Eh I’m going to take a turn on this. My Garmin watch measures my heart rhythm through the night and can absolutely report super poor sleep for the first few hours if I have 2 glasses of wine with supper, with even 1 glass I can see poorer sleep stats.

I can, however, mitigate a lot of that with 2 Aleve taken beforehand, and of course adequate hydration. So my suspicion is that alcohol is inflammatory, and the inflammation causes all sorts of problems that inflammation typically does. Maybe taking the anti inflammatory is enough to mitigate it all, maybe not. But certainly something bad is happening.

Election day is on a Tuesday. You don’t necessarily get the day off work. I think they are open until 7, but I wouldn’t know because I work 12 hour shifts 9 - 9 when I work. There is early voting but mail in just makes it so much easier. I can sit down and research all the candidates for each thing I am voting for.

And the mail in voting in Florida was great (strange to say something political in Florida was great, but it was). You opt in for mail in, then every election you can vote for, they have to send you a ballot. Sometimes you don’t even know there is an election going on and you get the ballot and you can research and find out why, and make an informed vote.

It’s just a system that makes sense and encourages more participation and allows for better engagement with your choices. So of course they are trying to dismantle it. It’s still good in Florida, but now you get opted back out after every major election and you have to go and get yourself opted back in. Small hurdle but I’m sure people have forgotten.

I like it. G as in gif, J as in Jif

I think more studies are still warranted. I agreed with you before, based on that available data, but later they have found that the bmi of people who use artificial sweeteners is the same as people who don’t.

2 takeaways can be considered here. First, that just keeps their palate attuned to extra sweetness, which if they just took a break for a bit from all sweetened stuff, even fruit might taste amazing again. Second, it’s possible that it directly affects their microphone, perhaps feeding poorer quality microbes which would lead to all kinds of things, perhaps increasing hunger for foods those microbes like, perhaps affecting their mood, etc.

But those really amount to the same thing. If you can cut sugar, and not supplement with other added sugar, you might consume more fruits and get the associated fiber, which is probably a good thing.

I think it’s notable that in winter you run it slower so that you can’t feel the air movement. You are just trying to get the warm air that rose to the ceiling to come back down gently by pulling some cooler air up to displace it.

It never works that way. People who shop around are shown the same fares as usual and the business are shown new higher fares… Then the businesses raise their costs for everything, since their expenses are higher. Eventually, it feels okay to raise the base level fares too.

Eh anyone can Google to get to the next step, and the next step, until their hodgepodge project is complete (eg, most of my projects), but not many would take the time to learn how to best optimize the code, keeping in mind the low level fundamentals of the operating system. Those courses actually do provide a nice minimal level of understanding of concepts to ensure the programmer understands what they are doing to a level that can build larger projects, and hopefully work well with others on a team.

Hmmm with this logic I could have super strength or something if there is a livable planet with 0.1x gravity. Hooray I could be a super hero!

Fear. The insurance is not for “oh what if I break an arm and don’t have much cash in the bank” it’s “if I get cancer, or need to spend even a week in the hospital, all my life’s savings will be taken by this. Better give boatloads of cash every month forever to protect what I have against this.”

Then the insurance company does its best to wriggle out of paying anyways.

I don’t think the freedom part is accurate, but the propaganda certainly is. The news tells them what to think and they don’t try further. They are convinced the United States has the best healthcare in the world, so nice, it cannot be put into a more affordable model without becoming unusably bad. They believe the Magic Market has created the absolute best and cheapest option out there, and the government can only mess that up. Individually, to those who use it, you almost always get complaints as we find ways to make it MORE inaccessible and MORE expensive (eg, concierge doctors), but even those people believe this is the best and cheapest way to do it. They themselves just got unlucky for their personal and not unique situation. The news told them so.

The hype does kind of die out since it’s a bit inconvenient to get it going vs just sitting on your couch. I have not played my quest 2 in a while, but when I was I would add to your list: 11 table tennis (great ping pong. Still prefer the real thing but it scratches the itch if you just want to play and no one to play with)

Demeo (board game. It’s a bit limited in levels but it was great to keep in touch with my brothers who both live in different states.)

