was there iconic scratchy rapid frenetic drum electronic scraping noises before Bowie?

You can find elements of that in earlier 90s industrial, like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Bowie collaborated with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on the Outside Tour, which supported Bowie’s prior album Outside, before the release of Earthling. They also collaborated on remixes of I’m Afraid of Americans. You can probably also find some elements Earthling’s sound in earlier drum and bass, techno and jungle music.

Skrillex’ influences include 90s industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, plus 90s electronica acts like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Bowie’s Earthling reminds you of Skrillex because the two share many musical roots.

AMD crowns the Ryzen 7 9800X3D a ‘gaming legend’

Memes aside, I’m eager to see some independent benchmarks. Been a while since I did a hardware refresh and I got the itch.

The software subscription fee was an ongoing cost to whoever installed the equipment, now that fee has been replaced by a per-use fee that’s part of what drivers pay. It’s easier for businesses to justify installing chargers if they know that it’s a one-time purchase with no ongoing subscriptions, fees, or management hassles.

Off topic: how much would it cost to run a charger continuously?

Depends where you are and how much electricity costs there. Could also depend on time-of-day if electricity metering in that area has time-of-use rates. The biggest level 2 chargers put out 19kw, where I live it would cost about $60 per day to run one of those chargers at absolute maximum. Realistically speaking it would be hard to run one full-time though, since the average EV has ~80kw of battery and would be full after 4-ish hours.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. What I’ve seen doesn’t look anywhere close to an 8+ out of ten rating. Will be interesting to see the player ratings on this one…

I don’t dislike that art style in general, but to my mind it seems like a poor fit for a Dragon Age game. I guess they’re pivotinf strongly away from the series dark and gritty roots, which is unfortunate because I think that was one of its strong points.

Watching Skill Up’s review now, and oof. That art style… that writing. Don’t know who they made this game for, but it’s definitely not me.

No, the opposite actually! Any amount of exercise will help with GI motility, but intense exercise causes the digestive system to slow down (source).

None of the above. The correct answer is walking. Moving around helps kickstart the GI tract.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

I don’t believe it actually does grow back faster, it just seems that way. The first inch or so gives the impression of growing back faster because the hairs are thicker at the base so they’re more visible and less prone to breakage.

I’m all for de-Googling, but… is it possible that Restricted in this context mean those apps have no data usage because they’re restricted from using it? It could be trying to say that the app is restricted, not that you’re restricted.

Is there any benefit at all

Maybe! There’s at least some scientific evidence that chemical compounds in mushrooms can have medicinal effects.

Bias disclaimer: I put a lion’s mane mushroom tincture in my morning tea because it may have a neuroprotective effect (source). My father’s father had dementia, my father is currently in a home with profound dementia, the chances it’s going to happen to me are very high. It’ll be years before I know whether lion’s mane mushroom will do anything for me (and even then you couldn’t claim anything from one data point), but I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s affordable and has at least some plausible evidence behind it. This isn’t the only thing I’m doing of course, I’ve also overhauled my diet (MIND diet) and lost 30 pounds (obesity is correlated with dementia).

why can’t you make it your self by pulverizing dried mushrooms of the same variety they use into powder and making the coffee yourself?

You absolutely could. Or, you know, just eat some of the same mushrooms. The benefit to dried products like Ryze, or tinctures like the one I use, are that they’re convenient, easily transportable and self-stable. I’ve cooked up fresh lion’s mane mushrooms several times, but not super often because they’re not in many stores in my area and tend to be pricey for the amount you get. I’ve also grown my own from a kit but that takes significant time and a little bit of daily attention to maintain optimal growing conditions. The tincture is convenient and relatively affordable as far as daily supplements go.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.

Private State Tokens are Google’s implementation of the IETF Privacy Pass protocol. Apple has another implementation of the same protocol named Private Access Tokens. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this protocol in its current form, and its existing implementations in their current forms. See here for their blog post on the subject, and here for their more in-depth analysis.

One of my grandfathers used to work for Nortel. One of the projects he worked on was the Trans Canada Microwave, which was a microwave relay system built in the '50s to carry television and telephone signals across Canada. The towers were installed all over Canada in remote locations and high elevations. Maintenance on the system could be required even when the weather was bad. My grandfather told me that the engineers who worked on the towers would sometimes stick their hands in front of the microwave emitters to warm them up. It’s anecdotal, but I’m relatively confident that it’s theoretically possible to warm people with microwaves.

