close to the metal” because the programmer needs to do EVERYTHING manually. The benefit to this is that it’s very efficient; the program only does what it absolutely needs to do. The tradeoff is that it takes a LOT of extra time to do everything manually, the margin for error is very slim, and you’re pretty much on your own if things go wrong. Another downside is that, since everything is manual, Assembly needs to be written for the specific processor architecture you’re using.

C is only slightly further from the metal than Assembly, so it’s still very efficient, but misuse is very easy to do, especially by accident. The main benefit is that C code can be compiled. Compilation is a process that does many things, but one thing it can do is take C code and turn it into Assembly instructions that can be interpreted by a specific processor. So, you can write the program once, then compile it to x86, ARM, Mac, whatever. With Assembly, you would need to write a different version of the program for each architecture it would need to be compatible with. Doom was developed in C, which has a lot to do with the “but will it run Doom?” meme.

From there, different languages abstract different aspects to different degrees to make them more specialized to certain tasks.

C++ adds object-oriented functionality to C, slightly impacting performance, but making classes and inheritance possible without hacking memory pointers to behave the same way. C++ is typically used when high-performance is desired, but the code base is still very large. Thr Source engine, and thus, Source engine games like TF2, are written in C++.

Python and other languages sufficiently far from the metal have the benefit of being interpreted, which means the code you write is executed in real-time. This means syntax errors and such can be identified in real-time by your IDE. With C and other compiled languages, you have to wait until you compile your code to find errors. This makes Python ideal for developing many, simple programs where performance isn’t a (big) consideration.

C# and Java are interpreted, but also run inside special runtime environments, which makes them compatible with just about any hardware, but is very resource intensive. Unity engine games like Rust were developed in C#; Minecraft was developed in Java.

Haxe can be cross-piled to C code that can then be compiled to Assembly, allowing developers to write one program compatible with all gaming consoles (Dead Cells, for example) without the performance impact associated with languages like Java.

J and Lua are specialized to complex mathematics and simulations. Lua is the language used to create Beam.NG:Drive and Project Zomboid.

The kind with my pen is

Based on my experience, which includes asking many, many cops from many, many different departments and jurisdictions all over the US, you’re correct. Every single one has told me that maybe 10 percent of cops practice at the range outside of qualifying, and only about 1 percent practice on a monthly basis or better, and those guys are usually on a SWAT team or high-risk fugitive apprehension task force, were prior military continuing their habitual training, or also moonlight as an armored car driver or some other high-risk private gig.

That’s why I said “most cops”. Training requirements vary wildly from state-to-state, county-to-county, sometimes even department-to-department.

The three biggest cities in the US are Chicago, New York, and LA. Chicago is once a year, New York is twice, LA is four times a year, but only one has to be with duty ammo, the rest are with practice ammo.

I’ve heard of quarterly qualifying for SWAT officers or those on task forces that apprehend high-risk fugitives. But, for the most part, your standard beat cop or highway trooper is gonna be once a year.

It may shock you learn this, but, despite what the media portrays, cops in big cities spend 99% of their time doing rather mundane things like traffic enforcement, domestic disputes, and event security.