I agree, I didn’t say with clarity that the reason for the worry is the above. I worry things will work out that way and AI companies are the absolute worst offenders for screwing everyone over constantly so it seems more likely with them than another company.

That said, Blender wouldn’t be where it is without contributions from various companies that drove features forward and made contributions to it. I do worry about the future, but I feel that way about most tech, the average person does not benefit from DRM at all but Linux supports it to some degree. I can remove support if I want and there are distros that support that, but in a world with corporate control as law I guess this is the best we can hope for for now.

It isn’t about there being any contact at all, it is about the inherent corrupting nature of money. If they become a corporate patron they are paying money to the Blender Foundation who can then use that funding to hire people to work on Blender. This all seems cool and normal.

The problem is not with getting the funding. The problem is once you have the funding you don’t want to lose it. That means you will be more likely to tweak things a little, embrace things that suit your corporate patrons, and not block features your community doesn’t want. For example, AI.

So if I make a prediction about this it isn’t that tomorrow Blender will have AI tools integrated throughout the whole stack. It is that over time, especially a year or more from now, AI related tools will come to Blender and they will be Anthropic based tools.

Will they be required? No, of course not. But they will be there and they will be opt out. And along with that the development of other tools which would have filled the niche the Anthropic tools have taken over will not be developed. So less work will go into something that an Anthropic tool could do instead.

It isn’t malice, it isn’t direct evil, but it will give Anthropic a quick leg up to getting all the graphic artists and modelers to use their tools rather than a competitors, and they can do it all while looking good.

The same thing happened with computers for schools. If kids grow up using Apple computers they buy them as adults and take those skills into their careers. If they instead learn on Windows machines then they take those skills forward. The whole industry is shaped by these choices and that locks in massive profits for those companies. Why do you think Google worked so hard on Chromebooks?

I would prefer for none of my apps to use the plagiarism machines in any way. I would prefer that any AI “enhancement” was a plugin I could easily install but not installed by default. But I am not going to get that, so it is disappointing.

When you get it wrong, which you will, just correct and move on. Make a separate acknowledgement that you will make mistakes but your intention is to get it right. Make those two separate things, don’t make the moment of you getting it wrong the time you affirm your intent, keep them separated and they will both be more effective.

Also, ask them if they would like to go clothes shopping, in person or online, and support them in trying things that they have not yet been comfortable trying.

Being supportive isn’t about perfection. It is about effort. Your effort shows your care and consideration which in turn show your love and regard. Be there, be involved as is wanted, and be willing to accept making a mistake as you learn together. That is worth more than any amount of perfection that cannot be provided. Remember, the effort is the display of love, messing it up is something that happens along the way, keep trying and things will work out.

DevilutionX is absolutely awesome.

https://devilutionx.com/

They have made an open source engine compatible with Diablo and Hellfire MPQ files. It is pretty awesome and works on a whole bunch of platforms that Diablo never worked on. It also fixes a bunch of problems especially around graphics, along with plenty of enhancements.

Just consider two things you said here. You have said that he doesn’t care for your opinion, or seemingly even like you, and that you won’t call him by the name he wants to use. There is a pattern here which is fairly obvious.

You don’t respect your son but expect respect from him. You want an asymmetric relationship where you are the parent and he is the child and what you say goes. Imagine if someone else wanted that in reverse with you. Would you respect them? Care about their opinion? Care about their feelings?

It is also likely that if you have this structure to your relationship you also probably do a bunch of other things that make him feel lesser and disrespected. Do you invade his privacy? Assert control over things? Make support contingent on his compliance?

Think about what respect actually means to you, what behaviours someone can have towards you are how they can make you feel. Really think it through and define respectful behaviour for two equal parties. Now evaluate whether you act towards your son in the ways you would consider respectful. We are not talking about subservient, bowing head and scraping the floor, we are talking about two people on an even footing having a conversation.

If you can’t honestly say that you behave towards him in a fair and respectful manner then any disrespect from him has to be seen for what it is. He has been trained by you in how he treats other people. If he is being an asshole to you chances are it is for a good reason.

In summary, YTA until further evidence is presented. Many people in your generation have this problem and it comes from having an authoritarian parenting style. Learning about that may help you to chart a new and better path forward. Good luck.

I definitely feel similarly about bad instructions. I have found a few recent products that actually had good instructions which made me really understand the issue.

Good instructions give a single possible interpretation. Bad instructions could be interpreted to mean mutually exclusive things.

Does the washer go on the bolt before the bolt enters the hole? Or on the other side? If you get it wrong you may not tighten it correctly and may compromise the strength of the furniture.

