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Cake day: March 14th, 2025

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  • dack - Dutch

    Dutch is alsjeblieft (informal), alstublieft (formal), thanks (informal), dankjewel (informal), or dankuwel (formal). The former probably means “as you desired” in old Dutch, the latter “thank you well”, and the formal/informal variants simply insert the right word for “you” (je or u). And then there’s thanks being commonly used. Or also bedankt, sounds kinda formal to me as well, not sure when you’d use that instead of dankuwel

    Just “dank” (maybe you wrote that and autocorrupt kicked in?) is not really a thing we say, it just means “thank” which you’d also not say by itself in English (unless you’re Rocky)

    Edit: writing “dank” in an English sentence feels like everyone will think our thank-yous are like dank memes. The pronunciation of the “a” there is as in Clark; the English pronunciation of dank would map to denk in Dutch and means think!


  • Have you ever seen someone use a turn lane to only jump out of it at the last moment?

    Yeah, when they have their turn signal on to indicate they want to change to a different lane

    Leaving the turn signal on when you’re already where you want to be is the more confusing thing. I know most people do it because it’s taught that way in driving schools, but it’s a matter of habit, not actually logical if we’d design the system anew and everyone learned from scratch


  • Interesting. For me, the latter scenario is the most clear. In the first one, they may want to turn into a driveway, just stop on the roadside altogether, switch to a different lane to their right (on a double turn lane), whatever: they’re potentially trying to deviate from the path they’ve chosen to take. If they just want to follow the path they’re on, turn signals off makes the most sense to me

    Of course, if you’re in a country that crosses different traffic directions on green (like Belgian and German lights that go green for you wanting to left turn, but there’s traffic coming straight on) then it’s needed to indicate you’re a turner and not someone going straight on. But then, mixing traffic is a recipe for confusion and accidents anyway (saw a stat recently that right turns having green together with pedestrians increases accidents by iirc some 60% — probably a low number to begin with and so any change looks big, but still crazy to me that countries continue to choose this)

    Another scenario that appears more universally, where you have one lane for two options (straight on or right, for example), the turn signal is also needed of course: there is no path you’ve already chosen and so you need to show intent to change


  • You mention 150€/day in the comment thread. I’m struggling to think where in the world you couldn’t stay on that budget if you spend some time looking for cheaper accommodation (hostel or something like airbnb) and mind a bit where you eat. Australia seems (per Wikipedia) to have the highest minimum wage at 18$/hour, ×8h to € comes to 127€/day. Sure, temporary accommodation costs like five times more than more permanent places, but in terms of food and transport you can pretty much do whatever the locals do so that, on the whole, you should be able to meet that budget pretty much anywhere

    In Europe, Iceland might be the only place where you’d really have to plan ahead to get to an average of 150€/day as tourist. It’s Europe’s most sparsely populated country and lots of things need to be imported, making essentials like food expensive and accommodation options few and far between. If you don’t want to drive a long distance every day (outside of the wider Reykjavík area at least) you’ll easily spend three quarters of that daily budget on accommodation, and with food being expensive even in supermarkets and needing a rental car to get anywhere, you’ll exceed the budget on a lot of the days

    So that’s challenge mode! I’m curious what values people who tried to cheapskate Iceland get to. We were at 290€/day for 2 persons. That’s including the rental car, eating out most days (not at expensive places necessarily, but sometimes simply the only place), and we booked reasonably priced but not always the cheapest option for accommodation. This price excludes costs of attractions like the lava show, boat tour, swimming pool, etc.—the country is plenty beautiful to travel to without needing those necessarily, though I’d recommend all of the above. This amount is for 2 persons, but the car and rooms don’t scale much when you’re alone so a per-person cost price wouldn’t be fair





  • It’s not bad. What actively bothers me is the incessant flashing of the whole screen for two minutes every two minutes or so. Besides that,

    Fulgora discovery spoiler

    there not being any enemy whatsoever

    makes it less… special? deep? highlight-worthy? I’m not sure what to call it but that makes it feel pretty barebones so I wouldn’t say it’s among the best planets, even if it is a good planet

    Fulgora resource management spoiler

    It also feels wasteful to trash so much stuff just to get a trickle of Holmium ore, even if it’s a fun challenge, it feels kinda wrong. I’ve just accepted that now, though, as there is no way around it and the near-spawn deposits are rich enough for it not to be a problem in my current save’s production scale

    Which is not to misrepresent how fun the unique challenges to Fulgura are to solve: very much in line with how Factorio should be, yet also unique. I did enjoy it (last night I spent some time working on the setup there and enjoyed myself) even if it’s not imo among the absolute best planets :)

    Curious how you see it. The Gleba experience was exquisitely frustrating for a while but I’ve come to enjoy it, even if I can see why someone wouldn’t. But Vulcanus, for example, how’d you rank that with Fulgora?


