Oh, please don’t take that remark as an excuse or endorsement. The intended tone is one of resignation – pseudonymity reduces the social cost of bad manners to near zero and there’s not much we can do about it.

I will forgive people for being blunt in their criticism, however. High-ranking politicians are exactly the people who have to be able to take a certain level of verbal abuse since their decisions can change other people’s lives in directions that justify the liberal use of expletives.

Which plays back into my perception that Fetterman is currently not suited to his role.

I can understand both sides here.

On the one hand I have empathy with him like with any victim of such a life-altering injury and wish him a swift and full recovery. I don’t want people to suffer and, quite frankly, “the brain doesn’t work right anymore” is one of my personal horror scenarios.

On the other hand this kind of behavior is a huge problem in someone capable of making decisions that can alter the lives of other people – millions of them, in this case. He has enough power to ruin a lot of people’s lives, intentionally or not.

Even as someone who isn’t impacted by his mental fitness in any way, I’d agree that removing him from office seems like a good move. That man needs rest, not the stress of a high-profile political office during interesting times. And his state needs someone with a level head, which doesn’t mesh well with a semi-recent traumatic brain injury.

And, well, this is a politics community so guess which part the discussion will focus on. (Also, this is online so people are inclined to be assholes.)

That’s not quite how AC outlets work. Line and neutral can intentionally have different potentials relative to ground depending on how the house’s electrical system is designed. This can become relevant in certain situations like very simple devices (think “lamp socket with a power plug”).

A plug that can’t be inverted makes this a non-issue.

(Edit: Added missing “not”.)

I think the Swiss have the best Europlug-based system. Their three-conductor plugs have the same footprint as basic Europlugs, which makes for very dense plug arrangements. Unlike e.g. the German Schuko plug they only fit in one orientation so you get no polarity issues.

It’s pretty neat.

Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.

The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.

That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.

We’ve been productively using AI for decades now – just not the AI you think of when you hear the term. Fuzzy logic, expert systems, basic automatic translation… Those are all things that were researched as artificial intelligence. We’ve been using neural nets (aka the current hotness) to recognize hand-written zip codes since the 90s.

Of course that’s an expert definition of artificial intelligence. You might expect something different. But saying that AI isn’t AI unless it’s sentient is like saying that space travel doesn’t count if it doesn’t go faster than light. It’d be cool if we had that but the steps we’re actually taking are significant.

Even if the current wave of AI is massively overhyped, as usual.

Yeah. It’s one thing when people leave some extra money for good service or tell the server to keep the change, all while knowing that none of this is necessary.

It’s another when a 15%+ surcharge is added to the total so that the server can afford to live.

Remember that each woman has a different experience. Some women have such a light period that they only notice it because they find spots in their underwear. On the other hand, a woman with endometriosis will probably start being in excruciating pain the day before the period starts and will know exactly how long it lasts.

Source: I know someone with endo. She also has a resistance to at least one OTC painkiller because she used to pop those things like candy. And a female coworker of hers (with a very light period) thinks that most women are exaggerating and that periods aren’t much of a problem…

Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren’t cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can’t handle well.

It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

And the name of that hamster? Pikachu.

We absolutely do. The paper is plastic-layered, which is how beverage cartons generally work.

I am aware of waxed cardboard. I dismissed it because I thought that relying solely on it to store a liquid sounded a bit too ambitious. But it might work so yeah, I should have considered it.

Besides, how would an all-paper bottle even work? Liquid soap is, well, liquid. Paper soaks through when it’s in contact with a liquid. The only other way to do such a bottle would be to use coated paper, which is less recyclable than an inner plastic bottle.

Holy shit, that’s much better! Thanks; I didn’t know about that package.

Unfortunately, it follows the current Gnome design language. Gnome’s approach to UI design doesn’t click with some people, me included. I feel that while the main UI has not changed much since GIMP 2, the dialogs have become far less intuitive to use.

One problem is that in a world without major problems, stakes have to be low (which is perfectly fine and can make for an engaging story) or an external threat has to be introduced. The latter can easily feel forced or disconnected with the world.

I wonder how it would be to have a nonlinear game set in two time periods. One is a solarpunk-ish idyll under threat (with the protagonist’s actions focused on protecting it) and the other is a preceding industrial dystopia (with the protagonist’s actions focused on effecting change for the better).

Throughout the game the player first learns that the dystopian protagonist’s actions did succeed in changing the world for the better but also that the threats faced by the idyllic period are consequences of those actions. The message is that even ideal decisions can have negative effects down the line, “happily ever after” endings don’t really exist, and happiness requires maintenance. Yet, change for the better is both possible and worth the effort.

Seconded. As far as pens are concerned, Uniball is where it’s at.

Depends on your keyboard layout. On Macintosh-like keyboards it can be as simple as AltGr+dash. On smartphone keyboards you can just long-press the dash.

On Windows you’re expected to hold down Alt and enter some code.

I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.