But the brilliant part is that they aren’t selling this shit to kids, they are selling it to parents and there’s an extra dynamic of parent trying to make kid happy and kid probably picking up on that and acting happy to please the parent, resulting in the parent buying it more times when neither of them really care about it.

It’s insidious and reminds me of those car commercials where they are marketing “a new car will make your teenagers want to spend time with the family instead of their friends” instead of trying to sell the car itself.

What’s the dishonored game that came out after 2? I have the first one and saw two others on my wishlist just the other day.

Electric elements are actually pretty efficient. Usually the heat generated by an electric current is the inefficiency (as well as sound, radiation, and vibrations), but for a heating element you’re using that heat waste. It still can generate sound, radiation, and vibrations, so it’s not 100% efficient, but you can do well just sticking an element in the middle of the thing you want to heat, especially if it’s a fluid. If you don’t stick it in the middle, then you lose heat in all the directions away from the thing you’re trying to heat.

Heat pipes are more efficient because the heat isn’t being generated but just moved. Natural gas (or fossil fuels) seems more efficient but is actually just cheaper, as it used energy that was stored a long time ago.

Even induction burners still lose heat from the bottom of the pot into the induction burner itself, hence why they usually have cooling fans. And the reason why they are more efficient than radiative heat or those spiral elements is because they create the heat closer to the food using an electric current in the bottom of the pot/pan itself, though even the induction part has additional losses.

My guess is you’re getting contamination from something else. All a microwave does is emits microwave radiation inside the faraday cage that is made from the microwave’s frame/cover, and as the microwaves pass through, they flip di-polar molecules (molecules that have one side slightly more positively charged and the other slightly more negatively charged), which creates friction and heat. Water is one such molecule.

One reason some people don’t like to use it to cook have to do with how it affects the texture. Microwaves heat food up from anywhere the waves spin water, whereas most other cooking methods involve heating it from the outside, so water is evapourating more there, plus you can get some oxidization to add a brittle crunchy layer.

It can also damage other molecules and affect their structural integrity in ways different from other forms of cooking.

It can occasionally do this thing where it heats the water past the point of boiling but without boiling the water (superheating). Not sure if that affects cooking as much, as it usually requires pretty pure water and is more a safety concern because that water will explode when it realizes that it should actually have changed into a gas already (which usually happens because you bumped it while picking up the container it’s in).

And that container is the last part. You don’t usually cook with plastic containers because they melt in the high heat used for cooking, but they seem fine in a microwave. But who knows what’s happening at a micro level. A metallic taste is probably something other than plastic, but my guess is that it’s coming from whatever container you were using, especially if you’re microwaving something in a metal container of some sort. That would form current eddies that can arc, but if the surface is smooth enough it won’t necessarily spark visibly, but could be breaking particles off into your water that you then taste.

Lifespan is in seconds, not years. Greenland is old.

For all complex life and most of simple life, Greenland was there. It was in different places and depths, but those rocks were there for most of the time. There’s only a few other places on the planet that rival Greenland’s age (or more specifically, certain rock formations in Greenland, though they make up a significant portion of it).

Though one thing about “lifespan” is that it’s intended to be “age at death”, not “current age”, so I’d call that an inaccuracy, as Greenland will probably continue to exist for billions more years (though when the glacial lakes eventually form and break free, there will be a lot of sudden erosion).

Makes me curious what the future lifespan will be for the various continents. I wish our own lifespans were more geologically significant. Though at least I got to see the time since dinosaurs tick from 65 million years ago to 66 million years ago.

Fuck auto-correct, especially Microsoft’s version of it.

Downvotes could be about censoring the company name instead of exposing them.

Once you’ve trained the oral dexterity for other tasks, you just need to add an effective strategy. One I’ve had good results with is to think of a message and then spell it out with your tongue right on the button. This combines a set of repetitive motions with unpredictability.

No one’s ever accused me of being mature.

Oh, how long until an AI ends up swatting people. There will probably even be different categories:

1. Legit swat scenario, wrong address (or otherwise incorrect details make it turn tragic)
2. Caller deliberately trying to swat innocent victim, AI goes along with it and adds credibility (not that humans seem to take away much credibility, so maybe this one shouldn’t really be a black mark for AIs if it does happen)
3. AI just misinterprets a caller’s description, deploys swat team
4. AI doesn’t trust the caller’s description, deploys swat team (anyone ever seen an agent start suspecting they were in an adversarial situation where something was injecting things into the context? I have)
5. AI uses dispatching tool incorrectly, accidentally deploys swat team

Though once you have been driving your manual for a while, you can get a feel for the speed from the engine sound and knowing what gear it’s in. Or even from the throttle level equilibrium is at and how much of an incline you’re driving on at that equilibrium. And probably also from just getting used to how fast things come at you at various speeds.

Not that I’d give up the speedo but checking it is more of a confirmation thing than a real lookup.

While we’re talking about glasses technology, it seems like oil resistant coatings have finally gotten really good. My eyebrows are pretty oily and would smear on the top middle corners of my glasses all the time. But my latest pair just has a tiny bit of smudging there. I can press them against my face and wiggle my eyebrows right against them and it’s still only a bit smudged.

There’s a sad set of shows from before I got tired of laugh tracks. Sad because they are harder to enjoy now that I understand the laugh track is pretty much just there to dumb down the humour.

Though that could be an interesting remake formula: take some existing show then redo it but without a laugh track or live audience. I hated how live audience shows needed a pause after each main character’s first appearance while the people present did the whole “scream because you see a new celebrity”.

IT crowd did have that one gag where the character said he’s putting this fire with the rest of the fire when that should be a self-explanatory step when sorting out a fire. You have to sort it before you can out it (for any lost non-nerds that somehow ended up in here).

Nope, Canada.

To answer your question, it’s because whoever controls these technologies going in to the cyberpunk dystopia will have a lot of power in it. And the ones inventing it aren’t really thinking about whether they’ll have the supporting power to hold on to control of it.

In general, trying to split up frame rendering between multiple GPUs runs into issues with latency because either you need to share data between the GPUs (so some reads/writes go to the remote GPU, which takes longer and then there’s cache coherency issues on top of that) or you need to mirror it (so all data transactions between GPU and CPU need to be doubled, bus bandwidth might need to be shared), and there could still be cross-gpu dependencies that require eating those longer latencies.

100 fps means each frame needs to be rendered in 10ms, so even round trips of 1ms can be costly and risk missing the frame deadline (which results in a stutter). The whole idea of multi-gpu is to get even higher frame rates, so the higher they get pushed, the bigger an impact that latency has.

Though maybe raytracing workloads would work well with it. Something that depends more on massive parallelization than anything else and where each ray is independent. But load balancing still isn’t trivial as it will depend on the scene or even the camera and lighting position and the software complexity might not be justified by how small the market would be.

Yeah, it could be a pain occasionally, though the amount of times I’ve opened it up to look in the past few years is few and the times I actually needed to get in there has been none so far here.

Though there was one toilet at one place I lived that wouldn’t close that seal properly and would just keep running the water since it couldn’t fill the reservoir and it needed to be pushed down every flush. But it was a college age problem that would have been better solved by solving the issue instead of dealing with it for the years we were there.

And on the pros side, less cleaning required, and what you need to clean is a simpler shape. Even better if that bathroom has a drain in the floor and the shower head can reach everywhere, though I doubt that’s the case with those floors.

Meanwhile where I am, if I see a cop on the highway, I just check to make sure I’m going less than 20km/h over the limit. Occasionally I wasn’t but still got ignored.

Maybe there’s a closet for it rather than it just being in the wall?