In summary: Neoliberalism.

The calming down and stress relief all happens once the petting session ends.

Correlation and Causation are just fancy-pantsy words used by experts to lie to us common folk!

Surelly something capable of being trickle charged from a solar panel would be a superior option, at least for camping or any sort of situation were having no access to power would last for days.

Thinking about it, the “power outage” use case is probably more than sufficiently different from “camping” that which is the one you care most about has a big weight on the requirements for the portable power station.

For every random genetic change that did something that turned out to be useful, there were countless ones that did nothing useful at all or were even counter-productive (to get a sense of how many “tries” there were, consider every time every beetle in the World tries to reproduce times how many eggs they lay times several random genetic changes per egg times millions or billions of years - we’re talking grains of sand in a beach level or even more, and this is just for one kind of creature that doesn’t even reproduce all that frequently - in things like bacteria there are so many reproducing so many times that we actually see evolution in action in a short time frame, for example with the growth of antibiotic resistance).

Then for all those random genetic changes that did something that turned out useful, there are only going to be some were that make enough of a difference in terms of increasing the survival of a beetle till reproduction and way more that didn’t make a difference.

You know what happen to all those quadrillions or whatever of tries that went nowhere? We’ll never know about them because the creatures in question are long dead (if their eggs were viable to begin with). We’ll only ever know about the random genetic changes which did work well enough to give reproductive advantages.

[There are actually a lot of cognitive falacies around how we perceive success because we only really get to know about what worked, not about the countless things that didn’t work. A good example is how most people pretty much only hear about Startups that made it big, yet for every Startup that does succeed enough to become widelly known there are tends or even hundreds of thousands that fail and we never hear about, so it might seem that Startups are generally successful when the reality is, in average, the very opposite]

Continuing on the Evolution story, if the previous part of the process worked based on the Maths of “trully insane large numbers”, at this point we add an effect akin to compounding interest: even if a genetic change adds a very small increase in reproduction for an animal - say, a beetle with a given random genetic change that did do something useful and gives it a 1% higher chance of successfully reproduce - as long as that trait gets passed down to the next generation, it means (rought) that all else be the same there will be 101 beetles born with that change for every 100 beetles born without it, for every reproductive cycle. This might seems little but as I said it compounds, so for example after 71 generations that will have grown to 200 for every 100 and it will keep growing.

This is how even a random genetic change that gives even just a tiny increase in success of living till reproduction and reproduction itself will, given enough time, come to dominate a population.

And then all those slightly different beetles keep on having the random genetic changes happen (the first part of the process) and those additional changes that did work and gave a tiny bit more success over that ones with just the original change will get the compounding part of the process, so those are the ones for whom there are more and more individuals, to which in turn the same process applies.

TL;DR (but you should)

A beetle with a random genetic change that affected its shell that makes it every so slightly harder to spot for predators in a place that has lots of water droplets on leaves will have more descendants than the rest. Some of those will randomly get additional changes that make that effect even more successful at making the beetle harder to detect for predators thus having even more descendants than the rest. Amongst those, the ones with random changes that make it even better will have more descendants and so on: changes towards looking more and more like a water-dropplet make the beetles with them more successful at reproducing that those without the changes.

Given enough time and enough beetles this is how you go from beetles with a “normal” carapace to beetles with a mirror-like carapace.

Evolution doens’t chose anything, it’s just one big statistical N-dimensional field of probabilites with local stable minima (points of maximum success at reproducing) and then some random genetic changes might just happen to matematically nudge a subset of the beetle population towards a specific stable minima on some characteristic (i.e. on one of dimension of those N dimensions) but it could’ve just as easilly and by chance have been a different one, but that didn’t happen so we’ll never hear about it (it’s a bit like the answer to the “Why has evolution made humans that think?” question - "Because if it didn’t made us think we wouldn’t be thinking about it, and if it made humans look different that different being would be what we think is “human”).

Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).

Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).

IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.

The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.

Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.

Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).

Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.

Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.

So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?

One more reason to, when having the choice, prefer GoG over the rest.

Actually I just checked GoG without going through a VPN (from work) and I see the same “Lowest price in the last 30 days before discount” information, so maybe GoG just does it for all of Europe or maybe even always.

In other words, I don’t think is going via na IP in that specific country that’s doing it.

Guess I’ve just chosen the right country to point my VPN to then :)

In my country, to crack down on tax evasion by small businesses people can give their tax payer number when they buy something (say food at a restaurant) and a copy of the receipt automatically gets passed on to the taxman (there’s a lottery on those and people can get some money from it, which is how the State incentivises people to do this, plus you can get some tax discounts on some kinds of expenses such as medicine).

All this to say that the idea of the taxman getting a copy of an itemized receipt for sex work services is just delicious.

PS: Around here sex work is unregulated, meaning not illegal (though profiting of other people’s sex work is illegal) but not explicitly legal and regulated.

Here in Europe they’re forced to show the lowest price of the last 30 days and I was looking at some games in GoG and for several interesting games their Black Friday “discounted” price is €15 whilst the lowest price in the last 30 days is €10.

So the Black Friday “discount” is in fact 50% more expensive than the previous time that game had a “discount” which happenned not even that long ago.

The places I know were they do cook stuff using volcanic heat (in Peru and the Azores islands which are part of Portugal) they do it by digging a hole in an area were the ground is hot from volcanic heat and putting a pan cooking in it (they cover it all to keep the heat).

So it’s more a local technique for cooking for free that then evolved into a couple of traditional dishes.

Never heard of trying to roast stuff on the output of a geyser.

The amount of effort to obtain the female-impressing rock by the crow is far less than by the human, thus indicating that the crow is the wisest of the two.

Meat eating is actually a very cultural thing.

In India, for example, there is an area where most people are vegetarian and have been so for centuries.

My point about how people are psychologically pushed to consume also applies here.

Further, excessive meat eating (and the average meat consumption in most Western countries is at those levels) is actually bad for one’s health and life expectancy, so even from a pure individual selfishness point of view people aren’t doing what’s best for themselves, which would indicate there’s more to it than merelly individuals being selfish.

That said, I agree that people should eat less meat, it’s just the expectation that they’re informed enough (at various levels) to do it that I find unrealistic.

It’s another of those things which in order to change needs to be pushed as education to all of society, while what we really have is massive economic interests pushing in the very opposite direction.

Certainly that goes a long way to explain why so many think LLMs are actually intelligent.

Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.

Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.

Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?

Then there’s all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that “it’s people’s fault” when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.

Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it’s a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we’re all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don’t even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.

Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.