No problem. :)

You say that like anyone knows how Fahrenheit even works.

Nah, FOSS stands for “free and open-source software”. There was a time before paid software was a thing, so the “free” there stands for freedom.

In a lot of ways, it means the same as open-source (access to source code and allowed to modify+redistribute it), but it’s more idealistic and political, looking to prevent software from restricting what users can do.

In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.

AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.

On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.

Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.

It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.

That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.

Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?

Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).

This is a bit of me-thing, but yeah, I’m annoyed that YouTube is the way it is. It’s non-trivial to embed videos from there without violating the GDPR, so embedded videos are basically not a thing these days on general-purpose social media.

And personally, I also want to avoid the tracking from clicking through to a YouTube video and Google encourages long-ass videos, so I always hesitate before clicking through. Also, people without ad blockers go through a completely different circle of hell before a video starts.

Basically, I miss the days when memes could just be short videos. Where everyone could see on the embed that, oh, it’s a 30 second video, I can watch that. And then they’d just click play, without leaving the page.

I do understand that likely no one would care to provide the bandwidth for dumb meme videos on PeerTube either. But yeah, I just dream of that being a thing.

I’m not exactly fond of the space either, but man, the T is noisy. They could’ve gone with an underscore or something, so it actually looks like two different sections.

Well, typically, being married for 60 years would also involve not dying for the past 70+ years…

Well, this isn’t a problem for smaller, less centralized services, so that might be an answer. Obviously not an answer big corporations will bring to the table, but ultimately, it might simply be among the reasons why users do still prefer smaller services.

I guess, the real question is: Could we be using (simplistic) LLMs on a phone for predictive text?

There’s some LLMs that can be run offline and which maybe wouldn’t use enormous amounts of battery. But I don’t know how good the quality of those is…

You’re in the No Stupid Questions community. Think about rule 7 in particular.

I think, it’s only in the free version of Spotify. So, if you’re paying for Spotify Premium, you wouldn’t have that problem.

But I mean, I’m obviously completely out of the Spotify loop, so definitely take that one with a grain of salt…

Not sure, what kind of notification sounds you have that you’d need to skip to the end of them. A foghorn?

I was only vaguely aware of the algorithm on Spotify and that not being allowed to skip very often is a thing there, and man, this comment read like a completely deranged monologue from some sort of alternative, dystopian reality.

And you wouldn’t have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don’t consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn’t actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you’ve fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don’t have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past…

Hmm, but why do you think these things haven’t occurred yet?

As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

So, it’s like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we’re at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically “If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?”, but yeah, I don’t think that’s terribly useful here.

And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let’s say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can’t do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

That’s actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn’t go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that’s the case, because that’s actually the speed of causality.

So, it’s reversed. It’s not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it’s actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.

¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can’t escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a ‘bend in spacetime’ because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we’re still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.

Well, I’m going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don’t actually exist in the sense that you can ‘send’ something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that’s also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn’t have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that’s pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.