Isn’t that how the setup works for any relatively large company? I admittedly haven’t worked in many, but that’s usually the case for corporate computers at least.

See, I am of position that in developing countries British colonialism (or whatever you prefer to call it it) right now seems to push pro-queer rhetoric, at least that was my experience. And I can’t accept opposing statements “Britain pushes homophobia” and “Britain pushes LGBTQ+ people acceptance”; at least if there is something of the former, the latter has larger effect it seems.

Thank you for a well-written response. I think I am just starting from the different position, having experienced more positive effects from English influence than negative ones, in my country at least.

My experience on social media mostly skewed my view towards “anyone can say anything, and it looks like there’s a lot of hateful things people want to say” for Britain or any other democratic country. As a result, I see the anti-queer sentiment, but know from what I see daily in real life it could be much worse.

In my experience, the Christian (well, orthodox for that matter) church is right now very reluctant to accept LGBTQ+ people, with state-wide position being non-tolerant, and individual priests being accepting, if you are lucky. This is wrong. This must be better. The same, I think, can be said about Catholic Church, yet I didn’t have direct experience with that. Still, it’s better (again, for my region) than Muslim-majority regions being in a murderous position about the same group of people. It’s a lousy choice, but still, in a choice between “you are a disgusting sinner” and “you don’t deserve to exist, and your own family will murder you” the latter looks much worse.

Maybe I am not opposing Islam per se, maybe I just think that Islam is inextricably linked with “non-secular form of governance”, and that alone is enough for me to condemn such states more than any form of British influence.

In Russia. I think it’s the perspective that matters but I’d take British colonialism any day over the genocidal shitshow we have here, even putting Ukraine aside and focusing on LGBTQ+ for the sake of the argument. In comparison, the homophobia in the UK/US, while problematic, is relatively tame, e.g., it does not call all the LGBTQ+ people terrorists and extremists as official government rhetoric. And as for pre-2022, number 1 rule for an LGBTQ+ person living in an Islamic regionin Russia would be “don’t you even try to suggest that you are queer if you want to live”.

I kind of get the grievances towards the British colonialism and homophobia of the past (which incidentally gets a lot of whataboutism from some Russians I know: “What about Alan Turing! What about India!”), but for the present the British/American media is THE BEST thing that has happened in Russia to stop vilifying and demonizing LGBTQ+, and I just can’t wrap my head around the reverse situation.

I thought the topic was the hate of LGBTQ+, and right now it’s Islam that’s acting with said hate most of all. British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago, and you can’t actively blame dead people for it (well, you can, but they aren’t going to fix anything, and you won’t solve anything by blaming them), while Islam is remaining anti-LGBTQ+ right in this very moment. Isn’t it more productive to oppose whatever’s present right now?

I guess it’s one of those “on a spectrum” things — for me, an ADHD person, reading before bed works.

It’s just other things mentioned in the post, like movies, games, are stimulating and not recommended before sleep even for neurotypicals, and even they still can’t live without screens before bed, that was my point.

I thought reading is actually often recommended though instead of all those other activities. Knitting too. Relaxing things like that.

It might be a specific “stay alert” trigger for some, but not generally.

Why isn’t Brazil on the list of countries that have their fees waived? Are they on the “rich” side of the spectrum for that to be considered or is there simply no agreement between Brazilian government/publishers?

Yes, I know this is treating a symptom rather than illness itself, but for the sake of today’s science and not the science of tomorrow, at least such an option should be available.

“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.

Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.

And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.

Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).

It’s a brief five-minute Google search for me, but it seems that everyone has problems with both reading comprehension and/or causality evaluation.

I think it’s great that such a patent exists and that the technology was invented by her. Yet, even checking the frequency-hopping spread spectrum page on Wikipedia shows that it was only one invention in the long series of discoveries and technologies, which was neither the first, nor the most crucial of them, and this particular option seems to be one of the sources of inspiration for later technologies (along with a bunch of predecessors).

The rest of the criticisms regarding the choice of Wi-Fi over Bluetooth is already mentioned in the comments of others.

