BubbleMonkey

I babysat my cousin’s 3 kids under 5 for the year I lived in their basement (free rent trade)

And above all the noise and hassle and all, the day I knew kids definitely weren’t for me… was the day the parents went out for one of their “be home tomorrow, probably” nights, knowing full well at least one of the kids had the flu.

It ended up being all three of them. All I did all night was give baths, sooth crying, change bedding, and clean up vomit.

I managed to keep them alive and relatively comfortable, but I don’t ever want to do anything even close to that ever again.

I want science to win so that’s a good option anyway.

Are you also upset when they do a donation drive and have a pre-article header literally asking for money?

Normally I’m not a fan of transparent background scrolling content (it’s obnoxious and a waste of space) but the little car was a cute touch. Entirely unnecessary, but cute.

You absolutely must, if you own such a gem, refer to it as the peamobile. Both because it is gloriously whimsical, perfectly matching the aesthetic of the vehicle, and because it just sounds fun in that funny innuendo sort of way.

Keep in mind that all of these could be more or less stopped if there was any real desire to do so.

But there isn’t.

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/phone-companies-can-filter-out-robocalls-they-just-arent-doing-it/

The nice thing about it is that this isn’t actually heating an area, it heats you and the mattress/blankets around you, basically making a microclimate in your sleepy cocoon. Very very efficient, even if your electric rates aren’t great (mine really aren’t either, but it still barely touches it, they just don’t use a lot of electricity). I put my heated pad under a padded pad to help retain and even out the heat, and it helps a lot.

Happy to help either way! So here’s some more info!

https://electricado.com/how-much-electricity-does-heated-mattress-pad-use/

Most of the below comes from that link-

60-100 watts is roughly average energy use, but you can get lower, and smaller pads will use less.

Energy Cost = (Wattage x Usage Hours) / 1000 x Electricity Rate

For example, let’s assume your heated mattress pad has a wattage of 75 watts, you use it for 8 hours per night, and your electricity rate is $0.12 per kWh. The calculation would be as follows:

Energy Cost = (75 watts x 8 hours) / 1000 x $0.12 = $0.072 per night

For one mattress pad for a 30-day month with the above assumptions, it would run you a whopping $2.16/mth.

Yeah, I’m basically built for tropical environments. I’m cold at 75 unless I have a sweatshirt on. And I still wear that big fuzzy bathrobe through most of summer (I don’t have AC, and never have, but I do have dehumidifiers for when it’s really warm, and that’s generally enough).

Heated mattress pads on my bed and couch, mostly. And a heated chair pad when working. They cost a ton less to run than filling a drafty space with gas-warmed air, and are mostly sufficient. A month of both of the big pads being constantly on, on high, barely touches my electric bill, but my gas bill for heat… I keep it that cold because that’s still around $200 usd/mth. If I bump it to 65/18.3, it shoots up to the $350-400+ range. And since I’m not actually comfortable at 18.3 either (26-33/80-90 is about my sweet spot), might as well just keep it at 15.6 and save the money :)

So those, and fuzzy socks, fuzzy pajama pants, and a fuzzy bathrobe. Maybe a high-heat pad here and there, if I’m feeling luxurious or my back hurts. A friend of mine does something similar, but uses heated vest and socks to take the warm along with (rechargeable ofc).

I really enjoy coconut oil as a rough weather gauge.

I cook with it a lot, but prefer it to be in liquid form for easy measure (which only happens in the warmer bits of summer here), so in winter, I keep a jar of it on top of a particularly warm heat vent.

I keep my place at 60f/15.6c in winter or it costs a fortune to heat. When it’s relatively warm out, the heat doesn’t kick on often enough to melt it, but when it’s real cold/windy the entire thing will be liquid.

I find this wholly unsurprising.

All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data. I don’t give a flying fuck if they want to call it proprietary, they don’t own most of the data in the first place. Even if they bought it, it doesn’t belong to them, just like we don’t own digital movies we buy.

And if even a single piece of that training data doesn’t have proper licensing for that specific use for that specific model, or they are ever found to have withheld any of the data, the model as a whole should be immediately scrapped, along with everything even tangentially derived from it, and the company should be fined fully double whatever amount of money that model generated or one years revenue for the company as a whole, whichever is more (no I don’t care if this leads to bankruptcy, should have thought about that before you stole data), and like use if for affordable housing programs or public schools or something, whatever.