Thrill of the Fight (look up boxing videos first to know how to correctly throw a punch, then try to apply that here. Surprisingly good workout shadow boxing a virtual opponent. You are just like “okay maybe I will play one round, not get too into it” and the next thing you know you are pouring sweat trying to win)

Real VR fishing (just nice backgrounds while doing essentially nothing with probably a bit too much action of fishing)

3D or 360 videos (however you can get them to play): it’s kind of cool that I had a (really low quality) video feed at my wedding. Someone set up a small 360 camera and I can drop back in and feel like a mouse at the table at the reception. I also wanted to rewatch Avatar in it too but I never got around to it.

If my memory serves me correctly, there was Adam and Eve (the first people), then they gave birth to Cain and Abel. Then after Cain kills Abel, he gets sent out to live as an outcast amongst “the other people of the world”. … Who? I think someone said one belief is Adam and Eve kept having kids and they became the rest of the people. So yeah, Cain was old.

It’s a rundown of the programs you need to run to make an Alexa replacement with Home Assistant connected to these smart speakers. You speak the wake word, and these speakers listen, then what? The speakers then send your audio file to your PC running Home Assistant, and that file gets sent to a program called Whisper, which parses your audio into text. Then you can have it either verbatim do commands (eg, “turn on the kitchen lights”), or run that text through an LLM, which you can run locally on a program called Ollama (it runs a few different flavors of local LLMs from Google, etc). Once the LLM generates a response, you send that text to a program called Piper, which turns the text into an audio file to play back through the smart speakers.

My experience is that the local LLMs are too hard to run unless you have a PC made for them. My Mini PC, which I use to run Home Assistant, had to run such a low quality model the hallucinations made it unusable. I gave it it hour by hour weather data for the day and it for some reason hallucinated temperatures that did not exist and told me to wear a jacket for my 95°F day. They do make LLM ready PCs though.

It’s the krebs cycle. If you look at how sugar is broken down by the cells to make atp, the actual energy your cells use, it takes C6H12O6 (sugar) and makes it into a few CO2 and H2O, getting energy (atp) from breaking it down into the components. That CO2 is then exhaled, which is I think what OP is referring to.

Note: it’s been a long time since I learned that in class so it is most likely somewhat incorrect

Yes, but the barrier to entry is much much higher. Also, we should trust licensed MDs, and if they are a public nuisance (eg, “vaccines cause autism!” nonsense), they should lose that license, and thus the trust.

One thing I’ve noticed about boomers is the constant TV on in the background. Very commonly FOX news, or newsmax these days, cnn, etc. Their world view is absolutely shaped by their media diet.

Meanwhile, our generation has always had the Internet. We view the world through that lens, which has a bit more of an expanded view, especially since people from those “scary” countries can come on places like reddit and post. Which is why I think the push for AI has been so strong. Now the Epstein class have some sort of means to taint what we read online, slowly moving our own worldview to the one the boomers have had from their own propaganda. It used to take owning the news stations to push their agenda, but now they had to pivot to now posting via bots to get their messages in.

All this to say, I think we had a nice gap where a kinder worldview emerged for some generations, but I worry that the generation growing up with the internet how it is becoming is going to slip back into the boomer thinking if it continues this way.

I was actually kind of successful in responding to the “our power grid can’t HANDLE EVs if everyone switched!” With “you’re telling me the power companies don’t want more business, and are unwilling to support it?”

They were not fully satisfied, but they didn’t have a response.

The AC situation in Europe is a little rough. I stayed in Paris in a niceish hotel and the AC could not keep up with the heat when I was there. It was maybe a 10 degree difference inside vs out, and the humidity did not drop much. This was 10 years ago so maybe more places have better ac now, but I don’t think every place had AC then.

Won’t this be related to the humidity/wet bulb temp?

It’s two fold: ads are annoying, and they actually work to slowly make you less happy without the advertised product.