NovaVeles

Microwave your shoes for 5 seconds, kill that chip. ;) For everything else, no idea.

The big wake up call for me was a few years earlier. I had just hit 130Kg (285+ pounds) and I had just had enough of it all! By the time I had COVID earlier this year I was down to around 90Kg (198 pounds) - I get the feeling that helped out immensely compared with how I used to be. Vaccines also did their part combined with the lessening impacts of the various variants.

The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible.

For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.

This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares.

Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.

All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.

I am in the camp of we are in overshoot, have been for a very long time. In the same way that a someone can spend way above their income by using the credit card. Looks great now but that looming cloud of debt is coming. Societal wise we have done this via the monkey pore wish for "unlimited energy" in the form of fossil fuels. We got energy unlike anything else in history but at the cost of environmental blow back and setting the paradigm for our living standards.

Maybe we will rise to the challenge and go green on these, I'm not convinced yet but I am definitely not ruling it out.

When it comes to optimism, it boils down to two distinct modes. Necessity is the mother of invention. Less energy, stuff and stimulation will be good for most people in wealthy countries.

Fossil fuels will decline, we will make some cool new stuff that makes that decline easier, we will demand less stuff and use of energy. This doesn't sound so bad. Hopefully we will move into something akin to Solarpunk + cottage core. A declined future that is more fair. But the pessimist in me feels like that is but fantasy.

That is a fair analysis of the situation. Producing better produce is the better path forwards and it is where we should be going. But in taking short cuts there are the four horsemen of flavor - Salt, Fats, Carbs and Sugar. A little is good, too much is bad.

As for fresh produce, I used to work in food manufacturing and there was company pitching their new sterile, vacuum packed fruit range. The idea was that the fruit would be ripened and sealed up at the farm. Their pitch was "fresher than fresh". The idea was that they could stop the ripening process in a fashion similar to how NASA stores their produce for long hauls. Overall it was... ok but there is a reason why it never really went anywhere.

It is an interesting question. It is clear that some of these these alternatives can stand on fairly similar price points without subsidies - other more newer players, not so much. I'm thinking things like Beyond meat that simply do not have a price advantage in any fashion.

It really does feel like the only way to make a dint is to either wait for prices to raise so much that even the subsidies don't save the industry or they just remove the subsidies altogether. I suspect the latter is not likely anytime soon.

It is fascinating seeing folks flocking to these new meat alternatives not knowing about the neat stuff that had already been produced decades before.

Here in Australia - I still think the crown champion is the Not Burger by Veggie Delights. Discovered them in 2006 and I have yet to come across anything as good.

https://vegiedelights.com.au/products/classic-not-burger/

It isn't trying to imitate meat - it is just down right delicious.

Which is why it tastes so good! Shame really.

Like restaurant vegetables - taste great but the secret is a ton of salt and sugar.

While the app was rubbish, it did stir up some interesting questions.

I do wonder about where the biggest critics of it are now? There was the whole issue of slowly taking peoples rights with the assumption that they would never come back - and yet all of them where returned in good time - even if a little early on some.

Not saying Oz is a paradise of freedom, far from it, but in this case it was at least temporary.

It is one of those things. There is the idea that one day we will make an AI that is far superior to us, and yet current AI seems to be hopelessly reflective of biological being that create them.

Some something make something more than it self, like a gravity assist? One of the big questions.

One of those moments where the question is "If ethics didn't matter..."

All that does is decrease the value of the dollar. A trillion new tokens on energy and resources has been made but not 1 single gram of material or 1 watt of energy has been added to the system by this move.

While there are a thousand little caveats and technical details on this, essentially the spending power of the future will be reduced.

For the poor, this is a big problem. For the rich folks (almost anyone reading this) it is more of an inconvenience.

Gad to see they have already thought of my first guess. Gases raising from the sea bed. Could be something as boring as that.

And, it is amazing just how much you do not miss it. Once the stream of news is gone - you wonder why you ever fell into it in the first place.

I am in the same boat with other people bringing the important news. Some times it might actually be relevant.

News nowadays reminds me of the Serenity's prayer.

--

Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.

--

Most things in the news, we cannot change.

I was the same. I would download the games and then start messing around with the code/variables. By breaking things, I learned how they worked. Self taught myself to program via this meathod.

I still used QB4.5 occasionally to bash out a code idea just because it is so easy to get an idea down and running before moving it onto the real deal.

I am still upset that I threw out the hard drive with my side scrolling platforming game. It could do smooth scrolling like Mario on the NES but on a 486 33Mhz. Learning to split and address data sets as is needed would the game changer for me in gaining the speed up to what was needed.

There was show on here a few days ago (The dark side of the 90's) all about the Beenie Baby craze. It funny that they covered the website that was pitched by 2 teenagers with only a few days work and eventually approved.

Needless to say - it screams mid 90's web design.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961228114553/http://ty.com/

There are a few places lurking in the shadows of social media that the algorithms never touch, where the freak flags still fly. When you stumble across those hidden gems, it is something magical.

And that is how we get Bodhi Linux. ;)

I'm in the same camp as you. Running an T420 instead. ;)

My phone is a top-low end phone or a low-mid end Oppo A 53? Or something like that. It does everything I need with loads of head room. Will just run it until death.

Yeah... nah. Simply on CICO (well more just monitoring CI) I have lost 40Kg/90 Pounds over the last 5 years. It does work.

The pessimist in me thinks it will never happen.

That said, I'm in Australia and our recent government change is starting to make major changes in the space of renewables. It gives me a since of optimism about government I haven't seen in a long while. Just maybe we can still get into the right direction even if it isn't a perfect conclusion.

Spot on. I see these things poping up and it does look bad, but we have the remember that the current power system is worse.

I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).

I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.

I would suspect it is a case that folks just aren't looking hard enough yet. There is also the massive fragmentation in the ARM space. Something like M1/M2 being a much more consistent target.

It could also just be that they have designed them better but time will tell. A lot of things looked really secure until they suddenly were not.

There is only one reason I would hope it is a lab leak. A lab leak is a mistake that theoretical can be controlled via more stringent systems. It is something that has a limited footprint in terms of initial infection vector.

If something like this did arise from zoonotic sources via a market - this will be the 1st of many such cases that we will endure going forwards. Controlling something like that is nearing impossible.

I have been one of the more negative folks on SpaceX over the years - there are still big issues with some of their bigger long term claims, however... they sure are doing a damn good job nowadays of just getting to business and making it happen.

Steve jobs said it best - Real Artist ship. SpaceX is shipping and getting really good at it. Kudos to all the folks that have made it happen.

That said I am always surprised when I see local stuff that is of high caliber. It always feels like it is a little guys proving it on the world stage.

That said... Little city!? I surprised that folks would see this place as small. I would have thought that back in the 90's but we have slowly become, maybe a little too much, a big city.