See also the NYT article about the CIA being extremely involved in the war in Ukraine, and the many ways they assisted in escalating things before Russia invaded. Not a Russia fanboy, they shouldn’t have invaded and I hope they’re defeated soundly, but there was a lot of hand washing pretending that the US did not provoke this war, and it did.

At least with Gaza, I actually kinda hope it’s true and US Special Forces are in those tunnels fighting Hamas members. Because that’s a far more effective method of stopping this fight than Israel carpet bombing civilians. I would like the US to beat Hamas before Israel does, in the same way Germans wanted the US to get to Berlin before the USSR.

Ah, so we’ve finally hit the end point of The Slow Breakup

Correct. Green hydrogen is expensive and energy intensive, and is not as cost effective as getting it from natural gas. So currently most hydrogen comes from natural gas.

But, unless we find ways to make batteries without rare earth metals, we will be better suited to moving towards fuel cell, once we have the excess electricity from renewables needed to split hydrogen from water. For now, batteries are the better option.

Correct. Splitting hydrogen from water is quite energy intensive. Burning hydrogen into oxygen to make water releases energy, but not as much energy as it takes to split the hydrogen off in the first place. The reason to use hydrogen fuel cells is that the extra energy needed to generate the hydrogen is still far better than the carbon output and costly materials needed for making and charging a battery. Batteries need rare earth metals, and they lose their charging ability over time. Splitting water into hydrogen creates “potential energy” from the later creation of water again, making it a useful, clean way to store electricity.

Same as the plans for using cranes stacking concrete bricks to store electricity. It takes more electric to stack them than is produced by unstacking them. But it’s a clean way to store potential energy, and far more efficient and sustainable than a battery.

Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that’s just for these self driving cars. There’s a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

But if we did that, there’d still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

But it’d be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we’d want to set schedules of when they’re running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

And if they’re really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

I miss the good times. I don’t miss the incredible jealousy, having to slowly shed all my female friends. I don’t miss arguments because some girl heart reacted my fb post. I don’t miss the gaslighting. I don’t miss just having to give her her way because she would never compromise, or see something from someone else’s perspective.

I miss the year where I thought she was honest about being over her jealousy issues, when she wanted to be Poly. Where I could at least have healthy friendships again, while still being with her. Where I thought maybe I could fix things, turn our relationship around. But all of that was a mirage. She didn’t stop being jealous because she had changed. She stopped being jealous because she was done, and just leaving me slowly, and wanted to date another guy so she’d have another relationship to catch her when she left.

sure, but not having POPCNT means way older than not having TPM

When was the last time there was a conservative president in the US who didn’t cause tremendous lasting damage to the country?

They’re so insistent on getting people to do their Subscribe & Save stuff, with lots of discounts for making a subscription. And I take the discount and cancel the subscription as soon as it shows up. The entire point seems to be to get people to subscribe at the low price, and then jack the price up, sometimes double, when it starts recurring.

Given that small typed one, it sounds like they’ve had troubles where there wasn’t enough toilet paper so people waddled out to get a paper towel to use. But who exactly is going to stop mid poop to kindly ask a staff member for more toilet paper? If they don’t want people to flush paper towels, get a toilet paper dispenser with two rolls.

Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they’re “green texters” in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage’s connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is “Get your grandma an iPhone”. Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they’ll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.

Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.

Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.

They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.

I’ve been using Kagi for 2 months and swear by it. It might feel silly paying for a search engine, but I’m now the customer instead of the product, and I can customize my searches the way I want.

So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all “thinking machines” and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That’s why everything’s analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.

But unlike what one might think, they didn’t destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn’t be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.

So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we’re heading to the same crossroads at some point.

It’s specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.

They’ll steal the territory after they’ve starved out anyone who was able to resist it.

• Large files I don’t care if I lose (perhaps videos of popular things): NAS. Hard drives are cheap, not worry about losing it, I can download it again if needed
• Storage with frequent access and security compliance: Wasabi. $6.99 per TB per month, free egress. Compatible with S3. SOC2 and PCI compliance. I use this for work as a backup to S3 for website images.
• Files I need to store cheaply, redundantly, and access often: Backblaze B2. $6 per TB per month for storage. You can download 3x the amount of storage you have per month for free, or connect Backblaze to a CDN partner like Cloudflare for free egress through them. It’s also AWS S3 compatible, so you can just the AWS SDK/CLI or tools that work with AWS S3. I use this for hosting image files for my Mastodon server. Note that Backblaze B2 also has SOC2 compliance and US region available now, so it should be as secure as Wasabi at slightly lower cost if you don’t have a ton of egress.
• Cheap long term backup storage: AWS S3 Glacier. $0.0036 per GB per month (so $3.6 per TB). Upload your files to S3, and add a lifecycle rule to migrate them to glacier. Glacier is cold storage, extremely cheap and great for a redundant backup. I use this for backing up photos and other files I’m going to want to store forever.

For anything I’m hosting, multiple backups. Home NAS is usually the first backup, followed by cloud storage. So if I need something now, I can get it from my NAS. If there’s a problem with my NAS, I can get it from cloud (though with a delay for Glacier)

Right. If the UK tries to rejoin they’re going to get no favors from the rest of the EU, as an example to other member states that you can’t just play hokey pokey with a continental union. The UK will be miffed as a response. It’ll potentially take decades for a deal to work out for the UK to rejoin the EU, if that’s even its form at that point.