This is exciting! I have wanted this since I was young and 30 years later VR monitors are finally getting here. I want to be able to switch into random positions and have my screens visible without rotation and angle issues. I have fairly severe ADHD and I move around a lot. Having this would mean I could throw my legs up the wall and still use my screen, then roll over to my belly and keep going. A phone works fairly well for this but does mess with shoulder position and is a strain, so getting something more reasonable would be awesome. Also I work with people with fairly significant mobility disabilities and I think this would be amazing for them. No dependence on where they can aim their head, just use software to correct the monitor to match their needs. Add some good inputs and it would be life changing.

Man, I really don’t like this study.

First, this is 44 people, 22 pairs of twins, followed for 8 weeks. This in not enough to be meaningful and the researchers knew this at the start. A sample of 44 people is so small you would only use it for a pilot study to show your study design and get funding.

Second, 8 weeks? That is an insanely short time. Again, pilot study, not real study.

Third, they didn’t measure heart disease, they measured LDL cholesterol. This is a proxy marker, not a measure of heart disease. It would be like measuring how many fires a city has by counting firefighters. It doesn’t measure how many actual fires there are, just how many resources are available to fight them. What if there is low funding? What if there is an issue with training? What if there is another disaster which is more urgent than the fires? LDL is not a good measure on its own for heart health.

There are lots of other issues but they all boil down to this being bad science. We know what questions should be asked and how to ask them. They chose not to ask questions correctly and get meaningful answers. This is not worth the paper it was printed on and means close to nothing.

If we get enough countries over time and the EU ends up encompassing the whole world it could become the Everybody Union and that would be cool.

What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.

First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”

It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.

None of these, Bruce Willis in the sixth sense.

Went to a job interview after my night shift with no sleep the day before, so awake from about 4pm to the interview two days later at 11am. So at 43 hours awake I had a technical interview and almost got the job. You can seem to function at a fairly good level tired, but depending on various factors it can be really bad for your performance. It is similar to being tipsy with regards to driving, so definitely don’t drive tired. Stimulants like coffee don’t make you better at thinking, they just make you less aware of how tired you are so you can keep going. Your performance is still shot but you are less able to judge. Other stimulants like Ritalin can help more for people who work well with them, but that is people with ADHD or some people who are autistic.

That said, longest would be post open heart surgery. Lots of pain, multiple days of missed sleep, lots of pain killers which don’t really work well for me, but eventually I figured out I could sleep slumped forward over a desk rather than in a hospital bed. You can go without sleep for a while without dying but you become less functional and it is bad for long term health.

I think they want it automated so it would need to be integrated to Sonar/Radarr etc rather than the machine you watch the media on.

I used to be a sysadmin in a web hosting company so I know my way around CentOS systems which are basically the same as Fedora both being derived from Red Hat. I liked the system and their SELinux configuration was really good. Package updates were reliable and easy though sometimes a bit out of date.

I found Debian to be rock solid but quite out of date and back porting something was generally not a good idea, it generated too many errors and complex problems with dependencies etc.

Ubuntu, specifically Mint, is something I have installed on a few peoples machines and they found it fine, no complaints really, until they tried to do something more complex or advanced. They could usually get one complex thing done but without lots of experience they tended to have one thing interfere with another and just make things unstable. I got one person to use a VM for some stuff as a work around and it was much easier from there. That said the defaults are good if you have a modern machine and don’t want to make massive complex changes.

As a server I really don’t like Ubuntu. They did things their own way to avoid systemd and honestly it was a nightmare to administer. Much better for me to switch to Debian for stable stuff or to CentOS or Arch for complex stuff.

The biggest advantage for Ubuntu based distros is the user base. Lots of people in lots of forums documenting their problems and eventual solutions. That seems to be shifting with Bazzite and CachyOS getting massive install bases in fairly short times, especially around Steam Deck style machines. I expect we will have more more change in that direction over the next few years and honestly more users means more of a useful position in the market driving more support from developers so I am all for it.

But yeah, using the CLI is harder at first because you have all the keys as an option and no idea what the names of things are, but it can get really fun especially when you start chaining commands together. For example, you can find files name *.log, grep a specific line out of them, the sort by time and merge it all together. The output is all the logs from these different files that match your search but in appropriate time sequence and it makes troubleshooting way easier. Or you can search for all files in your whole filesystem which match a characteristic like who owns them, check their sizes, and present the largest 10. All with a few pipes and filters. It makes you feel like you need a hoodie, dark glasses, and a projector blasting green text over your face while playing trance in the background.

I have the exact opposite experience with Ubuntu based distros and Arch based distros. I’ve done Arch from the CLI installer enough times to be comfortable following the quick guide with the full beginners guide for a couple of places, and since running plain Arch I have aged around with EndeavourOS and ended up switching over for the good defaults and having Timeshift setup built right in with all the hooks like during updates etc.

When I tried an Ubuntu distro not too long ago I was lost. Their init system was different from what I was used to and it was really hard to figure out for me. I couldn’t get logs and errors easily and my troubleshooting was really slow and laborious. I had trouble with graphics drivers and using pass through for a VM in KVM, so I never got that working. I switched back to my familiar Arch based stuff after realising it is all the same in the end with small differences of exactly how to do things but nothing really important being different.

