It’s just like kayfabe in professional wrasslin’.

Certified medical laboratory scientist here: reckon we still do this because it’s fast, free, requires no technology, and can give you some decent insight into what’s going on. Of course, you’re going to want chemistry and microscopy to confirm anything, but color can certainly steer you towards a pathology. Even the fancy analyzers with automated dipstick chemistry and computerized microscopy report color and clarity.

Also if your pee is any darker than straw colored, drink some water. I’ve seen so much nasty piss come through the lab. Apparently a ton of people aren’t drinking enough water.

I spend a grand on a nice adjustable dumbbell set and a bench and went from 165lbs to 210lbs over the last 18 months with a combination of weight training and eating better. It’s absolutely possible to work out at home with the resources that are out there these days. I do miss some of the equipment at the gym but the convenience of a home gym is just too good.

I would point out that getting lean/shredded is not a function of the gym, it’s a function of the kitchen. You cannot out exercise a bad or even mediocre diet. You can use a gym to build muscle, increase flexibility, or improve cardiovascular fitness, but there’s no avoiding making changes to your diet if you want to decrease body fat.

They’re just moving to the app store version.

Very cool looking plant, but it doesn’t look out of focus to me.

Plexamp. Genuinely my favorite audio player since Winamp.

Ah, I see. Yeah that’s pretty bastardly.

cmd+Q on macOS is great.

Was Kinkade misrepresenting the production process or something? If not- who cares? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I’m just now realizing it isn’t “Alarmy”

I played Shadow Warrior back in the late 90s on DOS. Granted, it was only the demo because I had no money and no internet to pirate things.

It was a pretty decent Duke clone from what I remember. Gory kills, interesting weapons, corny toilet humor, some sexuality, and interesting little tidbits that made the levels feel more alive than your standard shooter at the time. You could watch the rabbits bang and multiply, stuff like that. Pretty entertaining for me at the time. I’ve had it and the reboot in my Steam library for years now, maybe this is a sign to finally check them off the “to play” list.

Destroying the economy also allows them to write bills to give trillions to companies “too big to fail” just like the automaker bailouts, bank bailouts, and PPP loans.

Economic conservatives my ass.

A 1080p Bluray disk will look far far better than Netflix in 4k every time because its not compressed.

You’re not wrong about the quality difference but video on a Blu-ray is compressed. There is no way to get raw video unless you’re shooting it yourself.

any form of compression will cause loss in fidelity in some way

Lossless video compression also exists although I don’t think any consumer products have it.

I write all my dates in military format i.e. dd MMM yyyy, so 16 MAR 2025 for today. Zero ambiguity. I also use 24H time from being in the military and living in Italy for a couple years.

I don't follow the logic. Human teeth would be better if more children died? That "quality check" only applies if an organism dies before mating, which happens usually around teenage years for humans.

Maybe those hunter gatherers had better teeth because of what they ate. There seems to be too many other potential factors to simply pawn it off on Darwinism.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/02/24/172688806/ancient-chompers-were-healthier-than-ours

In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.

However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of "friendly" bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.

Also, a ceiling coated with highly flammable material

I’m not saying it’s not possible

There is no argument from ignorance fallacy in what I said. I am not claiming these devices never send audio without you wanting because there’s no evidence to the contrary.

However, the idea that everyone’s microphones are always listening, and that’s why you saw an ad for whatever after talking to your friend, yet not a single person has observed a device uploading this kind of data, nor has anyone ever leaked any kind of information on this supposed system, is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.

They don’t need microphones to do this. Regular tracking is plenty to do a good job at suggesting you a highly relevant ad, and frequency illusion does the rest. You’re not noticing the thousand times you see ads that are irrelevant to whatever you were talking about, but the one time you do notice really sticks out.

Frankly there are plenty of more concerning ways of violating our privacy that are out in the open that I believe are a much higher priority than mics always recording, of which there is no evidence for.

Sure, but that’s not the commonly repeated conspiracy, even by non technical normal people, that everyone’s mics are listening all the time and they’re being used to serve you ads or whatever. The scale of this is not at all comparable to what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes devices are inactivated inadvertently, those responses are uploaded, and people have listened to those recordings when they didn’t have permission. That is a far cry from all devices listening nearly all the time, using some surreptitious method to upload the data, and what was being recorded being used for some nefarious purpose.

Again, I’m not excusing these devices for being a privacy nightmare, but I just think it’s extremely implausible that Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are always listening and nobody has discovered a device uploading.

The real privacy nightmare is that recording your conversations is completely unnecessary to build a richly detailed profile of you and your contacts. Regular old device / browser fingerprinting and a few people in your group sharing contacts with apps is enough for that, and it’s not a top secret conspiracy.