It’s hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It’s a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

I mean… you’re surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They’re called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.

We need better alternatives

We’d need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮‍💨

Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.

I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level “damn, I wanna nap right now.”

It’s probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that’s an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.

• Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
• Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
• Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

I’m not well versed in the machinations of the Chinese government, but if a relatively “normie” VPN like Nord works in China… it’s probably controlled opposition (i.e. they’re logging everything to a government server.)

I understand the sentiment, but… HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to “thing everyone uses” for no good reason.

set timers

This broke for me a few months ago. It just randomly… won’t start, despite saying otherwise.

That sounds like more effort than just… writing the code.

A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.

My guy, see a doctor. Temporary blindness/blacking out is not a normal reaction to nicotine, even in excess. “Nic sick” should just mean nausea/vomiting, dizziness and headaches.

A few posters I bought from the campus poster sale at the start of the year. (Specifically, a woodblock print, a solar system map and a Cowboy Bebop poster.)

I have a huge window with a nice view (in a university owned apartment no less!) so I can afford to skimp on the other walls.

Too late, already moved to Garmin after my third dead Charge 5 in ~1.5 years.

I’ve had mine (first generation 13" model) for over a year now. I’m very happy with it, and I intend to make it last me through university (3 years) and then some. I would consider it a good investment for me.

Good, I would like to avoid interacting with the hallucination machine.

You forget that many people live in areas where passenger rail infrastructure is not economically (or practically) viable. I, for one, pity the grain truck that has to drive over an unpaved road.

The Rocinante is an obvious pick.

I also really like the ships in Starfield, mainly because I’m a cassette futurism shill.

Most of them, yes. The reddest stars (like Proxima Centauri) are too cool and dim to be visible to the naked eye, but if you go somewhere with no light pollution and let your eyes adjust you should be able to perceive some differences between stars.

Most of the more exotic colors (such as green) are caused by various optical tricks.

Physically speaking, all true stars are roughly one of these colors:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• White
• Blue

The exact color of a star depends on its size/temperature. Red stars are the coolest, while blue stars are the hottest.