There are lots of wild foods that are poisonous, but that didn’t stop our ancestors from figuring out ways to make them edible. In the case of bitter almonds I can find a reference to baking and boiling being effective methods of reducing cyanide content. Cold leaching might also work but it would take a lot more time.

I have to imagine that dire necessity was a catalyst for these discoveries. I’m guessing the thought process was more like “These are bitter as shit and they killed Bill, but we’re gonna starve to death if we don’t find some food, so let me try boiling these to see if the bitter goes away.”

AMD crowns the Ryzen 7 9800X3D a ‘gaming legend’

Memes aside, I’m eager to see some independent benchmarks. Been a while since I did a hardware refresh and I got the itch.

The minority party that establishes confidence and supply is the one that gets to form a government. Under a C&S arrangement, the smaller party agrees to support in favor of the party forming a minority government for all motions of confidence and budget bills (“supply”). A government that fails to pass a budget bill or fails to defeat a motion of no confidence is said to have lost the “confidence of the House”, which would force a new election.

Is it exploitation? I’d argue slave or prison labor is exploitation because the workers have no freedom of choice. Bees are free to leave, and the queen will in fact do so if not content with the conditions in the hive. If the queen leaves, all of the bees will swarm with her and you’d be left with an empty box.

Beekeeping strikes me more as symbiosis. The beekeeper provides ideal conditions, far better than the average location that would be found in the wild, and can help protect the hive against threats like mites. In exchange the beekeeper receives a share of the honey produced by the hive.

No beekeeper takes all of the honey from the hive. Only the top box (the “honey super”) of a typical hive stack is harvested. A grate below the top box (a “queen excluder”) prevents the queen from entering it so no larva are laid in the top box. The workers bee are smaller and can pass through the grate to build out comb and produce honey. The comb and honey in the bottom boxes are left to the hive to feed its workers and produce the next generation of bees, ensuring the survival of the hive.

A queen excluder cannot be used to prevent swarming long-term as the drones that gather the pollen also won’t for through the grate! An excluder might be used to delay swarming and buy time so the beekeeper can offer another solution, like adding more boxes to the hive or splitting it into two hives. Better beekeepers proactively manage their hives, e.g. by setting up an empty hive in advance to essentially offer a swarming hive a new ideal home whenever they’re ready for it.

I’d argue that Molyneux from the 80s and 90s was a great game designer. Populous, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper were all critically praised at launch and sold well, and in all the sources I’ve seen he’s credited as the main designer on those game. This was mostly pre-internet, so if he was over promising features in those games that hype wouldn’t typically reach the game-buying public.

The rise of Internet game journalism is what really fueled the self-destruction of his legacy. Black and White was the first Molyneux game where I can recall seeing tons of prelaunch hype, with many of the hyped features absent from the finished product. Game journalists have consistently given Molyneux a platform, initially because of his early hits but later because he’s reliable clickbait. They don’t care that he’s full of shit, they know it’ll drive engagement, and negative engagement is just as good as positive for their bottom line.

Even with all the over promising and under delivering he’s done since 2000, there are still plenty of people who love the Fable and Black and White series. I think if the man had ever learned to keep his mouth shut before features were locked, he might have a markedly different legacy. But he just couldn’t do that, so now I keep a Polaroid of him pinned on my corkboard with “don’t believe his lies” written on the bottom in permanent marker.

Same for my father in law. If he were a US citizen he’d probably be bankrupt right now, or more likely just still be in pain because he couldn’t afford the surgery in the first place.

It depends who you’re comparing. For the average US or Canadian citizen, I’m sure you’re correct. If you look at income levels I bet it’s a different story. The poor and middle class (whatever’s left of it) have to wait, the rich have the option of paying out of pocket. If I wanted to have a whole-body MRI scan done, I could get one next week for $3200. Wouldn’t even need to be sick! Requires a referral, but you can “obtain one virtually from (their) physician partners” and you know their “physician partners,” aren’t going to turn away business.

As a Canadian, I’ll be the first to say that our system isn’t perfect. If you’ve got a chronic but not life-threatening condition, like a need for knee or hip surgery, you could spend a long time on a waiting list. There are certainly lots of affluent Canadians who opt to step out of that line to get treatment at private for-profit clinics, both domestically and abroad. There’s always a shortage of something. Qualified doctors, nurses, family practitioners, CT or MRI machines, etc.

That being said, if you do have a life-threatening condition, the Canadian healthcare system can work pretty well. My step father had pneumonia Nov./Dec. last year, chest xray revealed something concerning beyond the pneumonia, by early January biopsies has been done, by February he’d started radiation, six or so weeks of that, then monitoring for a while and now he’s in remission. Everything moved fast, because he had a time-critical condition. Total cost to my family: zero dollars (setting aside costs for gas, parking, snacks for stress-eating, etc.). I couldn’t imagine a family going through the same situation in the US.

