There are many of these where I live. The lights are usually timed so that you just go straight through without having to stop. They’re much better than the traditional intersections that came before.
I will absolutely concede that they’re shitty for pedestrians or cyclists, however.
People who eat Dayton-style pizza are like the city of Dayton itself—smelly inside and bereft of true purpose. Those of us in the US who haven’t been so psychically damaged wouldn’t eat that shit.
(I’m only just learning about the disgusting gutter pizza. I don’t like Dayton because my last company was slowly destroyed over several years by a company that was headquartered in Dayton. I associate the city with the asshole who was CEO. Fuck you, Chris! I’ve heard Dayton is, at worst, not great, so take my comment as the joke it is.)
I just kinda vaguely name them after what they do and how big they are:
smol: my tiny little 2 bay Synology NAS that I’m no longer using
medium: my R620 with 4x 18TB drives that is my current NAS (medium, because it’s larger than my previous NAS). Is also a k3s worker and provides NFS PVCs.
big: my old full-tower gaming rig that’s a k3s worker and runs my Home Assistant VM
molecule: my current mini-ITX gaming rig and primary computer, also serves as the k3s master node and runs a lot of my home automation stuff. I think I picked molecule because it’s REALLY tiny (it’s in a Dan Cases A4v2, I think?) and it has a bunch of small stuff running on it (containers and pods)
monolith: my old T440p laptop. It’s a large, black, featureless slab that doesn’t do much
slab: my new Framework 13 laptop. I just kinda looked at it and said, “that’s a nice slab of metal”
All of the above running Linux. I tinkered with Ubuntu for the NAS (because I heard Ubuntu was good at ZFS), but I still absolutely hate Ubuntu, so it’s all Arch Linux.
As others have said, the inner child is an incredibly useful metaphor for trauma/therapy. The way your brain reacts to trauma is to basically create a bookmark of you at that time. If you manage to live through the trauma, then clearly, the emotions you felt and the actions you took worked perfectly!
Well, that was probably true in prehistory, but nowadays it’s a big fucking stupid liability. Like, for example, say I’m doing my adult job at $company and my coworker Todd Fuckwit (esq.) says something shitty about suicide that reminds my brain of an old bookmark. All of the sudden, my emotional state is transported back to when Young Badabinski saw the results of a parental suicide attempt and thought it was entirely their fault and Badabinski deserved it (Important note, this is not regular PTSD with vivid hallucinations/flashbacks, this is more about emotions). Now I’m freaking out in the meeting room and abruptly leave because I feel like a 12 year old who has just had their world ended, and escaping us what I did back then.
The way you heal this is to try to create a connection with that bookmark of yourself and then give yourself what you needed back then. Over many therapy sessions, I was able to help young Badabinski realize that none of that was their fault, that they didn’t deserve to see that, and that they should have had the warm and loving care of both of their parents. And you know what? It really fucking worked.
For more chronic cases (like a lot of emotional neglect), your inner child is just kinda… There? Like, the bookmark part of the metaphor breaks down a bit. Your inner child represents the tender emotions that were left unhandled and childhood needs that were left unmet. A lot of my therapy nowadays is helping my inner child feel less deprived and more loved on a day-to-day basis, because if I don’t take care of myself enough in the ways I need, then my brain will pull up the chronic inner child and I’ll be miserable for days/weeks/months. In contrast, the parts of my life where I’ve permanently changed my day-to-day behavior feel so much more fulfilling and wonderful. It’s not just about avoiding the negatives, you end up focusing more on achieving the positive.
I personally like describing it as a metaphor. I was a bit of an angry skeptic when I was younger (due to the aforementioned parent moving to a bunch of new-age crystal healing shit after their recovery and then trying to push it on me when I absolutely did not believe in the validity of those methods), so I didn’t like how metaphysical and “touchy-feely” an inner child felt. I’m no longer skeptical of this idea am a much more emotionally liberated person. I often think of my inner child as if it were an active presence in my mind (it feels more effective to do so for me). It took a lot of time time for me to reach that place. I believe that explaining it as a metaphor will get through to people who would otherwise spurn the concept. Metaphor or not, I still want to help the little human that is past me, and I’d love to be able to drink a potion that would let me talk to that twelve year old.
