This is wild to me because my SO and I, who are both Gen Z by some definitions, think about how much meat we are eating very frequently. On top of that, we think about what kind of meat it is, since it is my understanding that of the huge amount of environmental damage caused by meat production, the bulk of that is caused by beef in particular.

I have also been super busy lately, but I am hoping that running and participating in something like this will get me off of mindless scrolling and on to doing something interesting!

Always happy to find another person who loves the posts on ACOUP! It really is a treat to find a historian who is so knowledgeable in both the field and gaming and is willing to use all that knowledge together. I think the pedant label is more in reference to a lot of the earlier posts, which look at battles/events in popular fantasy media like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings and do have a bit more nit picking to them, but are great reads nonetheless.

I actually understand where he is coming from on the football team vs office job perspective. When I think about my current work, my feeling is sometimes that it doesn’t matter, but if I actually consider what I am doing and the nature of the project, I realize that my efforts do affect the course of the project going forward. Contrasting that to my experience running competitively as a high schooler, I did not matter there at all, I never raced fast enough to score, in the rare event I was in a race where the score mattered. But despite that, I still feel some connection to the team. Whether that is different because of the physical nature of the task, the social elements, the fact that I was young and certainly still developing socially at the time, or that sports coaches have an approach that just hits differently than office bosses, I can’t say. I think I have enough capacity for self reflection to not go chasing the way I felt during that time of my life, but I can understand how someone would come to feel that way and why they might want to generalize that feeling to other parts of their life.

Okay I have watched the video, it was very interesting! Broadly, the diet he described matches what I thought I should be eating, though I was not aware that eggs are more broadly uncontroversial these days. Emphasis on should, as I did have a donut for breakfast time morning, not sure if walking to the store and back to get it cancels out at all.

As far as weight, I actually just went to the doctor for a checkup. By their scale, I am right at the bottom end of healthy BMI, and if I measure at home without shoes/clothes/etc then I am in the upper 17s. I have been about this weight for a while now, as the result of losing some muscle from being a fairly intensively trained high school athlete to now being someone who works out for like an hour a few times a week when I get the chance. My SO on the other hand, has a lifelong history of gastrointestinal issues with accompanying food restrictions, and since moving in together has been up in weight and more stable, but still only manages to scrape into the healthy range. I am not sure how height factors in, since I know there is some concern with BMI skewing for the especially tall and short, and I am short, and my SO is quite tall, but the trend remains. So, with that as my context, I’m not really worried about current weight so much as making a well intentioned diet change that puts either of us into an accidental caloric deficit and does make either of us underweight proper. Your point about iron intake is something I should keep in mind since we have been trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat, and maybe not increasing the corresponding dark leafy greens sufficiently.

The drinking liquids thing is oddly timely, because my SO actually just started making smoothies in place of some of the food they would normally eat at lunch, and has found that they are delicious and help to avoid some of the discomfort they find they get when eating many other foods at lunch time specifically.

Okay I am going to try to summarize what you wrote and linked to be sure I understand:

Artificial sweeteners may have measurable health impacts, but those health impacts are overshadowed by the health impacts we are certain about with added sugars, so replacing sugar with a non sugar sweetener is at worst fine, and at best may reduce the drawbacks associated with eating added sugars. All of this being caveated with the difficulty of researching nutrition in general and a lack of as many studies as one would like directly comparing the two alternatives, and the fact that different non sugar sweeteners will impact individual people differently.

If all that is correct, then should people who are relatively healthy make the substitution of some of the sugar in their diet with non sugar sweeteners? My SO and I are still young, but we are definitely people who struggle more to keep weight on, so I think we would have to find a way to eat more other food if we were to replace sugar with something lower in calories. I guess that would probably be healthier, assuming the replacement food isn’t potato chips or something (large risk tbh), but is that a health intervention that is worthwhile over something else of similar effort? I feel like this is a question that is solidly veering into the unanswerable, but I think it could be an interesting discussion.

Yeah I have no concept of how much data they have, but I know services like Backblaze barely charge anything for cloud storage, most of the cost is associated with upload and especially download. Regardless, as I saw pointed out on some other discussions, $1 million is what, a few engineers annually for a company like them? It feels like not enough money to be a big deal for them.

EDIT: Looks like it wasn’t enough money, decision at least partly reversed.

The point about wet bulb events is what I see as their best application. Being able to distribute a bunch of precharged ones for people to use in the afternoon of a deadly hot day would be a literal lifesaver.

I mean I think so, but I posted it.

By active SIM I meant having a phone plan activated on the SIM card in your phone. Since you only mentioned doing banking over WIFI, I wasn’t sure if you had a phone plan or were just using the phone when connected to WIFI. In your case, I think even the deals that prepaid providers do typically are tied to service plans that include data, but could be worth double checking with your provider just in case.

Interesting. It would still probably be helpful if you posted the output of lscpu, which should give some information about what processor you have.

