hallettj

There was a post earlier today complaining about questions that aren’t open-ended, and therefore don’t adhere to the community rules. So here we are with a question with many possible answers (which makes it properly open-ended).

The artificial sounds are legally required at low speeds, at least in the US and Europe. In the US electronic sounds are required at speeds below 30 kph. In the EU I think it’s 20 kph. At faster speeds the sounds of wheels on the road and such make electric and hybrid cars basically as loud as ICE cars.

There are very specific rules about the noises. It looks like there was some effort in the US to allow user-selectable sounds, but it didn’t work out. I found some info here, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/07/13/2022-14733/federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standards-minimum-sound-requirements-for-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles

There are other galaxy clusters. Gravitational binding is not unique to the local cluster. From Wikipedia,

Notable galaxy clusters in the relatively nearby Universe include the Virgo Cluster, Fornax Cluster, Hercules Cluster, and the Coma Cluster.

The expansion of the universe is very tricky to explain. Oversimplifying can lead to an explanation that seems to be contradictory.

Good to know! I’ll put the Ibis and fruit bat on my Australia bucket list, along with a Huntsman. Although the latter are so widespread that I’ve probably already seen some living in America. But I’m guessing the Australian Huntsmen are a bit different from the North American ones.

I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.

I’m not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I’m very happy with it!

Yes, I use passphrases for stuff like my password manager, my computer login, and my disk encryption. For my login (which I type a lot) it’s four words; for occasional stuff like disk encryption it’s six. I’m sold on the argument that a passphrase is way easier to memorize compared to a comparably-secure random password.

The number of possible passphrases is the number of words in the dictionary you use to generate passphrases raised to the power of the number of words in your passphrase (assuming a small chance of reusing the same word in a passphrase). I use this command to generate a random phrase using my stock OS word list:

grep -v '[^a-z]' $WORDLIST | shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom | head -n5 | paste -sd ' '

grep -v '[^a-z]' $WORDLIST filters out words with apostrophes or other weirdness. On my system the filtered list is 77,866 words.

For four words, 77,866 ^ 4 ≈ 3.7 × 10^19 possible passphrases.

Compare that to randomly-generated passwords. I’ll assume that random lowercase & uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols add up to 46 characters. The number of combinations is 46^n where n is the length of the password. A four-word passphrase is the same order of magnitude as secure as a 12-character password, which has about 9 × 10^19 possible combinations.

I’m sure that if you make up your own passphrases instead of randomly generating them then the security is much lower.

I find ngrok useful enough to pay for. When I want to demo some software I can run it locally and set up a temporary tunnel. When I used to have a VPS I would do this with SSH port forwarding, but I’m told that tunneling TCP in TCP can lead to some weirdness.

I used to have a dyndns subscription to get a stable domain name for my home router. It’s kind of another way to do the same thing - instead of a tunnel I could forward a part.

The original story is from the SR-71 pilot’s perspective https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blackbird-speed-check-story

In which case you’re probably using a predefined 64-bit floating point number, which I think is accurate to 15 digits.

I’m a fan of Pitch Meeting. I feel like Honest Trailers is too mean.