An Aloe vera plant, not only are they pretty and fairly easy to care for (potted in a southern or western window, watered occasionally), their leaf goo is an excellent treatment for burns and the basis for a lot of over the counter topical salves. It’ll always be there when you need it and regrow what you use over time. Just snap off some of a lower leaf and squeeze out the goo on to a burn. Just… don’t eat it, not good for eating.

Ginger and garlic steeped as a tea are also a fairly good symptom alleviator for coughs, upset stomachs and head colds, adding a fair amount of honey is good too. Easy enough to keep around, not super extreme like some cold medicines can be but still surprisingly effective. Ginger is actually fairly easy to propagate and grow, but, eh, cheap and common enough at any story that keeping a plant of it around may not be worth the effort.

One of the biggest uses case for AI software will be as an accountability sink “I didn’t tell it to do the thing I obviously wanted it to do, so I’m not liable for the outcome.”

We’ve known for a while that the current government in Tehran has been willing to do awful things, but that it’s constantly being brought up now makes me think that this is an attempt to manufacture consent to start another war. This is, obviously, a very bad idea.

When I first read the title i saw it as “pouring boiling hot water on it cleared it up” and imagined some part in it cracking due to thermal shock.

Not sure how big of an issue that would really be, depends on the metals in it I imagine. I know a lot of people destroy car windows trying to melt ice off them with boiling water.

A hot water bottle is a much better option, slower heating.

Next month “fed to raise rates”

I to have a modular electric vehicle but, mine already has a massive variety of after market options to modify and upgrade it to me needs with.

It’s called… my bicycle that I put a motor on.

it’s so amazing, the absolute brain rot it takes to think that a LLM is a better way to operate a vending machine than simple if-then logic. “If the value of money inserted is equal to the price, then dispense the item”.

Like, why? What is even the point? It doesn’t need to negotiate the price, it doesn’t need have a conversation about your day, the vending machine just needs to dispense something when payed the right amount.

“ Shit, we need more cash to keep the bubble inflated, quick squeeze customers for more revenue! “

You know what’s funny about the clear plastic electronics? They were the result of a unique and new market demand, that of mass incarceration. The point of them was to be easily inspected by guards. To make sure nothing was getting hidden inside them.

Them ending up in normal distribution and getting picked up by teens who thought they were cool was simply a fluke. Kind of emblematic of the era in a way, to have the effects of something so criminal seep out in to the wider world, stripped of it’s context, and resold as trend to teens.

they’re gradually reducing the amount of vehicles sold while increasing the margin per vehicle. They’re approaching the limit of 1 vehicle sold at infinite margin.

That all, and they raised the price when the core demographic has less disposable income than ever.

It’s a growth medium for culturing cells. It’s a mix of sugars, salts, and amino acids, often with other nutrients.

Forbidden sports drink.

Because it’s not about the companies being profitable, it’s not about making products people want to use or pay for.

It’s about riding the hype cycle to maximize share price. Because the people making decisions are not payed based on the success of the company, but on the success of the share price and market cap.

Their current business model is not “not very profitable” it is deeply unprofitable.

They aren’t just loosing money on free users, they’re loosing money on payed users. Publicly traded for profit companies are legally obligated to provide accurate reports of the nature and source of their revenue. As of this summer (Second quarter), OpenAI was paying roughly twice as much servicing the demand of paying chat GPT users to publicly traded companies, like Microsoft, as OpenAI claimed to make from subscriptions to chat GPT.

And that’s not even counting the costs to train new models, spending with private companies, or their spending on building data centers with Coreweave or Oracle.

I highly doubt that adding advertising revenue will close that gap, especially since paying users might cancel their subscriptions if they start getting ads.

I think the steam deck might be worth it for the sake of giving her the option to play stuff that’s isn’t on switch.

Like, sure, maybe she never ends up caring about anything but first party Nintendo originals. But, giving that option opens up a world of possibility.

I have a little cousin, he’s not exactly the most technical, not the most patient with such things, he calls me a lot for help with stuff. But he’s on a laptop instead of a switch or a console because he wanted to play modded Minecraft, i’ve seen him grow a lot in being willing to understand this stuff because he was given an opportunity and a reason to engage with it.

Everything to do with living as a person in a larger community, part of which is using technology.

puts a bunch of AI features in, turns them on by default without user’s asking for them, mandates employees use it when ever they can.

“How could this be a bubble? Look at all the demand!”

Sounds interesting, but, I do worry, if such a system were to get any sort of significant adoption, it would create a financial incentives for projects to do questionable things.

Like, even the best intentioned dev would have a very strong incentive to intentionally make their software run in the background in a way that made it look like it was being used. And if a lot of projects did that, then, suddenly there is a bunch of always on stuff eating up system resources.

There is also potential complications around one project pressuring or paying off others to do stuff that gets them more run time. Like say, pressuring a distro or desktop to include their project as a default that turns on when ever the system starts. Or simply include their project as the default even if it’s not well suited to the task.

The incentives created by the system for devs and projects would need to be considered in aggregate, like what down steam outcomes could be created for the entire software ecosystem.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.