When I was doing my undergrad, there was this sketchy shop in a nearby alley where they photocopy textbooks and sold them for just a bit more than the cost of the paper and binding. If they didn’t have it, you could borrow it from the library to lend them and they’ll give you a free copy in exchange.

It’s a question of risk vs reward, not risk alone. I don’t imagine many would care if their candies look different, but if you take away cigarettes, you’re going to get a riot and lots of people going to the black market.

I wouldn’t say monopolies are good, but there’s a difference between monopolies existing because the one at the top is actively preventing others from offering the same services, versus the monopoly existing because no one else is capable/willing to doing it. How do you resolve the latter without forcing them to offer a worse service?

In the context of programming:

• Good for boilerplate code and variables naming when what you want is for the model to regurgitate things it has seen before.
• Short pieces of code where it’s much faster to verify that the code is correct than to write the code yourself.
• Sometimes, I know how to do something but I’ll wait for Copilot to give me a suggestion, and if it looks like what I had in mind, it gives me extra confidence in the correctness of my solution. If it looks different, then it’s a sign that I might want to rethink it.
• It sometimes gives me suggestions for APIs that I’m not familiar with, prompting me to look them up and learn something new (assuming they exist).

There’s also some very cool applications to game AI that I’ve seen, but this is still in the research realm and much more niche.

I don’t know if the H2O2 is going to cause any problems, but if you have one of those ultrasonic type humidifiers and you do manage to dissolve the black goop, turning it on will just toss that goop onto all the surrounding surfaces.

It’s hard to imagine how you would even begin to learn to read. You see text and you have to translate that directly to meaning without imagining the sound in your head? Witchcraft I say.

I was that idiot once. Nice to meet you.

It basically comes down to finding the longest chain of carbons, then you number each of the carbons on that chain and list off things that are attached to each of them. For example, 1 carbon = methyl, 2 carbons = ethyl, etc.

Tfw you distrust the scientific establishment and take health into your own hands to stick it to the man. But then you realize you’re the man.

This is the main reason I still keep Windows around. The majority of my stuff “just works” much better on Linux, but every once in a while, you need to interact with someone else via some weird proprietary software and it’s not really reasonable to go “sorry, can’t do it because Linux”, nor is it reasonable to spend several hours figuring out for Linux when I’m likely only using it once.

Windows is completely free though. I don’t even bother to remove the watermark.

A lot of people are under the impression that the new guy is getting paid the big bucks to make some extra unpopular decisions before Galen takes over again to “save the day”.

Seems that there was one just a few months ago

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/central-dairies-brand-and-s-milk-brand-2-partly-skimmed-milk-recalled-due-spoilage

Oh god, imagine having to give birth every day for the rest of eternity.

Unlike conventional batteries, supercapacitors have an exceptionally long lifespan, lasting hundreds of thousands of charge-discharge cycles, whereas lithium batteries typically last only five years or less.

So, what’s the conversation rate between charge-discharge cycles and years?

I keep local backups of everything, so restoring the files is trivial. In the git repo, I have instructions on how to set things up: what packages to install, where to place certain config files and what to put in them. You could use containers to make it even easier, but I haven’t found the need for it yet.

I don’t see how carpooling is relevant here at all. Even if you carpool or take a bus, you still need the road and wouldn’t be able to commute if that road gets blocked off.

I mostly use AWS. I have about five different accounts going and I delete/remake them each time the free tier runs out.

I don’t have enough testosterone to care about them anymore

Writing with this thing sounds difficult because most of us write with our fingers. Proper writing technique is all arms since that allows you to write much more without fatigue. So as long as your elbows and shoulders are intact, you can just duct tape a pen to your stump and write just as well as you can with a hand. Think of writing on a chalkboard, but scale it down to a piece of paper.

It’s a bit of a circular problem. Certain journals have a reputation of publishing higher quality work, so if you see where it’s published, you’re more likely to read it. Since it draws in readers, it leads to more citations. More citations means more people want to publish there, meaning that the journal gets to be more selective and gets to choose the cream of the crop. Thus maintaining their reputation of publishing higher quality work.