I recently bought and built a few items and they had clear, unambiguous instructions. Only one possible interpretation, clear logical steps, and well labeled parts. One was from GiantX and the other was Fantastic Furniturea chain here in Australia. The difference between those and other flat pack items was insane.

Yep, when you have life with a major block and then experience a significant reduction in it you will definitely feel the pull to have even less. There is a sweet spot for meds and it can be different than you initially think.

I find that having my morning dose of 40mg Ritalin LA and my afternoon dose of 20mg Ritalin standard release works really well, but if I am just doing stuff like dinner and hanging out I may actually split that 20mg dose into two sequential 10mg doses a couple of hours apart. That gives me relief from some of the sensory issues for much more time but doesn’t give me as much help with the motivation and activity level stuff.

So for you it may be worth considering an adjunct of lower dose Ritalin for after the big dose wears off, obviously depending on how it worka for you. I would recommend speaking to your prescribing doctor about trying a few different dose schedules for their recommendations, and really to use the language of testing so they understand you mean to experiment within safe bounds to understand how it works best. That means the same overall dose but tweaking the delivery timing and measuring the outcome.

Some psychiatrists will be uncomfortable with this. Some may be reluctant to have you try things and experiment. Some may think you are heading towards abuse. For that reason I would also recommend saying you want to optimise the dose you currently have, not increase, and also be open to other things like modafinil or similar non-stimulant meds.

Also, consider non-medication interventions. A great one is hard, heavy exercise, for example powerlifting. You burn a bunch of calories in a short time and release some of the body tension that builds over time and eventually causes issues. I find that lifting heavy things helps settle me and makes the next 3-5 days way better. Cardio never does the same for me, but maybe it would work for you.

100% agree. I actually fit this well. I am a tall and fairly muscled dude. My body responds well to keto and I can drop fat fairly easily. I choose to carry some extra weight because I prefer how people treat me at this weight. I am seen as less threatening and less likely to judge which are important things to me.

Also, replacing pants is so expensive. In this economy?

Not a worry. Now anyone else who has the same question will see your comment, my reply, and your graceful acceptance and hopefully follow your example. Somewhere out there on the internet in my turn in your shoes with someone else opening my eyes. I found it liberating to realise I could go find out myself rather than trusting a random internet stranger.

This.

I loved some of what was available on Reddit years ago. What really made me leave was exactly this problem, the fact that the same platform that allowed things I was interested in also allowed Nazi stuff, things like fatpeoplehate and jailbait. If you have a Nazi section of your bar and a pedo section of your bar it is a bar I don’t want to be in, it is a Nazi pedo bar.

Also, to be super clear, I am absolutely making the strong claim that fatpeoplehate was a Nazi subreddit along with jailbait. Nazis see people as less human when they don’t fit their narrow definitions of human, thus the term useless eaters. They also see women as breeding capacity without humanity and have strong tendencies towards younger and younger girls over time. These are solid links and part of the ideology, not incidental. If you have a Nazi bar it will be a pedo bar too, and they will also hate on people with disabilities and those who are lgbt+.

It isn’t their job to educate you, in fact requesting that is putting that additional burden on someone who is already burdened by this bigotry.

It is really unfair to ask them to explain it so that you can be a better ally. If you want to be a better ally it is worth looking into it yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yAbQ-CaJXs

That is a good primer, but it is just one person’s perspective. If you search “stonetoss Nazi” or “stonetoss bigot” you will get tonnes of people explaining it in more detail.

Just to be super duper clear, I’m not dragging you here. I’m not saying “you suck for not knowing, you should know, and asking is just you being a bad person”. That would be silly and short sighted. I am saying that as a person who is not trans you are not experiencing the horror of anti trans bigotry all day every day and so you aren’t worn down by it. You surely have your own problems and they are real and hard, and so do trans people. It makes sense to listen when they speak about it and hear what they are saying, but asking them to spend their energy on your understanding is a different thing. You can spend your own energy on figuring it out and make yourself a better ally.

Physorg is a great resource for someone who is not currently fully educated in the field but has a strong interest. They do really good summaries of each topic and provide just enough context to go and find out more. They also do have good RSS feeds available, so you can easily use whatever client you like to get their content.

As for FOSS clients, just have a look in F-Droid and you will find a bunch. I use Feedflow at the moment but I have tried a few from F-Droid and they are all similar. On desktop I would recommend looking at a different one depending on your desktop environment. On EndeavourOS with KDE I have used a few but be one included with the Kontact suite is fairly good.

Oh wow, I just had a look at that, normally Grafana is used for monitoring things like server response times and internal stats. Using for a Garmin fitness device is awesome! I would never have thought of it as a good way to get that kind of data and see it visually.