Eating this stuff would be about as bad as eating any regular cat litter that uses Fuller’s earth as the primary absorbent. The extra special ingredient (powdered quartz) is effectively nontoxic when ingested. The real issue is the chronic exposure to very fine silica dust.
Edit: to clarify, I do not believe that it would be safe for humans or animals to use this as cat litter. Just realized that this comment might have been taken as a “well akshually it’s fine.” It is not fine, silicosis is a dreadful condition.
So I’d like to chime in. It looks the the two primary ingredients for ZEP-o-zorb are Fuller’s earth and powdered quartz.
First, Fuller’s earth. This is good stuff! It’s actually often used as an industrial absorbent for chemical spills (the purpose of ZEP-o-zorb), as well as in some types of cat litter. It totally makes sense why this stuff would work well for you, and I understand why you’ve been using it for a year. It’s perfect for the task and has basically no downsides.
Now, about the powdered quartz… Chemically known as silicon dioxide. It’s often refered to as silica. Silica is also good stuff! It’s in concrete, it’s the main component of glass, and of particular interest for your application, it’s very good at absorbing volatile organic smelly stuff. Seems perfect, right?
Unfortunately, powdered quartz has a downside. When it’s in a very fine powder, it produces a lot of dust. This silicon dioxide dust is incredibly harmful to your lungs. Long-term exposure to silicon dioxide dust results in silicosis, which is a really serious illness that kills tens of thousands of people every year. Inhaling that dust can also give you lung cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other autoimmune disorders.
I totally understand why you felt that this product was a great option! I don’t doubt that it serves as an absolutely excellent cat litter. I had two kitties that took the smelliest shits, and I was always searching for ways to fix that (either through diet, litter, stress reduction, or other things). I also understand how upsetting it can be to share something with people and be met with disbelief, denial, and accusations. However, I really want to urge you to look past all of that and reconsider your use of this product. The silica dust is practically invisible and tasteless, and it had the chance to cause you many years of problems. You and your cat deserve to be healthy.
I tip 20% or $5 on takeout orders, whatever is larger (provided nothing goes terribly wrong). I have the means, and I remember how much I fucking hated working in retail. I depend on these people to feed me and I appreciate that they’re willing to do it (especially with how poorly they get treated at times). If I can make someone’s day better then it’s worth it to me.
That being said, I hate tip culture and wish that the laws in my country around tipping would change. This is getting off topic now (since I think that the people doing takeout orders aren’t subject to this), but it’s absurd that we let restraunts pay $3.50 an hour if someone is making the rest of the minimum wage in tips. If I tip someone, I want it to be because I really appreciate what they did. I don’t want to be paying their wages, they should be receiving a livable wage no matter what. I know that refusing to tip won’t change that, so I just go along with it.
I’ve also said nice things about it, and it’s just because I’m happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don’t get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
Sodium-ion batteries appear promising. Like, the energy density by weight of the current market offerings is absolutely too low to be useful for vehicles, but there’s hope that can be improved in a relatively short timescale. Prices should be pretty good when factories finish tooling up, and most chemistries use no rare earth metals. Current densities seem great for grid storage, which is where hydrogen has the most potential right now (imo).
I still like the idea of hydrogen for some forms of transportation (freight trains, container ships, possibly aircraft if energy density could be increased or aircraft weight decreased somehow) and as a strategic emergency energy reserve. It’d be great to have more grid resilience as the environment continues to decay. I just worry about the energy costs that come with transporting hydrogen for cars and individual transport. Pipelines seem like they’d be challenging, and trucking it around seems a bit wasteful. In-situ generation would be ideal if power and water are available and hydrolysis can be made more efficient and compact, but that’s not possible everywhere.
I dunno. I’m glad it’s not my job to figure out the actual energy cost of everything, but I’m really hoping grid-scale sodium-ion batteries will become a reality sooner rather than later, and that we’ll see sodium-ion batteries in cars within the next 10-15 years.
lol, I’d love to see the fucking ruin of the world we’d live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it’ll happen some day, but in the meantime it’s job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.
I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It’ll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.
I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.
Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.
