Yes, your Highness. Will you be needing any further artifacts aquired for safe keeping and preservation?

University is about a lot more than the piece of paper you get at the end. If it's of any real quality, and you are actually engaged with it, you'll be learning from experts in your chosen field, amongst engaged and eager peers, whilst also being exposed to different viewpoints on everything from what to have for lunch through the latest innovations in your field, and adjacent ones, to the geopolitical state of the world. The people you meet, and the connections you form can, and often do, form the bedrock of your working life from then on.

All of that does make the assumption that you actively engage with university life and those around you. Make friends in different subjects, seek out your professors during office hours and talk to them about their interests, join clubs, do stupid, but ultimately harmless things.

It also assumes you are attending a 'good' university, rather than a profit driven degree mill, and those might be harder to find in some places than others.

That would explain the slightly dazed look...

The critical bit is now maintaining that level of engagement. People keep missing that bit from the original commentary. It said that no protest with 3.5% of the population consistently engaged had failed. A one off event will do very little, constant presure will yield results.

The thing with the 3.5% that most people keep missing, is that it needs to be 3.5% of the population consistently engaged in protest, not just in a one off event.

If you are just a user, in that a computer is just a tool you use, then you're right, there's comparatively little reason to be concerened or even know about the underlying details of the system. If you go further and start making changes to your system, or even building more complex systems, over time you will find yourself forming quite firm opinions about various parts of the underlying system, especially if you've had experience with other options.

Honestly, I'm not sure, I was looking at Devuan, but then noticed that Debian supported sysvinit natively so I went that route instead. I figure that sticking to the source distro was going to give me fewer headaches, and so far it's been plain sailing.

Debian, installed without systemd as per the wiki. So far I've not hit any issues, whilst I've recently ended up diving through both kernel and systemd code to find the root cause of an issue I was hitting on one server. I could have just bodged past it, but I wanted to actually understand what the issue was, and what else it was going to affect.

Small children are surprisingly adept climbers, and ingenius problem solvers when the problem is one you don't want them solving.

Locks with the key somewhere they definitely cannot get it work, right up until you forget to lock the cabinet one time. Then you hope that curiosity doesn't overcome the bounraries you've laid down.

Maxim 29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.

That doesn't mean you can't work with them, or that their actions can't be useful, but be careful, and be aware they are not necessarily an ally.

I recall reading about that research some time ago, thanks for reminding me of it.

I was perhaps being a bit slapdash referring to information being destroyed, as in the quantum sense, yes, it can be recovered. However the recovery posited in the paper is a theoretical simulation of the information that entered the blackhole, which, I suppose could be used as a direct analogy for the actual information that entered the black hole, or maybe somehow used to create an actual copy of it, but, as far as I can see, it also requires that the black hole completely evaporates to release all of the information. Without all of the information, the information you do have does not describe the initial state, as they put it in the article it is 'encrypted'.

Our initial discussion was about whether conciousness can be destroyed. Given that there is a period of time between information entering the black hole and having sufficient information back to create a simulation of it, and that conciousness arises from the detailed structure and working of our brains, I would say that a consciousness that falls into a black hole has, indeed been destroyed. Whether the mooted simulation means that said conciousness can be reconstructed at a future point is a different question, and rather resembles the Ship of Theseus question.

There also seem to be significant questions about the exact conclusions of the paper as it is very theoretical and based on a number of simplifying assumptions. I've tried to find the original paper, but it looks like it may be spread over several, and I really don't know where to start with sentences like 'We reformulate recent insights into black hole information in a manner emphasizing operationally-defined notions of entropy, Lorentz-signature descriptions, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. With the help of replica wormholes, we find that experiments of asymptotic observers are consistent with black holes as unitary quantum systems, with density of states given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula.'

So, in summary, yes, information is not actually destroyed when if falls into a black hole, it's just mangled beyond recognition, entangled with all the other information that has, and will, enter the black hole, and can only be reconstructed by theoretically entangling all of the radiation the hole emits over it's entire lifetime with a suitable simulation!

The pace of development of Piefed really is something to behold! I like the new menu structure with communities at the top, but I know others would prefer feeds there, and frankly either is good. However, could we get the mega menu as a separate page too, so I can bookmark it?