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.

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.

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

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.

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

There really should be a certification course for using AI safely. I’m slop coding a hobby app and I’m shocked at how much it FEELS like it can do, because it can do amazing things, yet fails in the strangest ways. When it feels like it can get away with it, it forgets earlier discussions and moves on without it. So you can spend time hammering out a whole section of code, then move on, and AI will rip out everything that references that code and think of a different way in the moment and code that in instead. It won’t be the same. It probably won’t work, or at least won’t pass all test cases. But if you aren’t paying attention and keep coding, your original part of the project is no longer functioning and you won’t understand why. But every step of the way it’s confident in its answers and you won’t suspect that it fundamentally no longer understands the project.

To be fair, they were a LONG way from federation rules enforcement.

Lemmy used to be too “left wing” for me. I felt like my opinions were not a great match for the group here, so I tended to not comment much.

Then simultaneously Lemmy’s opinions seemed to make more sense (eg, billionaires should not exist, which is proving true in the current political climate), and also, more “right wing” people have arrived. And they are aggressive and vocal (eg DEMOCRAT cities will be hell to live in and hurt you and arrest you if you fart in public or something).

So actually I think maybe just bots have started to arrive.

I grew up with the calendar as shown here. Like bookends on a shelf. The week “ends”.

My wife’s work insists weeks start on Mondays. This allows them to schedule her differently and not get overtime according to their scheduling.

Mine does the same, but insists the week starts on Saturdays.

I don’t know why the world cannot decide a proper schema for this.

For one example, it’s likely relatively easy to determine with 95% accuracy if you are pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Would you want your job to know that before you have federal protection for your job? They might let you go before having to deal with the FMLA headache, even if you are a potential father who might also take time off and be protected. Also, though current Obamacare rules disallow preexisting conditions, that could always change. Would you want something like your search history raising your premiums? “Oh I see you likely experience migraines, that puts you in a higher risk category for X. Your premium will be higher.” Same for job applications “oh, [sees you might get migraines which are FMLA protected], we decided to go with another candidate”

My Christian mom didn’t let us watch Harry Potter because our church said it was evil. I guess it’s not for Christians either, though I think that has changed and it’s fine now.

Isn’t that strange though? Catholics trace themselves back to the disciples (though I think Roman and Orthodox both claim this), yet the new ones that split somewhat recently claim they are the real ones.

A Canadian friend told Americans do the same thing, we just put our word at the beginning.

“Hey, get off my car!” “Get off my car, eh!”

Not sure if he was being serious though.

I actually would kind of like ai in games. Not slop visuals though. What I really would love would be in a VR game, going up to an NPC, and getting a feel for different cultures of the world I’m in through talking. Maybe you have to have a certain type of conversation to find out the plot for a side quest, or talk to a guard at a bar and work your way to find out the shift rotation as he gets drunk or something so you can infiltrate the castle.

I feel like ai could be useful like that…but getting rid of artists in favor of ai slop is just the worst way to implement this AI thing.

Ah so the Uber business model then