I would go AMD for the reasons others have said, but also for long term driver performance. NVidia has shown over time that their cards stay the same for performance, meaning very little long term increase from driver improvements. AMD on the other hand has had long term driver improvements leading to longer life and better performance. Your nVidia option would start to feel crappy earlier than a matching AMD card. Also, if you can afford it the AMD is a more performant option. And consider making sure you have room to upgrade the RAM. If there are only two slots and both are full you will have to replace the RAM, but if there are two free slots you could add another 16GB later for a good boost.

Yes, in the same way all research funded by the public should be open. If you pay for a dataset to be gathered and only one team gets to use it you have wasted money. Make the dataset open, make all the methods open, and it can be used multiple times, increasing the return on investment. In the same way if someone is working on security auditing for something like OpenSSH anyone who uses it benefits. You pay once for the work but get benefit for all who use it.

This also makes standardising easier because of the common tools so you can have cross department access without unnecessary technical barriers. For example, making a standard format for data in a SQL database means you can access multiple datasets and correlate them, allowing the study of important issues with minimal fuss. You can even create standards for accessing this data to make it much safer to use without exposing people’s personal information.

On the flip side you could have Microsoft and other similar companies decide what is worth investing in and just hope their system will work. If there is a security issue you just have to wait for them to patch it assuming they identify it. If they stop supporting something you can’t keep using it with external support because you don’t have the code.

Honestly, it is also a national security risk. Using a vendor from another country means you have someone who can access your data with software you cannot audit who is potentially influenced by the government of another country and you just have to trust them. I cannot understand the use of Windows in military applications. Honestly, asking the fox to guard the hen house. Why would you let the USA have access to your systems with the plausibly deniability of a company like Microsoft in between? Sounds like lazy writing for a military fantasy novel, not modern foreign policy.

Australia is at this point a fairly safe place to be trans. I work with people under our NDIS scheme and support one trans woman. She has had a fairly good overall experience with managing her healthcare and getting markers changed etc. Her friend from the USA on the other hand has had a much worse time of things. Her friend is considering moving over here for the sake of safety and honestly I think it may be wise. Good luck

Consider doing a small test section in one corner before trying anything. Also take a clear photo in full daylight before you start and make comparisons with full daylight pictures later. It is very easy to have the lighting and perspective completely change how something looks, so make the comparison as apples to apples as possible.

Also, using plain water for a simple rinse can be very effective at removing dirt just by rinsing and repeating, no soap. This is lower risk than many other approaches but requires you fully dry before checking the result. Definitely research other options, but it may be good to try cleaning with plain water.

Yeah, and also the Oxford comma is in my mind much clearer. I think if you are understood you are using the language correctly. If you are not understood at first but become understood after a bit of back and forth then you are using the language and also pushing the limits a little, making changes along the way. It is an evolutionary process, not design, so it is messy.

Yep, it started going bad when Google took over it fully and started making changes that didn’t go through to the Chromium browser project. And killing ad blockers. And the telemetry.

I would recommend trying a few of the Gecko engine based browsers. Zen is pretty cool and has become my desktop default recently but other people prefer different ones. In my opinion if you can’t read the code you can’t know what they are doing, so shouldn’t trust it. Not personally read the code, I mean I principle.

Australian English is based off British English but is not identical. Both are different to US English and have a lot of words that are spelled with a bit more historical contingency. That said, knowing which words have which version of suffix can be difficult.

For example, authorise or authorize. Practice or practise. Gaol or jail. English is a pain but it does make a good common language.

Around 2004 for my last hairdresser haircut, and about twice a year I take a hand span off the end myself. I have my hair long and I eat a lot of protein so it grows quickly.

Beard on the other hand is weekly or thereabouts.

I tend towards games that are on the small end, less than 20Gb in general. That covers almost all of my favourites that I have put more than 100 hours into. Some that I have out over 1000 hours into are under 1Gb and are still very intense. That said, if I got a new game which was supposed to look good I would be happy with 70Gb, but more than that feels like lazy studios churning our high res textures to cover up bad design. You can absolutely reuse textures in creative ways to drop the scale of your storage requirements. If you really need massive assets for your top graphics tier then make multiple versions of the assets and allow a smaller install. I don’t need games that are in the Tb range.

A diepole

Yep, you can emulate, it does work, but there is a better option. Clone Hero works better, has lower performance requirements, supports all of the songs from all of the games, has great peripheral support, and has a whole community of people making modern songs available.

I would also recommend looking into a RetroCult controller mod if you really get into it. Quite a fun electronics project and suitable for someone with limited experience as it has been made very easy and only includes a little bit of soldering and cutting away a little bit of the case.

At the end of the day death is a guarantee. No matter what you do it will eventually end in death. That means that all time time between here and there is not going to change the end point. The worst is already locked in.

