A question for people who have already switched to the fish shell: What is the biggest drawback of using fish? For example, you get accustomed to it on your system and then have to work with Bash or Zsh on your company’s server systems. And if I’m going to make such a big switch from Bash to fish, then why not switch to Nushell instead?
I use Fish as a user shell everywhere I can and end up using Bash daily for scripting and on servers/VMs/containers at work, I've also been using Nushell a lot recently for personal scripts.
Biggest drawbacks for me is mixing up a few bits of syntax and some software doesn't ship Fish completion scripts, although I never write scripts in Fish which reduces the syntax I actually use.
In my opinion Fish is worth it just for the auto complete suggestions alone, but I also really like the way it handles editing config, it's sane default config, understandable error messages, and plug-ins.
Nushell is very nice, but I find it doesn't match the usability of Fish for interactive shells. Love it for scripts though.
Biggest drawback is unfamiliarity with the syntax, but that comes with time in my experience. I think the syntax is overall better and much better documented.
I switched to fish because for most interactive use case it’s so much better, without requiring any new muscle memory. I tried zsh at first but it winds up slow to get even close to where fish is out of the box. I still end up scripting in bash or sh for portability.
nu-shell won’t be available in as many places, and it looks to me like it would change paradigm in a way that would hinder working with bash or zsh over time. That’s just my 2c though as I have only briefly glanced at it and haven’t truly considered using it.
The main drawback is that I'm used to all the goodness that comes by default and have to get used to how primitive Bash is when I'm forced to use it.
I also prefer fish's scripting syntax (and built-in utilities) over bash, and some people don't like installing fish to run my scripts.
Nushell is far from fish in terms of interactive usage, and I find the scripting language to be too unstable for writing scripts you want to keep in the medium term.
What do you think about the dark forest hypothesis from The Three-Body Problem book? It seems reasonable to me. Are there any sociologist or math papers that describe the game theory behind the dark forest strategy and prove it?
I'm not very impressed. In general, I think that the people who have hypothesized about the fermi paradox and the natural paths of civilizations have tended to dramatically overestimated the actual detectability of other civilizations, and the feasible growth ceiling of other civilizations by several orders of magnitude.
We could not detect ourselves even in a nearby solar system. And as we've gotten more developed, we tend to be MORE frugal with our energy usage.
One major weakness of the Dark Forest hypothesis is that it presumes the bad guys have had interstellar travel for a long long time ... and yet in all that time they have never come to our system and left any traces behind. They didn't do anything bad to us for 4 billion years, but now they're going to do bad things because we have radio?
space is big. there are probably rocks within sight of I-95 that have never been touched by a human, yet tens of thousands of humans flow by them every day. We could be in the middle of a galactic empire and not know it because our system is a little off the trade lanes and not worth visiting on its own.
For me, the Dark Forest hypothesis is very probable. However, the whole book series assumes that interstellar travel is possible for advanced civilizations. What if no new physics is discovered, and the only way to accelerate/decelerate is to throw a mass in the opposite direction? Maybe all advanced civilizations in the Milky Way are limited to their planetary systems.
There are two ways to go to the stars: go faster or live longer (or hibernate).
If you could cryosleep, lived for millions of years, or were an AI that could just turn itself off for a while, you could go to the stars using simple chemical propulsion. No physicists’ nightmare torch rockets or warp drives required.
The crazy physics requirement is to enable interstellar flight within natural human life spans. It’s probably easier to extend that or figure out how to hibernate or become AI than it is to build an antimatter rocket or bend space time (if that is even possible).
I doubt the dark forest because Earth has been broadcasting that it’s a likely biosphere via its albedo absorption spectrum for over a billion years. If you are a hyper paranoid alien you should just blast every biosphere to kill any possible rival before it even evolves.
Side issue, but if you don't care about travel time, you also have another big problem. The frequency with which stuff happens that matters to civilizations has increased significantly over time. Meaning that the time intervals that matter have gone down a LOT as we've evolved and that seems like a natural tendency on the basis of natural selection: higher frequency strategies will tend to dominate. So then you have this massive juxtaposition between probe travel times and things civilizations care about. It's a total mismatch. By the time the probe reaches its destination and can come back, the civilization will likely have completely changed and/or forgotten about it.
This is true for us, but is also anthropocentric. We can't assume that everyone would have this problem.
Technological change is probably a sigmoid like most things. There could be people out there who have already won physics, figured out the entire unified theory of how everything works, and have developed most of the core technological stuff they ever will. At that point they might calm back down and become more stable over long periods of time. These are the kinds of civilizations that would send slow probes or one-way colony ships out and would be willing and able to wait.
It's very hard to think about potential aliens without dragging in anthropocentric or even recent-history-centric assumptions.
But we're also not a threat - even if we did detect another civilization, we'd have no way to attack them.
I don't buy the Dark Forest hypothesis at all, but it's also just not particularly a factor for us at our current stage of technological development, any more than a stone-age tribe has to worry about Mutually Assured Destruction via nuclear ICMBs.
With that sort of logic, you might as well exterminate every solar system around, whether or not it shows signs of civilization or even eventual habitability.
It seems to me that any technologically advanced civilization that is capable of completely annihilating another at such distances would likely be equally capable of avoiding detection, thereby reducing the potential threat level posed by the less advanced civilization. Avoidance would seem to be the best strategy unless the civilization posed a direct and imminent threat. Otherwise, the more advanced beings risk exposing themselves (by deploying a weapon) and declaring to the universe that they are both hostile and aggressive to others.
The claim that NATO cannot attack Russia is often justified by the fact that "NATO is a defensive alliance". Previous events show that actions by NATO in the recent past do not reflect this definition, so this line of reasoning is invalid.
The other line of reasoning on why NATO would not attack Russia is that it would trigger MAD. And while this is a really sad state of affairs, I believe this to be more credible rather than lies about NATO being "purely defensive".
I would love to see a keyboard with an ortholinear layout [1] for the Framework Laptop. After switch to a dactyl manuform keyboard it is really painful to go back to a typical staggered layout. Touch typing is much easier and more natural when using a good ortholinear layout.
How a such hypersonic missile locks a target? Does it use a radar or some optic system? I guess that plasma around the body might disrupt conventional guiding systems.
For blunt-body spacecraft, ionization starts at around Mach 10. The aerodynamics of a missile will be different of course. Regardless, there is headroom above the Mach 5 hypersonic threshold before blackout occurs.
All actually deployed systems are nuclear capable, for them aiming is not a huge concern because the boom is very big.
What the US is playing at with their strictly conventional warheads is anyone's guess, the overall impression is a of a "we want that toy too!" program.
Seeker window design is a whole branch of missile engineering.
Most missles use a quartz window that is sprayed with an evaporative coolant. In more advanced designs the coolant flows through microchannels and then out micro holes on the leading edge, where the coolant evaporates and provides a film cooling.
Ionization applies starting at a given frequency depending on heat. You have to reduce the heat around the radar or move the radar somewhere where the air is less hot. You also have to use a radar of a higher frequency.
How this is different from what Apple is going to do with that on-device image hash algos? The other big story on HN last few days is that a Google Drive account was blocked [1] because of a "terrorist" content. Why should I replace one set of censorship algos with another set of algos? At least Xiaomi limits their censorship algos only to Chinese users.
Every time I mention this here on HN I am down-voted. But I really think that in a next few decades sending (dangerous) cargo to (deep) space will become cheap and reliable. Space tourism just started this month and that will fund thousands of engineers working on that goal.