I am more comfortable with Arch and that family but for someone more comfortable with Ubuntu or Fedora family distros I understand staying there, you should go with what will make computing fun and useful for you, not what someone else likes. If you like BSD you should use it and enjoy it, not use the distro I like because I say it is good.

Sort of correct, but modern drug tests can distinguish actual ADHD meds from methamphetamine reliably. When I got tested I let them know my dose and what medication and they didn’t have to adjust anything at all.

This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.

You would meet the definition for bulimia most likely but also maybe other things like anxiety along with it.

Making yourself vomit is not effective at losing body fat. It is a bad technique with bad side effects and it is not sustainable. Even apart from the harm to your teeth, voice, nasal passages, throat, and so on, it is more likely to cause loss of muscle than loss of fat. This will make you weak and actually increase your body fat percentage.

Managing body fat is actually not that hard but does not match up with managing health. Fat is there for a reason. Dropping your fat too quickly or because of extreme deprivation is harmful and also makes your body look sick. Depending on what is important to you different methods of managing your body will be a better fit, but really nothing can help you lose body fat quickly without cost.

You need to question why you want to lose weight. Is it to be more attractive? To be healthier? To be happier? To get people to stop harassing you about your weight? To be less disgusted with yourself? There are lots of different reasons someone may end up bulimic but you need to find out what applies to you and the internet is full to bursting with bad advice and toxic communities which will not help you. Some communities actually make eating disorders far worse and drive people to death through either consequences of their eating or suicide.

To be clear, having an eating disorder is dangerous to the point of deadly if not managed. Just like cancer it can and will kill you if managed poorly, so you need an expert on your side. Depending on which country you are in your resources will be very different, but psychological help is highly recommended. It may be some talk therapy and some CBT with nothing ongoing. It may be much more. Either way starting earlier is best, so treat it with urgency and get help asap. If left to continue it will get harder to fix and more expensive in time, health, effort, and money than it is right now. This is the literal best time to do something about it and no later time will ever be as easy as now is.

Another option is to download then open with VLC and use the loop function to select what needs to repeat.

On the game front I have to recommend Creeper World 3. I have over 50 days, yes days, of playing. It was absolutely worth the trivial cost and quite enjoyable.

Kind of yes, kind of no.

Short term there is not a huge difference between getting sugar from complex carbs or simple carbs and most vitamins and micro nutrients will be OK with a few weeks of worse absorption and slowly lowering levels.

Medium term this would be bad, but so is the standard western diet. Carbs are not a great source for energy for a number of reasons but one of the key ones can be seen with vitamin C. Why do we not have functional pathways for making vitamin C? Our closest relatives do, the other great apes, and almost all other mammals do too. In fact as far as I am aware one of the only other mammals missing the ability to make vitamin C is the guinea pig which is especially ironic considering it was the aminal selected to understand scurvy, an extreme form of vitamin C deficiency.

We don’t need anywhere near the same level of vitamin C if we are not eating sugars, complex or simple. Eating a very very low carb diet, deep into the ketogenic end, reduces the need for vitamin C. Taking someone who has symptoms of scurvy and switching them to a carnivore diet seems to reverse the symptoms fairly promptly and plenty of people eat just meat for decades at a time without developing scurvy, so it seems safe enough.

So if you look at a diet made of highly processed high carb foods like the current standard American diet you would see a measurable but not extreme change in the short to medium term, but in the medium to long term it would get worse. If you compare to a more reasonable diet which doesn’t have huge amounts of processed foods or carbs in it then it would be a bigger difference.

I have a Ticwatch S2 (tunny) which was not officially supported but I managed to get it running and it was cool but not well integrated. The maps didn’t work, most apps were only a little functional, and syncing with a phone was not stable.

Those all sound like bad things and for a finished product they would be, but solving problems is fun if you have the right mindset. I love the idea of using a real qt based interface rather than running modified android or similar. It was very fun to play around with but ended up being less than perfectly suited for me. I want them to succeed though, so I hope they make more progress and get some better results.

If the transformation is because of the light from the moon there are a few changes we could expect. First, the cycle would still be matched to the lunar cycle of about 28 days just like on earth as that cycle is driven by the relative positions of the moon, sun, and earth. If the moon is further away from the sun than earth it is lit up more, most at opposition to the earth. In contrast the brightness would go down as it enters alignment between the sun and earth, peaking with a new moon.

Second, the near lack of atmosphere would likely increase the number of days which would be sufficient to trigger the transformation. Maybe it would be 5 nights instead of 3 nights, or maybe the transformation would be more intense leading to more extreme features or even new traits.

As for another planet and moon system, earth is unique here. No other moon is as close in size to the planet it orbits with the exclusion of dwarf planets Pluto and Charon. The bulk of moons are way smaller and also orbit around planets way further away from the sun and so would be far less bright. Perhaps not enough light would be reflected for there to be any transformation, while a confluence of moons may work together to have a higher impact on occasion.

In a more science fiction setting I would imagine having reflected light cause the transformation could make things like a ring world, a spinning ring with a central reflector, interesting. The starlight reflecting off the mirrors would theoretically make the whole ring be constantly lit for wearwolves and make night, changing the mirrors to reflect no light, the only time without wearwolves.

I read all the Murderbot books in a row a couple of times a year and they never get worse, they are fantastic.

And Project Hail Mary is so good, I love the relationship with Rocky, I really did feel horror and dread when he was in danger and that is very rare for me.