I really don’t want to minimise the contribution of an individual towards the development of sophisticated technologies, and I have zero qualms about this individual being a woman, I just think that the presentation oversells the achievement which might cause additional mockery from those who do think that women (and actresses at that!) have no business in anything serious.

What I actually find impressive, however, is that a woman, at the time where women’s rights were far from what they are today (just read about her first marriage, that must have been hard), could be both an actress, an inventor, a producer, all while leading quite a bitter life it seems. Not many can boast that.

I guess where I’m going with that is that she, as many others, may be best praised as an example of a complex person that had many achievements as well as many hardships. Using her as a basis of “Didn’t think an actress could do something worthwhile? Gotcha!” statement seems a bit shallow.

edit: However, since this post showed me that a person like Hedy Lamarr has existed in the first place (yeah, I’m not well-versed in mid-20 century American culture, sorry), and interested me (and likely a bunch of others) enough to Google her biography, I’d say it’s a net positive regardless.

First time I see the name, had to search it. To me, it is just a “change my mind” meme with no relevance as to which person is in it.

Both on Android, and iOS, opting out of notifications solves most of the problems. You can do all on your own time without constant nagging, and leave notifications on for the communication channels you really need.

However, what I hate with passion are shopping and delivery apps that suffer with disabled notifications (I don’t know when things arrive, and that would ideally be good to know within seconds), but enabled notifications mean that there would be a lot of spam notifications about ordering and buying more.

It’s also a laxative.

I don’t think my statement above is relevant, just throwing it out there.

This serves well as a statement.

It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.

Metallic elemental mercury (what you see in the picture) is relatively harmless to touch. Arguably, it’s more dangerous to rub a lead ingot, for example. However, mercury vapours (and mercury does evaporate slowly but consistently) absorb quite easily when you breath them with a ton of undesirable effects, often related to central nervous system, which is never a nice thing. Broken mercury thermometer won’t kill you. Playing with the puddle inside a non-ventilated room might kill you in several decades. Working in the non-open-air environment where mercury is always present will slowly worsen your health as mercury accumulates.

Organic compounds of mercury are what actually is nasty. A short contact with a few millilitres of that — and you will have to recover for a long-long time, if ever. However, the scary stories about methylmercury rarely mention that there are other organic compounds that are just as toxic or worse. I wouldn’t get close to any organic cadmium compound, for example, and would be extremely wary of its inorganic salts too. The thing is it’s extremely unlikely that you encounter any of these chemicals ever in your life, and if you do encounter them, then you are likely a professional who knows exactly how and why you are to deal with them.

Trying frantically to remember some recs too but nothing that fits exactly comes to mind except those already mentioned. Probably Cultist Simulator? Though it has frustrating moments where you seem to exhaust all available options and hit the wall without noticing some seemingly random option you have to try. Maybe also Sorcery! series — the more branches you try, the more complete picture of the world you get.

Thanks for recommendations! Outer Wilds is phenomenal, and Obra Dinn was so-o satisfactory to complete.

I’ve seen vending machines with cameras 10 years ago at least. Allegedly to prevent people from shaking and pivoting them so that the goods drop. Which people did. And started doing less once the cameras appeared. However, at that time, the message that “you are being recorded” was printed quite clearly on the front of the vending machine. Not mentioning that seems unlawful to me.

So that I can play Stardew Valley at highest FPS possible of course.

Joking aside, I have encountered problems with graphics card driver, specifically in Apex Legends (it took them ages to fix crashing mid-match with NVIDIA problem) and AC Valhalla (there was a slight gain in FPS, though it might have been a placebo). Also, the first thing I usually do when experiencing some lag is updating the drivers. It doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does.

And I simply don’t like the state of devices when there’s anything to update — it may be Windows, iOS, Android updates, or apps updates, or drivers updates, or Node.js package updates. That’s a me problem, and in case of Node updating usually brings more problems than it solves, but it just feels better when everything is on the latest version.

Did they remove the necessary step of creating an account for a simple act of updating a driver? Because that sucked. I know I can go to a website and download the drivers manually but this is also not very convenient to remember checking for updates from time to time.

Edit: Oh silly me, check the article before commenting: yes, it says that login is optional. Yay, I guess.