I use the free version (with a lot of layers of ad-blocking) to learn Dutch, and it's OK. It's terrible for learning grammar, but not too bad for vocabulary. I took (and am going to take) lessons from an actual human teacher, but I like the daily 5-10 minute Duolingo session to stay in practice. I don't live in a Dutch-speaking country, so it's tough to find people to practice with.

Rusting is an exothermic process, so you get energy from rusting, but it takes energy to reverse it. The summary is wrong, but the correct process is described in the body of the article.

As if Starlink satellites ruining their observations weren't enough... yeah, more light pollution is exactly what we need.

It's also a fantastic term to put into a search engine.

Also, it accidentally revealed a global dup operation.

A class-action lawsuit and possibly criminal charges are the only things that will shut these fuckers down. Using your device as a proxy without your knowledge or consent surely qualifies as computer crime.

2001... a retirement odyssey...

dot-com left us with some useful infrastructure (eg, huge fiber networks.)

AI-bubble will leave us with obsolete hardware in decaying buildings.

Zoning rules in cities, done right, can make them much more livable. Unfortunately, most of North America has crap zoning laws that turn cities into unsustainable car-dependent hellholes.

But farmland is a more-or-less non-renewable resource and needs protection. Maybe zoning is the wrong analogy; maybe it's more akin to nature conservation regulations.

Even on 32-bit systems and glibc, you can get a 64-bit time_t and 64-bit off_t by compiling with:

-D_TIME_BITS=64 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64

Unfortunately, it's up to application developers to do this. IMO, it really should be the default.

We have zoning in cities. Perhaps it's time to zone farmland as farmland and forbid it from being used for anything else without regulatory review.