    • 2 decades: Netherlands
    • 2 years: Belgium
    • 2 months: Finland
    • 2 weeks: Iceland
    • 2 days: United Kingdom
    • 2 hours: Switzerland
    • Somewhere between 2 minutes and 2 seconds: Netherlands, Germany, Belgium all at once

    • 6 years: Germany
    • 6 months: France
    • 6 weeks… this is getting tricky, Luxembourg is probably closest but not close enough to claim this tier
    • 6 days: Poland
    • 6 hours: Sweden
    • 6 minutes: I give up

    I didn’t realise it was a life goal of mine to spend 6 minutes in a country until this post, but now I’m not sure I can unsee this list. Maybe the Vatican is a good candidate for that? Italy can go in the 2 days slot, bumping UK up to 6 weeks another time. Germany will exceed the 6 years slot soon though, maybe I’ll need to visit all sixers to get bingo on a row of sevens instead. And where are we going for 7 seconds? Another tripoint, does that count?




  • Size matters… but only to a certain point! I’ve cracked longer ones from e.g. the LinkedIn password dump for a school project

    The reason this works is because they’re not random characters. People use 111111(etc.) as password (perhaps because it’s funny), repetitions of shorter passwords, a phrase that can be found on Wikipedia or elsewhere (“Maryhadalittlelamb” — for some reason people always remove the spaces, even if they write it down with spaces on paper when putting e.g. the WiFi password on a whiteboard! Drives me mad), words optionally with leet$p3ak (words are about half as random per character as random characters are, and that’s assuming people would pick entirely random words), and other predictable things

    The number of characters is thus rather meaningless for the password strength, besides calculating a lower bound

    I’d say:

    1. Use a randomly generated password. Memorise only a few, like for your disk encryption, password manager, bank login, and probably a few others. It’s a bit more difficult than memorising a mobile phone number but not by much
    2. Make sure it’s random enough, usually measured in bits. More is better, I forgot what we expect a (non-quantum) computer to be able to do exactly in 20 years but it’s on the order of 80 bits, which would be ceil(log(2^(80))/log(26+26+10))=14 characters when you use lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and digits, or ceil(log(2^(80))/log(6667))=7 Diceware words if I remember correctly that the dictionary contains 6667 words. Adjust to the character set or dictionary you use and the desired strength
    3. Use it regularly. You’ll forget ones you’ve not used for several months. Don’t want that to happen to my 2FA token backup, for example. If you don’t naturally use them regularly, set reminders to check it, or store the password in a safe place if possible (offline, and perhaps look into secret sharing schemes for this)

    If you know something will use a strong password hashing function like Bcrypt or Argon2, especially if you can set a good number of rounds/memory to be used, the requirements can be relaxed but I find it easier to have a few definitely-secure passwords than to try to seek out the edge of what’s safe

    When you use a TPM or HSM or whatever a given variant is called (like a smartcard), such that you can only do a limited number of attempts in the first place, a few digits may be enough for your needs (PIN code). Mobile phones and modern computers often have these, but they’re also often broken. Needs physical access though, so it again depends on what kind of threats you think are realistic for your situation

    Do switch to Argon2 in LUKS, but not out of fear please. Know that your password is good based on the maths and then upgrade at leisure :)


  • The cross-section between high volume and easy to make

    • Vegan replacement products? Easier to make than animals, but low volume so it’s more expensive than it needs to be (and often in a higher tax bracket, classified as candy or whatever)
    • Eggs? Needs healthy animals
    • Bananas are clones of each other. Might become an issue at some point, might not. Apples, too, but there’s many more variants
    • Maize, tomatoes, potatoes? Grown by the bazillion, cheap, afaik needn’t be clones of each other to get (something close enough to) the desired product
    • Rice? The pre-boiled stuff is afaik around the same price as the raw product, that’s how large the volumes are