Do you use it to see your training progress over time? Or is it more for seeing specific runs and comparing? How do you actually use it? Is it useful for you?

I’m sure it doesn’t bother him, but he is a he, though he was desexed a bit early (I think too young but he was a stray), so I think he never developed some of the breadth of nose that most males have. He is cute as a kitten and 16 years old, hopefully we have many more years together.

I have a proxmox host on a HP Elitedesk G3 with an i5 7500. In that I have a VM with HAOS and it runs like a dream. If something goes horribly wrong I can get remote terminal access from the proxmox interface along with rebooting and backing things up.

Also, you can actually run Grafana under HomeAssistant directly, though that does mean if HA is down then you also lose Grafana at the same time. IMO it is reasonable to use lots of stuff alongside HA but monitoring and remote access should be on a separate machine, and for that I have an old laptop (integrated battery so no need for UPS) and that machine is really only for managing remote access and monitoring.

I will add that this study looked at biological markers of inflammation and so on with cells exposed to vape vapor. If you are looking at it and saying “looks like there is activity, so maybe there is harm, more likely than not” but not saying anything about how much harm then it is not very useful for making choices. Sure, it is not without some risk, but a quantified risk assessment would say that based on the current best evidence it is likely not anywhere near as bad as smoking and it is easier to taper nicotine out if you want to do that.

From a public health/harm reduction perspective vapes may be a useful tool if used correctly, or a terrible additional harm with increased addictiveness and known dangerous chemicals, such as the popcorn lung issues. We need rational science and appropriate regulation, not panic and bizarre policies.

Broadly speaking it seems mostly to be the point of focus. In Libertarianism it is all about the individual, having freedoms from others, and being an island.

In Anarchism it is about specific external coercive forces. Those forces impact individuals, groups, communities, and so on.

So a Libertarian may think about food security from a perspective of deregulating supply so that you can choose to buy unsafe food because you think it is a good idea. An Anarchist may instead think about mutual aid, local cooperative production, and preventing external power structures like corporations or governments restricting sharing of resources.

It serves more than one purpose for me, so the calculation is a little different. My freezer has about $1200 of meat in it. If the temperature in there gets up over freezing the meat will start thawing and become damaged or spoiled. Saving that meat from being spoiled would save me spending that $1200 all over again.

The solar panel means that even if the whole power system is out for multiple days I should be able to keep my freezer below zero and keep my meat frozen. Last year we had snow, for the first time here since the early 90s, and it took down power lines on the other side of town. People there were without power for as much as 4 days, which obviously would be enough to heat my meat back up and ruin it, so it isn’t a ridiculous possibility.

Also, I intend to make something larger over time on a trailer which I can move from house to house as I move, being a renter. I want independent power and learning a little with this system is a good stepping stone to building out my own system with much more custom parts, especially including a larger battery system, inverter, and more panels. I plan to run as much as possible from the DC to skip inverter losses, so using cheap modules to pull from the 24-48V system I build to do USB C ports with 100W+ output gives a lot of options, along with using smaller dedicated inverters for required loads like a kettle.

The coolest thing is the fully DC power supplies for a PC. You can run directly from a battery and solar system with just 12V, 5V, 3.3V, and a few little bits and bobs. Very fun stuff.

I think you’ll find different answers based on country because of circumcision. If you have a foreskin it can be pretty variable how much urine will be held by surface tension and hard to remove with a quick shake. You will also find differences based on the local culture, for example in Germany men usually sit to pee while that is rare in places like the USA.

The battery degradation is overblown with lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is what is in the Bluetti Elite 30. If you aren’t putting it through deep discharge (greater than 80%) or high temperatures (above 30°C) it should still work well for a long time. The higher your draw on it, pushing up to that 600W limit, the worse the impact is too.

That said, it can work very well as a UPS for a freezer like what I have mine for, and adding a solar panel extends the usefulness of it a lot. I have a 200W panel which gives around 130-170W at any given time through the day, leading to a full charge in theory in about 2 hours. My freezer pulls around 60-80W with transient spikes to 700W when starting the compressor, but the power station can boost to cover that need for a short time. Over a day I use about 550Wh per day, so about 4 hours of sun per day in theory. It should be covered by the panel I have but the capacity is a little low so I can’t get through the night at this point, it has to switch over to AC after a while. Still, during the hottest hours where I need the most power I am getting solar to do it, so that’s handy.

Anyway, yes, they are useful, another more powerful system is definitely in the cards for me, but they are a great first step and handy as a backup for bad weather.