The short version is that life needs something that’s at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.

The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They’re ignoring the rapidity which is implied by “burning”. But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you’d need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It’s a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.

But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There’s a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it’s stable enough that it’s not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.

A bad exhaust can be extremely loud, but while it negatively impacts comfort, noise level, and emissions it doesn’t impact the drivability or safety of the vehicle. So people who struggle to cover the costs of vehicle maintenance will often neglect it.

Millennial with the opposite experience here. Once upon a time I’d use the phone all the time, could spend hours wandering the house and talking with friends, and calling anyone for any purpose was never a problem.

Then I got a job answering phones for Comcast, was there less than a year before I quit. It’s been about two decades since then but it installed a hatred of phones in me that has lasted to this day.

Alternatively you do like the Parker Solar Probe and do 7 Venus flybys, bleeding off a little speed each time with an inverse gravity assist.

Recover several hundred GB of disk space, if my team’s experience was any indication.

I was casting a video to my shield from my phone and ended up needing to pause for a phone call during an ad roll. Pausing worked fine but the play button on my phone was completely unresponsive after. Thankfully the shield remote still worked, but clearly play/pause during ads is handled differently than during normal videos and something is broken.

It was and still is valuable to be able to maintain the devices and machines that you and people around you use. I’m not sure why you seem to be implying that stopped being the case for cars.

Yeah, I’m just sort of also complaining because it feels like I have to use it.

I have a hobby development project with a modest community and maintain a Discord server basically because it’s necessary in order to avoid reducing my potential community reach by at least 50%.

I’m active on GitHub and respond to comments and issues there. I maintain an official thread for my project on the official forum for the game it’s related to. I also keep all documentation, downloads, and guides off Discord and on the clearnet. Discord is still easily 80% or more of where people look for information about the project.

Now look into °De. It’s upside down!

The pictures aren’t very good I’ll grant you that, but they definitely don’t require even one kWh per image, and besides that basically everything made with a computer costs power. We waste power on nonsense just fine without the help of LLMs or diffusion models.

It’s an extremely bizarre suggestion given your request. I do want to defend the game (though not the suggestion) a little though.

It initially presents as you say, but offers you opportunities to fight back in your capacity as border control. Letting in the right people can help the resistance and incite a coup, or enable you and your families escape from the country. It isn’t just Be A Good Tankie Simulator 2013, though you can play it that way too.

D-Brand paid him to bleach it.

Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it’s not doing much, but that’s not really a useful comparison. We’re talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.

But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.

On the overall scale of the universe? No, not even remotely close. On the local scale of the Earth, generally yes.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I definitely didn’t have gravity explained in school as the rotation of an objects 4-vector due to a temporal gradient.

Micro$oft

I dislike Microsoft and basically everything they’ve done with Windows post-7. Every machine I own that isn’t expressly for gaming is running Linux, and one of the two that are for gaming is also running Linux. When I build a new gaming tower to replace my current Windows one it will also run Linux, I just can’t be bothered to switch OSes mid-way.

And yet people using childish denigrating nicknames like this immediately makes me disinclined to engage with the conversation. I don’t understand how anyone expects to be taken seriously while throwing around schoolyard-grade name-calling like this.

For those of you who’ve never experienced the joy of PowerBuilder, this could often happen in their IDE due to debug mode actually altering the state of some variables.

More specifically, if you watched a variable or property then it would be initialised to a default value by the debugger if it didn’t already exist, so any errors that were happening due to null values/references would just magically stop.

Another fun one that made debugging difficult, “local” scoping is shared between multiple instances of the same event. So if you had, say, a mouse move event that fired ten times as the cursor transited a row and in that event you set something like integer li_current_x = xpos the most recent assignment would quash the value of li_current_x in every instance of that event that was currently executing.

…that’s what “aging like wine”, means, no?

I hate drive-thrus even as a driver. The intercom is always garbage, the menu is always presented in some insane arrangement that’s makes it basically impossible to peruse, paying at the window is awkward, receiving your food through the window is awkward, checking to make sure your order is correct is awkward, and to top it all off it usually takes longer than just parking and walking inside.

It is baffling to me that anyone ever willingly uses a drive-thru.