I’m sorry you had such a poor experience with men and relationships. It’s not my place to speculate, but it sounds like you may have had some really harrowing experiences. It’s good that you’ve found a lifestyle that makes you happy. Your first comment in this thread is really painful to read and makes me very sad. It’s also not my place to debate with you about whether or not your comment is right/good, so instead I’ll just share some of my background and why I feel pain when I read it.
I was absolutely raised to be “manly.” My father, the Boy Scouts, popular media—all of it seemed like it was encouraging me to just “toughen up” and be strong. Nobody ever talked to me about feelings except anger. My dad was a great role model for anger. However, I was small. I was weak. I had allergies and asthma. I was sensitive and scared of violence. I cried easily. I was cuddly. It was very difficult for me to square what was expected of me with the reality of who I was, so for a long time I was just angry and numb and tried to hide.
I had a series of relationships where I failed to be emotionally present with my partner and rather than fixing it, I just emotionally whipped myself raw in front of them. I thought that punishment was the only way to be accepted. I finally met someone who showed me what it was to feel and helped me see a therapist. I was able to unpick a lot of the “manly” crap, and nowadays I’m pretty happy in my skin. I crochet with my partner. We talk freely and openly about our feelings. We call each other disgustingly cute pet names. We hold each other and cry when bad things happen. We both continue to go to therapy, and we’re always looking for ways to improve and deepen our relationship.
For all of that, there’s still the old raw spot in my mind. Inside of me, I’ll always have that kid who just wanted a hug and instead got contempt and judgement. He was so lonely and miserable and felt like there wasn’t anything nice in the world for him. He felt so confused and broken and wrong, because why couldn’t he just be manly? Why couldn’t he be a rock? That’s the raw spot that your comment pokes for me. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
Having typed all that out, I guess I’ll make one request. I don’t know what exactly you went through, and I sure as hell won’t invalidate it, whatever it was. All I’d ask is that you consider that there may be more than just sex and hate in the heart of the men you walk by. You don’t have to be in a relationship or like men or want to be around them, but the world might seem like a bit better of a place for you.
Thanks for pointing this out, I’ve updated my comment to get rid of the unnecessary distinction.
In addition to the fact that it’s not just English via hand gestures, I believe it’s done because sign language is speech, with all of the benefits that comes with. There are extra channels of communication present in sign language beyond just the words. There’s equivalents of tone and inflection, and (I beleive) even accents. Like, this video of this lady performing “Fuck You” in ASL is what made it click for me when I first saw it many years ago. She’s just so fucking expressive, in a way that subtitles could never be.
EDIT: changed my wording to be more accurate, since sign language literally is speech through a different medium. There’s no need to draw an unnecessary boundary.
I think you may be mixing up Project Orion (let’s chuck bombs out of the back to make us go zoom) with NERVA (a nuclear thermal rocket engine where the heat from chemical reactions is replaced with heat from a nuclear reactor to generate gas expansion out of a nozzle). Something like NERVA is actually a great idea. Let me tell you why!
It’s completely clean (unlike Orion and fission-fragment rockets)
it provides extremely high efficiency
it provides lots of thrust
No oxidizer is needed
For automated probes, the extreme efficiency and low thrust of ion thrusters makes perfect sense. If we ever want to send squishy humans further afield, we need something with more thrust so we can have shorter transit times (radiation is a bastard). Musk is supposedly going to Mars with Starship, and the Raptor engine is a marvel of engineering. I don’t like the man and I’m not confident that he’ll actually follow through with his plan, but the engineers at SpaceX are doing some crazy shit that might make it happen.
Just think though, if the engine was literally twice as efficient and they didn’t need to lug around a tank of oxidizer, how much time could they shave off their transit? How much more could they send to Mars? Plus, they could potentially reduce the number of big-ass rockets they have to launch from Earth to refuel. If you can ISRU methane, then I imagine you could probably get hydrogen.
There are problems that still need to be resolved (the first that comes to mind is how to deal with cryogenic hydrogen boiling off), but like, the US had a nuclear thermal engine in the 70s. It was approved for use in space, but congress cut funding after the space race concluded so it never flew.
I’m happy to see that NASA is once again researching nuclear thermal rockets. Maybe we’ll get somewhere this time.