I responded similarly when I saw this posted before. Yes, mercury can be very toxic if it gets into your blood, but the chances of that happening from a lick are astonishingly small.

Agreed. Even if everyone is on the same page that wouldn't happen overnight, but it really seems like we've just been further entrenching it rather than trying to move away from it.

They accepted BTC for a while but stopped. The other comment here mentioned the transaction fees being a problem for purchases on the scale of steam game prices, but it wasn't just that. A big problem was crypto volatility and transaction processing time. They found that very often by the time a transaction cleared the value had swung enough that they were getting amounts that failed to align with the actual prices of the games people were buying.

It's more stable now, so maybe that would be less of a problem, but I feel it highlights a big problem with crypto in general and that is that even when you do find places that accept crypto nothing is priced in crypto. It's basically always just a proxy for USD using whatever its current market value is.

I'm a much less imposing but also hetero male but this also more or less lines up with me as well.

I've been of the opinion for a while that when faced with the idea that gender, as distinct from sexuality, is just a collection of social trappings, we've kind of gone in the wrong direction. Maybe I'll get flak for this, but I largely agree with RuPaul's take that gender and other identity stereotypes are absurd, and that it would be better to tear them down rather than affirm them or create increasingly specific labels to attach to people. A person's gender doesn't matter in the slightest to me with regard to my interactions with them, beyond the grammatical concern of using whatever their preferred pronoun is.

Whether you're male, or non-binary, or agender, or whatever else you might identify as, I couldn't possibly give less of a shit, and I want to stress that I mean that in the most accepting possible way rather than in a dismissive one. What matters far more to me is that you are Eric, or Rebecca, or Alphonse, or elucubra. I care about who you are, not what you are.

And maybe, maybe, if everyone was more accepting about a person's individual identity and didn't make a fuss about how they choose to present themselves we never would've seen all this importance attached to labelling people in the first place.

Yes, there are furry-trained stable diffusion checkpoints available, as well as at least one paid service that offers furry generation as a specific feature.

It's inconsistent. Canonically in most Trek warp 10 asymptotically approaches infinity, which is why you see a lot of nine-point-nine-something when really high speeds come up, but every now and then the writers forget and you'll hear about exceeding warp 10.

You also have things like transwarp, quantum slipstream, or the proto-drive which operate on different principles and don't follow the warp curve. Their equivalent warp factors would just involve stacking up ever more 9s after the decimal point, but their speeds aren't typically expressed in terms of warp.

You're going to need to be more specific. You can use installed GE versions of proton in game mode without any plugins at all.

What, exactly, are you trying to do?

Some of that, probably, but also poor road planning combined with Braess' paradox.

AA but having a swappable battery tray

Microsoft did something like this with xbox controllers. There are additional contact points inside the battery chamber for a li-ion pack, so you could use a pair of AAs or their rechargeable pack that just fits into the same space.

I disagree about the batteries. Give me replaceable AA cells any day over a built-in Li-ion. Rechargeable AAs are readily available and quickly swappable if you keep hot spares. Much better option for long term serviceability.

I've been waiting for someone to do this for years.

With imagery, or in abstracts. I have an internal monologue but not everything is a monologue. If I'm working on a project of some kind I'll usually keep a mental model of the current piece I'm working on in my head. There's no monologue attached, it's just a "working copy" of my current task.

Or for example if I'm reaching somewhere I can't see to plug in a usb port or something I'm visualizing in my head what my hand is doing, but I'm not talking myself through it.

To sell the narrative of cutting waste. The fact that people will be hurt by this doesn't factor into their consideration in the slightest and they need to stay on message.

Goldstein suggested more radical approaches, including using the courts to hold AI companies accountable through lawsuits when their systems cause harm.

The suggestion that this is a "radical approach" might actually be the most insane part of what is already a fairly insane article.

This is really what blows my mind the most. With all this talk about how much power LLMs and diffusion models use companies are still constantly cramming it into places where it's just running all the time passively doing things no one asked for.

Overall power use by these things would probably be cut down by an order of magnitude by just limiting it to directed, intentional use only.

"Conduit" is the word for those tubes for wires. Probably a shared etymology with "conductor" though.

Having the pipes in the mortar/bricks sounds like a maintenance nightmare.

Ah, if you need to build a .NET project that makes sense

Nuget is a the .NET package manager. Like npm or pip, but for .NET projects.

If you needed it for a published application that strikes me as fairly strange.

Let's table that discussion.

I'm okay with a DM ruling that it's possible to cast it in such a way that someone is taken off guard, sure. Maybe a performance or deception vs hostile creature(s) insight rather than the typical stealth vs perception when determining surprise from sneaking, which is not RAW, but I think sounds reasonable. I'd definitely not consider it to be an automatic aspect of the spell at any table I ran.

And you absolutely could not avoid a fight and just walk away from the situation with plausible deniability because you "only insulted them".