One other thing that could be important, but I’m not sure about, is that I know in the past Nvidia has been restrictive about allowing consumer cards to do what they consider enterprise level things, like GPU passthrough. It has been awhile since I was looking into it closely, though, so things may be different now.

Which Ryzen CPU do you have? Most of the existing desktop parts for Ryzen don’t have onboard graphics, which could make things difficult for you.

One thing to look into is refurbished devices. I don’t know where you are in the world, but in the US I was able to get a Samsung Galaxy A51 with 5G in good condition refurbished on eBay for like $300 with a one year extended warranty. The warranty was about $30 so the phone was only ~$270 shipped. I got Android 12 last month, and I think this phone should get Android 13, along with 1 subsequent year of security but not feature updates. If searching eBay seems too sketchy or time consuming, services Backmarket will aggregate reputable refurbishers for you, and handle warranty as well. Of course, you do have to check the individual model to know how long it still has updates wise.

If a new device is a sticking point, then I’m not sure what would be best. Like you say, it seems that a lot of the decent looking devices from companies like Motorola and Nokia only have Android 11. As long as they are still going to get security updates and you can live without Android 12 features then that might work, but obviously that’s going to vary by manufacturer and device. Depending on how (if?) you have an active SIM for your phone, you could also see if any carrier has a deal to switch to them. Having been a salesperson for carrier devices for a brief while in the past, I can tell you that it’s probably not a good deal in the long run, but if you already pay a traditional carrier and are willing to switch it could be worth it. Even pre-paid MVNO type carriers will sometimes offer a deal, though for them it’s typically some money off the service plans over the next two years in exchange for buying a new, higher end device through them.

One thing that I think could be interesting with air conditioning and load balancing is using the air in homes and buildings to shift peaks and make more efficient use of base load power where available. If there’s a bunch of solar power in the early afternoon or wind or nuclear in the middle of the night, it could make sense to cool buildings down further than normal, say instead of just 78 F you cool when there’s excess energy down to 68 or 70 F. Then there’s less need to run those air conditioners when there’s lots of other demand, especially if you insulate well. The nighttime cooling even has the added bonuses of the refrigeration cycle being more efficient over a smaller temperature gradient and many people preferring cooler sleeping temperatures.

Even better than just continuing to allow cars for people with disabilities, I think redesigning cities for pedestrians and cyclists is a great time to also make it easier for people to use wheelchairs or microcars too!

In this case, given the grounding in actual journalistic sources, I would consider the video factual content. Even that aside, it’s entertaining to me because I think Elon Musk is a person who seems to do a lot of bad things, or do good things badly, and seeing him caught in the act of trying to use the right wing grift machine to avoid legitimate criticism is amusing.

First, I would strongly recommend creating a bootable USB drive and booting to it instead of using a VM if you are looking to test hardware compatibility and drivers. If this isn’t something you are familiar with, just let me know and I can try to point you in the direction of some useful resources. The virtualization pass through can add an additional set of headaches that is not representative of what your experience will be after installation, and you can reuse the bootable drive later if you decide to go forward with installation. There is no risk to the data you currently have on the machine, unless you decide to do the installation process or otherwise deliberately muck about.

It is also possible a suitable driver is already in the kernel for this device, since it looks to be a fairly standard USB Wifi adapter, in which case you might learn that you don’t need to mess with driver installation at all. In my experience, I have only needed drivers for Nvidia hardware, and when I have been trying to do something unusual with AMD graphics hardware, but I also have never heard of the company for your particular adapter, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, if you are continuing with your VM testing, make sure all of your USB pass through is being handled correctly so you aren’t barking up the wrong tree.

As far as the drivers themselves, it looks like if you go a few directories down, there is some documentation, as in a Readme.txt that just contains a list of changes made to the software in various versions. I think if you dig down in the extracted zip file into WIFI-FE-2(Other Driver)/Linux Driver/DPA_MT7601U_LinuxSTA_3.0.0.3_20130313/ you’ll be in more or less the right place. From there I think on the command line you can just do make and things should get compiled by your system toolchain, and then when that hopefully finishes successfully you can do sudo make install to get everything where it needs to go. Those are fairly standard steps for installing from source on Linux, though they are typically preceded by a command to Automake or CMake to fully configure the build system. I don’t see any evidence of those tools being present, but that’s something to check out if the commands I mentioned throw up an error of some kind.

Anyway, good luck! I hope that Linux on the desktop impresses and you make the switch, but if not I hope you at least get the chance to learn more about your system. And don’t hesitate to respond here or in a DM if you have other questions!

I have an older HP laptop with a similar trackpoint style pointer. They are not as good as the real TrackPoints, because they lack the middle button in the buttons at the top of the track pad, so there’s no way to scroll while using that pointer. It doesn’t bother me because I am much more used to using a track pad anyway, but it’s definitely not interchangeable.

Fixed now

I am pretty sure its the reflectivity thing. Looking at this, seems like open ocean absorbs 94% of the light it gets, while even plain ice absorbs only 50%.