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.

Yep, definitely a good time to take plan B. Also, the responsibility to use protection is on both partners. Being as he was sober he was in a better position to manage this and made an active choice not to. You bear the burden of what happens and dealing with it, but he gets to have fun and run away. Very uncool.

I would consider how well you could really consent and if you want people who don’t care about that to be involved in your life. You, along with everyone else, deserve someone who will not take advantage of the situation to get off at your expense. Also, he should really foot at least half the bill for the plan B, without him it would not be needed and if it becomes a larger and more expensive problem it would be something he was responsible for there too. Any self respecting person should pay for their share.

I’ve seen a fair few people go through a similar problem, having trouble with food and hating that fact. Unfortunately it is a fact that you are having that issue now and will in all likelihood have that issue in the future. That said, the suffering here is coming not from the “picky eating” itself, it is the judgement and pressure which is causing most of the suffering.

Obviously it sucks for you to be unable to grab some random food from any random food stall or restaurant, not being able to eat at a food court can be annoying and not having a safe food available can lead to hungry times. That is all shitty and it sucks a lot. The problem here is that if you just had that and everyone accepted it then you would have a fairly normal experience of food with a small tweak of sometimes not being able to have something or sometimes going hungry until you can get home.

Anyone who has Celiac’s disease is in the same boat, but their experience is really different. Why? Because their needs are recognised as a medical need, therefore acceptable. Other people recognise that if they eat gluten they will have medical issues including very serious and obvious physical problems. In other words, people can’t deny their problems are real.

Neurotypicals often deny the experiences of people that they cannot relate to. They do this with autism, they do this with ADHD, they do this with PTSD, they do this with poverty. If they haven’t experienced it then it isn’t real, but once they experience it they are happy to shout from the rooftops that it is real and horrible and everyone should be kind about it.

You have a real, measurable, replicable difficulty around food. It isn’t just you. It is you, me, my partner, several of my clients, tonnes of the people in this community, and so many people around the world besides. It is normal to find that kind of sensory issue difficult to manage, but you have also been taught that it either isn’t real or you are choosing it in some way. It is real, you wouldn’t choose it if you could, and you have to live with it.

I would recommend learning about what works for you and then defending that set of strategies vigorously. If you need to have a known safe bag of jerky or a protein bar in your bag then you need that. If you need to abstain from food at an event and eat before or after, do it. You are the one who has to live your life, not them, so you should get to decide how to do it.

Nobody is actually shitty here but some things seem like they are not going to work long term. It is reasonable to have a need for some quiet time and to unwind from work. It is reasonable to need connection and validation of the relationship. It is reasonable to be upset.

He is not being reasonable about how he interacts with you. He is taking your lack of ability to be social at the level he needs as a rejection of him and in turn rejecting you. This is a lashing out response and it is not appropriate or effective. It will either result in the dissolution of the relationship or it will result in longer term toxic behaviours which will then result in the relationship falling apart.

You need to work a little less. That is basically the conclusion you have come to above and that may take time to enact, but it needs to happen. Neither of you will be happy until then. So your action should probably be to reduce just as you have said.

On your partner’s end he needs to build his own supports to take some of the load off you. He has a lot of free time that he could use going to a rock climbing class or something similar. That would give him the social interaction he cannot get from you at the moment. He also needs to work on how he talks to you about needs and his responses. He can’t put his self worth entirely in your hands. It is unsafe for his wellbeing and horribly damaging to your relationship. He needs to internally validate his worth and that is a skill, not a trait, he can learn that.

Some of what you describe above sounds like he doesn’t really understand ASD/ADHD very well and doesn’t get how burnout works. Maybe he could spend some time learning about how to be safe and healthy for himself in a relationship with someone on the spectrum? It is hard to know how he would react to hearing this, but he needs to recognise that a relationship with you is not the same as a relationship with a neurotypical and he needs to take care of himself to be safe in that relationship. It is not worse, but it is different. If he doesn’t learn how to manage his needs then they will continue to be unfulfilled and he will have a bad time.

And honestly, the dog situation is just devastating. If my partner lost their companion animal I would expect up to 6 months of very low function. For you to be working in this condition may suggest you are not able to grieve properly and are working to be away from demands, but it could also be it just doesn’t affect you in the same way it would affect my partner, we are all different. Take care of yourself and grieve as you need to, maybe spend some time talking to him about it if you feel safe doing so.

