Kiernian

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it's been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it'd say "water not found" because the standing water in the water line was "out of date".

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that's because the gigantic server farms powering all of this "AI" are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC's, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here...

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit -- I should add that I've met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn't allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it's another name for Tylenol.

A few bad people who hate others because they think putting others down means they win picked a fight on the playground. They got other people on the playground to join them because they yelled the loudest and some kids thought that the louder you yelled, the more right you were. The people they were yelling about just wanted to be on the playground too, but the yelling people didn't want them on the playground, so despite the fact that they didn't want to, the people being yelled at played a competitive game against the people who were yelling.

After a long long long time (LOTS of sleeps) the yelling bad people won against the people they were yelling at.

The yelling people didn't know what to do then. They only knew how to be angry and they couldn't find anything else or anyone else to yell at and people were starting to leave their team because all the excitement was gone and there wasn't a competitive game to play anymore.

So the bad yelling people panicked and started randomly picking other, smaller groups of people on the playground to yell about. They made up things about them and told lies.

It didn't work at first, and they tried telling lies about lots of different groups of people one after another, and eventually they started picking on some people who were JUST different enough that some of their old yelling teammates who got bored and left believed those lies and joined the yelling again. There was SO much yelling and it was so much louder that it was impossible for anyone near the yelling people to hear the truth.

And that's how we got from "abortion as an issue" to "trans people as an issue".

So, for this, the easiest way I've found is to look at it in the following sort of way:

Using the example of coding, you can already USE software, think of that like knowing how to DRIVE a car. Start with learning how to REPAIR the car (GUI building block code).

Then learn how to MOD the car with a kit (high-level object-oriented, TYPED code with an IDE or editor that does stuff like auto complete, syntax highlighting, and has add-ins that assist in getting the typed code to completion).

Then learn how to create your own car mods from "scratch" (get to the point where you don't necessarily NEED all those editor widgets to help code)

Then learn how the car functions at a base level and how all the various chemicals, heat, and aerodynamics, pistons, filters, etc interact to make the car function (interacting with and modifying OS-level code/low-level languages with things like hardware access instead of applications that run on the OS)

THEN worry about the various chemicals themselves create the energy needed to generate power for the car (firmware on top of circuits and chips like the CPU/GPU/PSU, storage controller boards, audio chips, and motherboard/bios)

THEN worry about the actual molecular interactions occurring in the batteries or fuel at the atomic level (binary electrical functions of the parts themselves, where 1's and 0's are just current on or current off).

Just because the binary is there at every stage doesn't always mean that understanding how the bonds between the "atoms" operate is going to make you a better programmer UNTIL you understand what you're trying to get those atoms to do and why.

For the briefest of moments, I thought this post was someone opening one of those packages of ea-nasir's copper.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

Basically, the rocking back and forth she's doing as a coping behavior.

Yeah, it TOTALLY doesn't have anything to do with him getting caught tripping balls on camera right next to his lady friend at the White House table who was so disassociated that the poor girl couldn't stop stimming.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got "randi ke beej" yelled at me.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I'm sitting here thinking "I don't remember it being TOO bad..."

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There's a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song...

Well

You don't know what

We can find

Why don't you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn't easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn't know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3's just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac's were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.