From https://www.githubstatus.com/ (emphasis mine):

We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back.

If you fuck up the database, you fuck up errythang.

The issue is that I have a 4k monitor and my current card can barely handle my desktop, never mind a game.

Try running games at 1080p (1920 x 1080), which is exactly 1/4 of 4K UHD (3840 x 2160). Your graphics card will only need to do 25% of the work but you shouldn’t get any resolution scaling blurriness because everything divides evenly. This isn’t so much for your current card, which probably just can’t keep up with newer titles. What you can do is look at 1080p performance of current cards, decide how much performance you need and how much you’re willing to spend, and that’ll narrow down the selection a lot.

Coming from a GTX 760, almost anything current gen or current gen minus 1 is going to be a massive upgrade. It’s hard to recommend a specific card without some info on your budget. For example if you had a budget of $300 US I’d recommend an Nvidia RTX 4060 since it has the best 1080p performance within that budget, or alternately a Radeon RX 7600 if you’d prefer not Nvidia (e.g. if you’re on Linux, the Radeon driver story is a bit better).

I’ve always felt that “have more babies but also fuck you for ever having sex” was a bit of wildly contradictory policy stance.

I bet those are insanely comfie.

Bet they wanted a Shapiro VP pick so bad. It would’ve been antisemitic space laser conspiracy theory bullshit 24/7 until the vote. Now all they’ve got is “how dare this man ensure school children have full bellies and necessary sanitary supplies every day.”

They smell like plastic, metal, complex hydrocarbons, and death.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

All due respect to Michelle Obama otherwise, but I think she was flat out wrong when she said ‘When they go low, we go high’. It’s the paradox of tolerance applied to the political realm. How do you ensure a tolerant society in the face of intolerant people? It’s impossible if you’re not allowed be intolerant of intolerant people. How do you ensure that political discourse sticks to concrete policies and objective facts when your opponent refuses to engage with either but instead stoops to conspiracy theories and personal attacks? Also impossible if you’re stuck talking about difficult concepts and nuanced facts while your opponent is free to sling personal insults and cognitively sticky memes that may have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

The solution is to apply social contract theory. Tolerance doesn’t have to be a rule that you’re not allowed to break. It can be a social contract instead, so when someone breaks the social contract by being intolerant you are no longer bound by the contract, freeing you to not tolerate their behavior in return. Similarly, sticking to policy- and fact-based political debate doesn’t have to be a rule you’re not allowed to break, it can be a social contract between political opponents. If the other candidate won’t debate policy or facts then you’re free of the contract, which means you’re free to say they’re weird. Which they very much fucking are. Once you get most of the figurative children out of the room, you can go back to making actual progress amongst the contract-adhering adults who remain.

Trump said of Harris, “Don’t forget. Four weeks ago she was considered, like, the worst,” and that she had had a “personality makeover … All of a sudden she’s considered the new Margaret Thatcher”.

Literally no one is comparing Kamala Harris to Margaret Thatcher… except Trump I guess. 🤣 I bet there are a significant number of voting Millenials who don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is. The ol’ weirdo’s references are weak and long past their best-before date, just like him.

That’s exactly it. If affluent countries can get on the same page, they can neutralize the “wealth flight” argument and we can start shifting the balance back toward something that remotely resembles equality.

MinuteCast from AccuWeather does exactly this. It looks at your location, looks at radar data for storm systems approaching your location, and estimates when precipitation will start at your location and how intense it will be. It’s generally pretty accurate, with some limitations. It seems to be pretty good for consistent rainstorms but it can get tripped up by pop-up thunderstorms, where the radar track can go suddenly from no rain to downpour. It doesn’t make predictions more then 2-3 hours out because past that timeframe it’s not easy to predict if weather will continue on its current track or change direction. Even with the limitations, I use it all the time. Mostly to tell if I should take the dogs out right away, or if I should wait an hour or two.

Billionaires, as a class, are likely already spending that much or more on lobbying for lower taxes. Or really lobbying for the status quo, since existing loopholes allow them to achieve an ultra low or even 0% effective tax with alarming regularity. The threat they make is wealth flight. “If you raise our taxes we’ll take all our wealth somewhere else!” As a result taxes on the ultrarich have essentially been a global race to the bottom for decades. At least now there finally seems to be some indications that wealth inequality cannot be ignored the way it has been for so long. My hope is that we’ll eventually see some international framework that effectively raise the tax floor for the 1%. It won’t cover every nation, but if it encompasses the EU, US, Commonwealth and other aligned countries then that would go a long way.