I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?

I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren’t false, heh.

The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.

Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.

I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.

I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)

Thumbs up for the World Tree.

Whenever I “can’t understand” something, I stop for a moment, and start interrogating my own assumptions of how the world works, because I clearly made an assumption of how the world or how people in general work and need to correct my own thinking.

It’s very hard to change how others do things. Much easier to start on yourself.

I’ve been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.

Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can’t even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.

LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this–probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn’t self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.

Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts’ sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn’t exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn’t exactly conscious like you or I.

The link to the science article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adf7360

Yeah, I treated Twitter as a RSS platform where I could follow subject matter experts like scientists and writers and artists I liked.

I also used it to follow people and groups that weren’t like me so i could learn. Like, “disability twitter” opened my eyes to some things I took for granted, because you had regular people dealing with those things just talking back and forth about it. If I shut my mouth and just listened, it opened up a whole new world.

For small-time creators making either art or science, Twitter was a good platform to get little chunks of info out to your followers. I don’t know that Mastodon fills those shoes yet, but I hope it will.

Yeah, cultivating a growth mindset is really, really important. And it really is cultivating…you’ll have a hundred reasons why you “can’t” knocking on your door, and you’ll have to be persistent to slay each one.

But once a “growth mindset” is habit, it gets easier.

really you have to make everyone disembark during rush hour so you can cram your obesity scooter on there so you can go to Tim Hortons so nobody else can sit down?

Has it…occurred to you that some disabled people have mobility issues or pain disorders that limit mobility to begin with, and that weight gain is a byproduct of not being able to walk or move or stand for very long without trouble?

I had a boss who had dwarfism and used a wheelchair 80% of the time. 20% of the time he slowly, painfully did hobble about–but it was clear as day WHY he was higher weight than he should’ve been. My own blood pressure would spike hearing the tiny sounds of pain he made when got out of his wheelchair and moved.

I have a friend with POTS–and if you’re unfamiliar with that, basically she stands up and her blood pressure and heart rate is malfunctioning so her heart acts like she’s running a marathon, the beats per minute go insane…but blood is pooling in her feet and they’re turning purple where you can’t see it because things are out of whack and despite her heart going haywaire, there’s not enough pressure to get the blood out of her feet and elsewhere. This condition happened prior to any weight gain.

I can hear her breath start to go wobbly just doing simple things because her body doesn’t regulate her blood pressure and heart rate normally. She’s gained weight because she’s at risk of passing the fuck out if she is on her feet for very long–she has to literally plan out doing simple things like going to the grocery store because if she pushes herself she might end up downed on the sidewalk relying on the helpfulness of strangers to get back up. It’s taken her many years to accept she really shouldn’t be pushing herself into a collapse because she’s worried that people will judge her for being “lazy and fat”. Comments like yours about “obesity scooters” only act to tear down all the people who ARE trying their hardest and still having their body fail them.

I have a different friend who has thyroid problems, she inherited them from her mom (and her bro has them too), and weight is a bitch for her to manage because her thyroid is fried.

I just broke my foot in July, and watched my weight inch up because it’s really fucking hard to get up stairs when you can’t put weight on one foot. I was semi bedbound for like 2 months. I’m LUCKY in that my foot will heal, but I don’t even snack and I gained 15lbs because of that one little temporary mobility issue. I’m LUCKY in that once it heals, I will be able to move normally and lose what I gained.

You could’ve made your point about transit without taking pot-shots at disabled people, who often are stuck in a terrible situation of their body failing them medically, and society often forcing them into poverty to be able to access the care they need.

Seriously, why isn’t it possible to champion mass public transit for all without shitting on the people who use it by necessity currently?

Maybe if you take LSD while watching it, the multi-fingered, multi-limbed speech will start to make some sort of divine sense…

So what I’m hearing is that computer code will eventually drift closer to DNA where “noncoding” sequences actually perform regulatory functions but in a way that’s super-arcane, and all you know is if you get rid of the noncoding bits the proteins change expression for some bizarre reason…

I imagine it’s a case where if you’re knowledgeable, yeah it’s free. But if you have to hire people knowledgeable to implement the free solution, you still have to pay the people. And companies love to balk at that!

The problem is that leadership doesn’t interpret it that way and just sees “minimizing inventory increases profit!”

Yep. Managers prioritize short-term gains (often personal gains, too) over the overall health of a business.

There’s also industries where the “lean” strategy is inappropriate because the given industry is one that booms in times of crisis when logistics to get “just in time” supplies go kaput due to the same catastrophe that’s causing the industry to boom. Hospitals and clinics can end up in trouble like this.

But there’s other industries too–I haven’t looked for it, but I’m sure there’s a plethora of analysis already on what Covid did to companies and their supply chains.