So if the worst outcome is eventually going to happen then you kind of have nothing to lose. You could life the rest of your life afraid of things not working out, afraid to try, afraid to take a risk. You could do that and nobody can stop you.

The question is, do you want that? Do you want a life that is defined by what opportunities you didn’t take? Defined by what you avoided?

It seems more likely to be a fun life if you take some healthy risks. Try and meet people. Try to learn new things. Move away from shitty influences. Ditch things that make you unhappy. After all, you literally get one shot at life, you have a finite amount of time left in it, why would you waste it living for people who treat you like shit? Is their opinion of you going to get somehow worse? Could it actually realistically get worse? What impact would that really have?

I left my family at 17. Homeless, cold, and broke. I’m in my 30s now and don’t regret a thing. I’m married, have a wondrous cat, have a loving partner who actually cares about me and who I love dearly. No amount of approval from my shitty parents would be worth giving that up.

They already controlled your childhood and made it hell. Don’t give them the rest of your life too.

From what I have read there is no physical reason that we could not all have a reasonable standard of living right now with no extra technology. The reason for poverty is not a scarcity if resources, it is a distribution problem. Some people take too much and use systems like law and governance to enforce their relative position. Ditching individual wealth would solve most of the issues which prevent a good life for everyone. Being as most wars are ultimately about wealth and the same for borders it would be revolutionary.

Post capitalism.

We have automation for so much manufacturing. We have solar energy which is basically free after manufacture. We could spend a fairly small amount of time really working towards automating most resource extraction and processing.

We could have a really good standard of living not just in the west but globally and we could in the process resolve the threats of climate change but instead we have billionaires.

No, but you also don’t need to blame the cholesterol. Cholesterol is a marker we can easily test, so we use that to measure things, but blaming cholesterol is like blaming fire fighters for fires. Cholesterol levels go up when you have damage to your blood vessel walls because LDL covers damage like a scab covers a wound, then once the damage is healed HDL removes the LDL and leaves repaired vessel wall. If you try to lower LDL artificially you can reduce the blood levels and think things are better but really damage is just not being repaired as well as it should be. A better option is to reduce the initial cause of the damage and let the repair process happen more efficiently.

Don’t smoke, don’t drink as much as possible, avoid huge amounts of sugar, exercise, sleep, and try to reduce stress. And then you can worry about not eating a credit card worth of plastic.

So to clarify for those who don’t want to read the article and a few supporting pieces, this is talking about the presence of plastic micro particles in plaques removed from patients.

Removing the plaque can reduce the risk of stroke so it is done fairly frequently. When they took out the plaque they checked for polyethylene, common plastic for bottles, plastic containers, and similar uses, and for PVC, famous for pipes and incredibly sweaty pants.

In both cases microplastics were found in the plaque. Both of these plastics have been shown to cause inflammation in other experiments where the plastic is introduced into the body.

What they seem to be suggesting is that some amount of the inflammation around a plaque could be caused or enhanced by these microplastics.

This study shows that in some plaques, about half of those examined, these two plastics were present. Previous studies have shown plastics can cause or enhance inflammation.

This study does not show that plastics are the primary cause of heart disease. It also does not show how much of an impact microplastics have on the formation of plaques, how dangerous they are, or whether they grow.

Because of the lack of information on how impactful microplastics are and the difficulty of reducing exposure the best evidence currently suggests focussing on removing the big known risks for heart disease. Those are smoking, alcohol, excessive sugar, burned or oxidised fats and oils, and a lack of physical activity. It would be wise to focus on those factors which we know cause heart disease rather than worrying about this small to nonexistent factor.

Yeah, I’ve seen some applications of hollow waveguides before, but yeah, visible spectrum has potential applications and honestly, anything they can do to reduce the number of boosting stages the better.

I love the idea of hollow core fibres, basically a long hollow tube with air inside so the laser can be carried through air not glass. It is really cool and a novel approach and we are only seeing the start. What happens if we change the internal gas to something else like argon? Maybe there will be a specific fluid for different laser bands, further reducing transmission loss.

They also say that the current result of 0.2dB per km of travel is a good starting point, but they think they will likely reach 0.01dB per km with this tech and a little more time. That means a massively increased distance before having to read out the signal with a sensor and then send it again with another laser. That means much less cost and lower latency at the physical level. Very cool, a good number of years before application but good news anyway.

Just a quick point, you aren’t starving. Plenty of people are not getting their basic needs met. There are tonnes of people who are unhoused, lots of people, especially kids, experiencing food insecurity, and a huge number of women specifically are living in abusive situations because they do not have the means to live outside those situations. Starving is failing to meet one need, but there are plenty of other needs that lead to death if not met. People die from cold and heat purely because of cost. Those deaths are no less tragic because it was cold rather than a lack of calories.

Good choice, the DOI is usually a better link to use, my bad.