As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.

Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.

Have an updoot, Offspring-fan.

I don’t know about this specific case, but it’s common for the big name researchers not to do any actual research or play any direct part in generating their images. That’s often done by kids - 25 year old grad students, even 20 year old undergrads - or other trainees. Those people may not appreciate how easy it is to detect image manipulation and are still learning what kinds of ‘refining’ of imagery and datasets is acceptable, while the PI that pays their stipend or sponsors their visa rages at their inability to get an expected outcome or replicate a previous result.

Not saying there aren’t people out there just flat-out frauding, but these are group projects with a structure of trust and pressure that can muddy assignment of culpability. Like any committee or corporate action, it can be tough to say that any one individual is the guilty party or which people where just going along with the group.

Dog races are worse than horse races, mostly because the dogs are trained to be more-or-less psychotic. Horses, you can see as understanding the competition they’re in and being (at least mostly) willing participants.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

There’s a new theory going around that we age stepwise at 44, 60, and 78. Plus/minus a few years, individually, because biology is fuzzy.

And exercise isn’t very good for weight loss. There’s about the same calories in a 15 minute run as a 12 oz beer or a 30 gram “serving” of potato chips.

Maybe you can find a way to couple activity to something else that you do want to do. Exercise for its own sake is tough for me, but I don’t mind walking 15 minutes to get lunch, and then, obviously, 15 minutes back. The meme’s message is that you don’t need to sweat, get out of breath, or get swole to have meaningful physical activity.

Fun fact: armadillos are all born as identical quadruplets. If you saw 5, then one was either a parent or adopted.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

The relevant text of the law is

The products must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district.

so, I think “boys bathroom” only in the case where a school has trans-boy without puberty blockers or hormone therapy. Clearly a very edge case, but right-wing propaganda depends on blowing up rare events or special circumstances, pretending they’re happening everywhere, all the time, and therefore an immediate threat to the way their audience has always done things.

Typical cat just knocking things off shelves - the library is an inexhaustible playground.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

It’s like a bear-sized Matchbox car. And when they take it away, he starts eating the fluff, like a 2-ton toddler.

As someone who lives in a major US metro, I order online because I’d rather have a truck that’s already on the road make an extra stop at my house than drive a single passenger vehicle 20 minutes each way to get it. Put stuff in the shopping cart, wait for it to hit the free shipping threshold, order. May cost slightly more than stores, but I save on gas and CO2. Groceries, definite go to the store.

Only looking at northeast Ohio, the population and income maps you show are high along the Cleveland-Akron-Canton corridor, where the voter purge is west of there - Wooster & Mansfield.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.

The CO2 sensor calibration thing is inherent in the technology. They drift, a lot, and without occasional reference to a known standard, there’s no way to know whether “1000” is really 1000, or 500, or 2000, but exactly how that gets implemented seems to vary a lot. I have an SCD30 board from Adafruit, which internally records CO2 minima and, over the course of week or so, adjusts its calibration so that minimum is 420. That means no special calibration procedure, but it does have to be somewhere that it gets periodic fresh air exposure.

There’s a newer, photoacoustic sensor technology that doesn’t seem to require continuous recalibration, but (at least this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22956 ) require an extensive initial calibration.

My CO2 sensor has dramatically changed my routines. My space isn’t small - maybe 1200 square feet/100 sq m - but it must be pretty well sealed, because I can easily see my own breathing add to CO2. Nevermind cooking on the gas stove. Treadmill time adds 500+ ppm.

Now, I open windows every chance I get (which isn’t super often, because the dewpoint is 70 oF/20 oC in Atlanta), and I’ve shifted a lot of my cooking to an electric tea kettle, hot plate, and toaster oven.