Lucky, you get 4 seasons!? Here in South Florida we get "holy fuck it's so hot!" with hurricanes, and "oh, this is kinda nice" with hurricanes.

How the fuck is this still a tight race? I just for the life of me cannot understand (I mean, I can, but... I just can't).

THE COMMON COLD

(well... just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)

I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

Shocked that Florida made it to double digits.

(sent, with love, from Florida)

I gave my kid my big crate of capsela a few years ago. Aside from having to sand a few contacts it all worked great after 25 years of non-use and also led us into some cool 3d printing projects. I wish they made more toys like this today.

Is that pedal set up up to drive the machine, or is it just for looks?

The argument was that before we drilled holes into them, those stone formations had held similarly sized pockets of natural gas for eons, so just refilling them with CO2 would be fine. It sounds not completely stupid on first thought.

On second thought it sounds completely stupid tho.

I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.

wasn't there some research recently that said that like 20% of what your brain does was actually controlled by your gut microbiota?

The critical thing to remember about LLMs is that they are probabilistic in nature. They don't know facts, they don't reason, they don't evaluate. All they do is take your input string, split that string into tokens that are about 3-4 characters long, and then go back into their vast, vast, pretrained database and say "I have this series of tokens. In the past when similar sets of tokens were given, what were the tokens that were most likely to be associated with them?" It will then construct the output string one token at-a-time (more sophisticated models can do multiple tokens at once so that words, phrases and sentences might hang together better) until the output is complete (the probability of the next token being relevant drops below some threshold value) or your output limit is reached.

Is this a copypasta or just new greatness?

I love how all of the characters are scowling and have their game faces on… and then there’s Kirby, who’s like “Hi there! I’m gonna eat you and extract your power!”

Think the Baltics have a vested interest in seeing Ukraine succeed?

One of those liminal spaces. Love it.

Softer running surface and better/newer shoes are the usual answers. Asphalt and especially concrete are much harder than your treadmill surface so your shins are taking more shock with each strike. If you can shift some of your run to turf or natural surfaces that will help.

The other thing is to check your shoes and change them every 300-500 miles or so. A running store employee can usually watch your gait and make suggestions about the right kind of support, padding, etc for you.

It would be ideal If the big activitypub platform stacks like mastodon, Lemmy, etc could agree on some standard like a federated OIDC or DID approach for all authx/authn functions. then fediverse users could get cross-platform and even cross-instance logins “for free”

Of the changes made last week to the license, this one stands out:

10. None of the Work may be used in any form as part, or whole, of an integration, plugin or app that integrates with Atlassian's Confluence or Jira products.

That is a weird carve-out, so I'd guess the license revision (and technically the reason it's no longer open source) somehow has to do with Atlassian or their plugin marketplace?

Feel like the (totally impractical) fediverse end-game would be for each individual to have their own activitypub service, and federation happening on a person-by-person basis. So you retain some control over anything you publish, and your history is yours to keep.

As others have said, changing UPS batteries is required maintenance, and I agree 18-24 months is the typical service life for even high-end UPSs. However, you may want to look into LiFePO4 based UPSs, which can handle many more charge-discharge cycles and often have 5-year warranties. More expensive and potentially not as recyclable as lead acid batteries, but maybe appropriate for your use case.