Big caveat, though. Those engineers knew how powerful the emitters were, they knew that microwaves are not ionizing radiation and thus posed no cancer risk, they knew roughly what percentage of their hands was composed of water, and thus how much heat energy their hands would absorb from the emitters at a given power level. That’s the only reason they were willing to do it, well that and they were probably the kind of people who got a kick out of doing something that would appear insane to most of the populace.

It seems very unlikely to me that a microwave system could be turned into a safe people-heating system for at least the following reasons:

• Feedback loops. All modern HVAC works on feedback loops. Your thermostat detects that the temperate is cold, it fires up your furnace / heat pump / electric baseboard / whatever and produces more heat. When the thermostat detects that the temperature has reached the set-point, it shuts off the heat. Current thermostats would not be able to detect the effect of microwave heating, which prevent the establishment of a feedback control loop.
• Uneven heating. Things with more water will heat up a lot faster than things with little water. This is usually fine when microwaving food since most of our food is water, in varying concentrations. If you’re heating up a burger in the microwave, you can put the patty in by itself for a minute, then put the bun in for 15 seconds, then reassemble a burger that doesn’t have a cold patty or a stiff overcooked bun. If you’re heating up a person, you can’t ask them to take out their almost-entirely-water eyeballs to ensure they don’t overheat.
• Failure conditions. If your heat gets stuck in the on setting, the maximum result is probably that your house will get sweltering hot but not hot enough to kill you in a moderate timeframe. Depending on power levels, a microwave heating system could internally cook people in their sleep if it entered a failure mode where the heating got stuck in the on setting.
• Efficiency. It takes a considerable amount of power to run even a small microwave, and that’s blasting microwaves into a relatively tiny cubic area. Trying to heat people would require microwaving a much larger volume, and said volume would also be moving around. Trying to emit microwaves in even a house-sized volume would probably be prohibitively costly.
• Interactions with metal and other objects. Microwaves can create intense electrical fields around metal objects, and those can become intense enough to create plasma and electrical arcs. Hell, you can create plasma in your microwave with two grapes. Blasting microwaves into a large volume with unknown contents would be a great way to create an unexpected fire.

My dream was to work as a game developer. This was nearly 20 years ago. I actually got an offer in that field at one point, and the salary was like $20k less than what I was already being paid. I was the main bread-winner in what was a (mostly) single-income household at that time, with my partner pursuing her PhD. Gave up the dream, and I’m glad I did based on what I later learned about that industry. If I went into the game industry I’d be making far less money and have far less free time to do the things I enjoy, like playing the games other people make.

I’d argue that Molyneux from the 80s and 90s was a great game designer. Populous, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper were all critically praised at launch and sold well, and in all the sources I’ve seen he’s credited as the main designer on those game. This was mostly pre-internet, so if he was over promising features in those games that hype wouldn’t typically reach the game-buying public.

The rise of Internet game journalism is what really fueled the self-destruction of his legacy. Black and White was the first Molyneux game where I can recall seeing tons of prelaunch hype, with many of the hyped features absent from the finished product. Game journalists have consistently given Molyneux a platform, initially because of his early hits but later because he’s reliable clickbait. They don’t care that he’s full of shit, they know it’ll drive engagement, and negative engagement is just as good as positive for their bottom line.

Even with all the over promising and under delivering he’s done since 2000, there are still plenty of people who love the Fable and Black and White series. I think if the man had ever learned to keep his mouth shut before features were locked, he might have a markedly different legacy. But he just couldn’t do that, so now I keep a Polaroid of him pinned on my corkboard with “don’t believe his lies” written on the bottom in permanent marker.

MinuteCast from AccuWeather does exactly this. It looks at your location, looks at radar data for storm systems approaching your location, and estimates when precipitation will start at your location and how intense it will be. It’s generally pretty accurate, with some limitations. It seems to be pretty good for consistent rainstorms but it can get tripped up by pop-up thunderstorms, where the radar track can go suddenly from no rain to downpour. It doesn’t make predictions more then 2-3 hours out because past that timeframe it’s not easy to predict if weather will continue on its current track or change direction. Even with the limitations, I use it all the time. Mostly to tell if I should take the dogs out right away, or if I should wait an hour or two.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.