They can try again with clean data, also subject to review. One time. Second time they do the same shady shit, permanently banned from the entire sector.

But regardless, we need to stop rewarding them for this behavior. And we need the consequences to actually hurt or we can expect it to get worse, not better.

And here I was using windows in a VM to run rstudio 😪

Times have changed for sure. (Tho I haven’t used rstudio for many years and it may still be unsupported)

Surprisingly unhelpful, thanks! :)

That’s why I don’t swap for fedora. That’s the kind of help you tend to get unless you know someone who knows the distro, so I guess thanks for exemplifying :)

I haven’t tried those, but I did hop a bit on a bad hard drive. mint was too much (also o just hate it, tbh). Antixlinux was too much and that’s meant to run off a flash drive so the drive was failing, and now it isn’t (new 15 year old drive!!!) and Ubuntu is still a bit too much. But it runs a web browser which is all I need for a bedroom media device. I’d like more, but it’s enough.

But since then I’m seeking a different end goal. I was looking to optimize that old pos, but now if it just runs a browser and runs Plex web, I’m happy because it’s so old I can’t expect it to download for me… it can do, but not well and I have other machines for that. I tried to use it as a download device but lol, nope, can’t handle that many p2p connections on 4g ram.

But I’ll try those on flash drives and see what they can do for me! Thanks for the recommend!

I’m probably going to get downvoted for this but I’m a Linux noob overall…. Windows has historically been what I’ve used. Or Ubuntu. I did distrohop to antixLinux and other really super small distros, but they didn’t fix my problems and I ended up back on relatively bloaty Ubuntu for further testing and sadly it solved bout a third of my problems (the hardware is ancient enterprise shit with a whopping 4gb ram and 16 usb ports)

I’ve been looking for a Debian based system to replace Ubuntu because I’m a noob and Debian-based is super different from the fedora.

I’m sure fedora is great! Tons of people love it! But for a noob is can be really daunting. Especially when most Linux instructions come in three flavors “Ubuntu/debian” and 2 other things. Who knows which two. You, the advanced Linux user, probably know which two but your noob doesn’t. And doesn’t understand the difference.

I’m not a total noob but I prefer Debian because I know a person who gets Debian and can help me. If I knew a fedora user that was actually willing to help me, I’d use that, but I’ve never met one so I’ll stick with what I know.

Make a scramble! It takes lots of ingredients, plus egg, but the egg is kinda on the side and largely irrelevant.

It’s all the ingredients that make the scramble worth it. Like life. It wouldn’t be great if everyone were… wait… no…

Lots of flavors make the dish good. Yep that works.

I really never got into EverQuest. Maybe I’ll try again, but honestly at this point I’m sort of over social games. I played a lot of neverwinter when I was transitioning off wow, and it did the job, but I’ve not found any sort of mmo since that really makes me want to play… because all I want to do most of the time is solo play and pug dungeons (always a disappointment).

I used to be a raid leader and main healer for the guilds’ clan (we had a group of iirc 6 casual guilds that shared forums and a vent server and would do stuff together like a super guild) and I miss doing that but… not enough to try to find it again I guess.

I desperately want to be into games like helldivers or other “major hit” social play games, but they are without fail not my style of game. So… eh. I think that time in my life is just gone. Maybe when immersive VR is a major thing and there are mmos for it (ideally that don’t give me horrible motion sickness), that sounds pretty cool. But I won’t wait around with bated breath.

I don’t really use steam and I have this problem too. I buy discs used, and I don’t always look up gameplay videos… so yeah, often not my cup of tea turns out. But resellable if I want down the line, at least.

Just the other day I bought a Wii super monkeyball game that uses the balance board. I have everything I need to play it, but the chances of actually doing that are pretty slim, tbh. A lot of the older games (anything under $10 for consoles more than a decade old, really) I buy are like that. “Might be fun, might never get played, but in an emergency, can be sold”.

I miss playing mmos, but none of them have hit like vanilla wow on a pve server, and now I hate people too much to bother. If I could spin up a server of my own and just play by myself or with a few people I know, sure, but most games don’t allow that. So single player it is.

Jokes on them, I don’t have family and don’t really listen to music.

Checkmate, AI-theists!

Researchers gave some ants stilts, so hey why not spider flip flops?

FOR SCIENCE!!!

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/insects/tiny-stilts-some-ants-amputated-legs-others-heres-why.htm

Edit to add: you could totally put flip flops on these cute paws!!!