It still amazes me that laptops are still the cutting edge tech for schools.

General purpose computers have always had major problems with students getting distracted and going off topic, and are a never ending source of tech issues; particular when locked down in a way that still fails to address the previous issues, but makes them fail more often.

Admin is concerned about paper costs? Get every student an Eink reader. Schools are a big enough market to justify specoalized Eink readers that support classroom management style features (e.g. pushing a reading to student in the room).

Don’t want to deal with hand written essays. I was using a digital typewriter as a middle school student 20 years ago.

It’s like requing laptops for every math class because we don’t want to force students to do all their calculations by hand. But that’s not the choice: we have calculators! Even when we let them use calculators, we have a choice of what calculator to give them. We have 4 function calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, symbolic calculators. And we can pick what tool we give students based on the needs of the particular lesson.

I have 3 cats, and one of them plays fetch. Although he typically gets bored after a dozen throws or so.

Sometimes they end up that way (at which point they stop being contractions). However, there are also cases where distinct syntactic words end up being pronounced as phonetically single words. Or, as my morphology professor put it, “word” is not a meaningful category.

For example, consider the sentence “I’m happy”. What is the subject of this sentence? The verb? What part of speach is “I’m”?

When I bought my house, one of the lights was a dumb switch, but smart bulb. Normally, it works like a normal light. But if you turn it on, off, on quick enough, it changes color temperature!

Possibly TPM backed remote attestation. Having said that, once you are at the point of being worried about hardware DMA attacks, TPM attestation is not as full proof as you might think.

I don’t know about Europe. But the US (or at least the portion of the US federal government I deal with) has been trying to ban us from using memory unsafe languages for as long as I can remember. For us, Rust isn’t replacing C; it is replacing Ada. The only difference is that they have stopped granting exceptions for new code bases in memory unsafe languages.

Waterproofing hasn’t been relevant to batteries since they were made internal.

I just checked, and a replacement battery for my 2024 HMD Skyline goes for $15.62 plus another $3.25 for the consumable adhesive pad and whatever shipping ends up being [0]. In practice, you might also need to buy tools, which can further drive up the cost.

Finding that source took a bit of knowledge. If you go by what HMD tells it’s US users, you would look on iFixit, which would be $30 for an entire kit, which includes the battery, adhesive, and tools (Just the battery and adhesive would run you about $28).

[0] https://gsmnet.com/products/hmd-skyline-battery-hba4633aa-service-pack-hq71101001dt2?srsltid=AfmBOor1-PdyDMT6TX5X--CtmlTm60kOFti1fr5gGnjsOMCX3pOcKZlw

https://gsmnet.com/products/hmd-skyline-battery-adhesive-service-pack-hq25804001fj0?_pos=1&_sid=1311a3ad0&_ss=r

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/HMD_Skyline

checks undetectable.ai

Of course their business model is an AI powered service to make your AI slop get classified as human by AI detectors.

Choking. I spend a fair amount of time in kink clubs, and the choking you see casually thrown into random porn would get you thrown out of all of them; including the ones that allow choking.

Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.

The most plausible path forward I see is the Native American model from the USA.

1. Genocide and ethnically cleanse the target population into progressively smaller reservations. (Israel is here)

2. Sign treaties recognizing the target population as a sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation.

3. targeted population demilitarized. It’s people become increasingly integrated into the parent nation.

4. Civil rights movement for members of the targeted population within the parent nation.

5. Develop an esoteric field of law clarifying what “sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation” even means.

6. Gradually chip away at the targeted population through a combination of progressively narrowing the scope of law covered in (5), and the natural integration of the targeted population into the host population (US is here)

New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.

If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.

AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.

Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.

“Calories” is actually two different things. The first thing is a unit of energy. In this sense, calories are very much interchangeable. Wood has calories, which is why we use it for fire. However, if you tried eating wood, you would mostly just be increasing the caloric value of your poop. This is not inherent to wood; if you were a termite and tried eating wood, you would actually get nutritionally relevant calories from it.

For nutritional purposes, we generally use some variant of the Atwater system. The core idea was to measure the caloric value of food, as well as the caloric value of the subjects feces and urine. This gives you a better estimate of how many nutritionally relevant calories there are.

Nowadays, we have standard values various core food components (e.g various fats, proteins, etc). By breaking down a food into its components, we can apply the standard conversion for each component and add up the results to get a value for the food as a whole.

This process is actually pretty bad. The digestibility of individual components does not perfectly predict the digestibility of a whole food. The measure of individual components is not perfect. The actual digestibility of some foods can vary significantly between people.

As a practical matter, “counting calories”, really just means eating less in a way that roughly measures food by effective energy content. It turns out that an accurate accounting of calories just isn’t super important or useful for this. There is even bigger variance in the “calories out” department (including the annoying tendency of bodies to become more energy efficient when less energy is available). Further, all of the errors in calorie counting tend to be consistent. If you reduce calories by reducing the quantity of food you eat, you are reducing actual metabolized calories, even in the exact measurement is wrong.

It is a little more complicated if you reduce calories by changing the composition of the food you eat, but broadly speaking lower reported calories are actually lower effective calories there as well. Further, if you are adjusting the composition of your food specifically enough for this to be a problem, then you are well past the point where you should be caring about other nutritional factors.

Wow. Those wings sure get hit a lot. They should really make sure they are well armored.

/s

Cat tax

And what is the EU going to do about it? Governing bodies can declare extraterritorial laws all they want, but they are meaningless unless they have a way to enforce them.

The big improvement has been image recognition on produce. It used to be you needed to either know the produce code, or navigate a terrible menu system. Nowadays, you can just put stuff on the scale, hit the camera icon, and have it show you a few possibilities, which is almost always correct.

There was also a long period where the anti theft system would trigger if you breath on the bagging area, and require a staff member to unlock it. They seem to have toned that down a lot. Even when it triggers, it just nags you without locking anything.

So he’s an anchor baby? The reason we need to repeal birthright citizenship?

This has been solved for over a decade. Include a linter and static analysis stage in the build pipeline. No code review until the checkbox goes green (or the developer has a specific argument for why a particular finding is a false positive)