Oh, and consider planning out movie night or similar things, make it explicit what you need and book it in. Those expectations in advance can help.

So yeah, NTA, but also, nobody is fully shitty here, his behaviour seems less ideal, both of you can do things to make life better, I think this is salvageable.

One thing that gets me about AI chat agents is the idea of attack surface. If you have a clearly defined protocol you can curtail most of the possible attacks by narrowing things, only accepting well formed requests, and validating both on the user end and then on the server end before processing anything. An LLM is inherently wide in attack surface given the way it is structured. It can take a prompt which can be any set of characters connected together into tokens. These tokens can’t easily be filtered for intent or goal and yet they can get the LLM to drop other rules or restrictions because they are just other prompts.

A simple coded padlock is not very secure, but a door with no walls is less secure.

There are a few options for age verification, but the one I like best is at the ISP/device level. You make the account at the ISP level have a flag for being a kid friendly service. You could also have the government establish simple tools for parents to install on their kids devices which would limit other apps and services, for example by blocking porn or violent age inappropriate content. You could even have it tie in with the age advice for film classification, though the current classification guidelines are pretty horrible. All of that could be handled by a very small government team and could be deliverable in 6 months.

These are active steps a parent can take to limit their child’s exposure to the internet and do not come with added cost to the parent. They would be just as available for someone who is poor as for someone who is rich. It would be possible to protect kids from many of the more dangerous aspects of the internet while also leaving unmanaged devices free and clear, preserving the good things about the open internet.

Yes, they are fantastic. They do have a little bit of a Windows 95 aesthetic but I kind of like that.

Rubik’s cube was my favourite for a few years when I was commuting by train. I had a 40-60 minute trip each way for work and it was an amazing way of killing time without going mad.

Then podcasts and audio books came in and honestly, I can manage sitting still with audio playing. I need it to be stimulating enough, but running everything at 2x speed is fantastic and really makes a huge difference.

That said, I also have a notepad and pen so I can write things down while sitting, so I plan projects and write questions to be answered later. That helps a lot. I also have my phone which is great for passing time, Offline Games is a fantastic set of games that dont require purchases or ads. I also have my first aid kit on my belt and I regularly go through it and make sure all is well, along with my tech pouch. Organising those and cleaning them out works well.

To be clear, we have more guns now than we did in the 1990s. The big thing that changed was casual, unregisted, random firearm ownership, especially around the major cities. If you were rural you didn’t have much of a change, just registering your guns and vetting rid of any that were no longer legal like sawn off shotguns etc. For someone such as myself living in a major city while growing up I just didn’t see guns. Not until cops started carrying guns, which was a mistake in my opinion.

So we didn’t ban guns. We regulated them. The average person could gain access to a firearm by going through the process of licencing, registration, and so on. The average person couldn’t be bothered and just didn’t. We don’t really have handguns here for the most part, our gun culture is much more focused on rifles and shotguns, things that are useful for hunting and pest control.

Now the criminal side has always had guns. They won’t obey the laws for theft, violence, extortion, drugs, and so on, so why would they obey for guns? The handy thing is they would not have registered guns and if they get caught with those they get serious time, so they only carry when they really think they need it. That means fewer gang members running around with guns most of the time, so fewer options for things to go south all of a sudden in a crowded place. A targeted attack though is still a thing and yes, a drive by shooting is still a thing here, just rare. I was living two blocks down from one in the early 2010s in Melbourne, but that is honestly the rare case that it actually happens.

Given the rise of tobacco as a black market though, we are getting way more violence. The war on drugs is fought on both sides, and society is the bystander.

Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.

Yeah, it is insane. My partner used a vape to quit and it was actually useful. I titrated the nicotine level down by 10% per refill, usually taking about a fortnight to get through. The use level would increase for the first few days but drop back down by the next refill. By the end when we dropped all the way to zero there was so little nicotine it wasn’t really noticeable. After that it was just the behavioural habit and that dropped by itself after a few months.

Compared with nicotine gum and patches it was way more effective and really did result in a long term quit. They are now approaching 10 years quit and it was absolutely worth doing. Harm reduction would suggest using vapes to help people quit and honestly to replace smoking all together.