Yeah, it’s kinda like asking your mail deliverer when something you pre-ordered will arrive.

Or saying that the only global maps we should accept are ones projected onto spheres. Same thing for partial global maps above a certain size threshold (projected onto partial spheres).

I’m curious what that threshold is. Like how long do North/South roads need to be before there’s a non-trivial divergence towards the equator? How far do parallel East/West roads need to be before one is noticeably longer if measured from the same longitudes?

At which point even the ones who it does help will no longer be able to use it because it probably depends on an online connection for no good reason.

Also it’s not like assuming it will collapse in the next decade will make any difference other than having a harder time enjoying the time before then.

You should inform Boeing.

I’ve always interpreted the other thing coming as a threat or an unpleasant surprise. Ie, the consequences of thinking the thing they think.

Shouldn’t that be semi-monthly? Rounding months to 4 weeks, of course.

Or maybe that’s just me wanting bi and semi to have consistent meanings. Bi is two, semi is a half.

No, you must go back and tell him that the moon moves at a very predictable rate and once you get close enough it will even pull you in.

Also I’m pretty sure the ISS moves a lot faster than the moon but we still manage to dock spacecraft with it. I’m pretty sure it’s a bit smaller than the moon and docking can require higher precision than landing on a surface. Even Boeing managed to do it.

Though even in that case, I’d consider water consumed to be covered under “food”.

The only exceptions I can think of are from gaining mass from things other than what you eat. Like tar buildup from smoking, snorting or injecting various substances, boffing something (I think that’s what it’s called… Up the butt instead of out the butt), things sticking to your skin, absorbing through the skin, or bugs/aliens laying eggs inside you. Maybe getting possessed by a ghost, if ghosts have mass. But I don’t think all of those combined would even come close to a single meal, other than extreme cases.

I was curious and looked into how much mass the average adult loses through breathing, and apparently it’s at least about 69g (at rest, if you are metabolizing fat).

Ah I see what you mean, my mind interpreted what you were implying in a completely different direction from what you intended.

Which makes me realize I had missed on a big part of home automation by not realizing you don’t need to have direct communication with the appliances for an automated home.

I need to look in to smart water flow meters and maybe I’ll be able to implement one thing that’s been kinda a pain here: needing to manually check the water softener level to tell if I should cycle it before running the dishwasher or washing machine. I also need to move things to get into the utility closet, so it’s a pain. Instead I could measure the flow to know how much is left and reset it when the softener draws more power for its regen cycle. And then have something check it and send an alert any time either of those water using appliances draw more power than idle if soft water available is less than a threshold.

Also, for your problem, I’m assuming now that the intention is to turn up the ceiling fan if the stove is at a higher level? Or something to do with circulating air based on that? If so, what about using temperature sensors and the difference between them? I think that would end up being more efficient and effective than just going by the stove setting, since you don’t need high fan as the stove warms up and might still want the fan going after it shuts down.

Or if you want to know for some other reason (pellet use tracking?), you could combine temperate differential with current fan settings and calculate a rough estimate of how much thermal energy it’s putting out.

This is different from the old man angry at change meme. The change isn’t the problem; personally I like change and seeing evolutionary and revolutionary improvements.

The problem is that so many of these changes are for the benefit of the corporations involved in the product at the expense of anyone who ends up using it or is near enough to be affected collaterally.

The idea of a smart TV is nice. Except they put the underpowered hardware in it that struggles to display a menu. Maybe because of all the data it is gathering and sending home or the time it spends making sure the latest ads are downloaded.

Smart appliances are also a nice idea. Except most just want to connect to some proprietary web service so they can middle man every interaction to sell your data or a subscription.

A smart car also sounds cool. Except they are also designed to just make more money either via more expensive repairs, possibly even forced to go through a manufacturer approved mechanic because they use security features to protect them from competition, or by the usual selling your data and ads. Oh and also they can save money by sticking a bunch of controls into the software and not needing to make physical buttons. Also they save even more by also using underpowered hardware and probably not even bothering with UX design. Maybe even deliberately because bad experiences can be upsellers. Oh they also want to sell subscriptions to whatever they can, including to things that don’t even benefit from going through their services.

It’s all just rent seeking.

Wait, doesn’t a pellet stove produce heat by burning pellets? I’d figure the electricity use would be similar to a gas furnace, where it’s just running sensors and cycling it on or off.

Don’t you have to buy pellets and maybe even load them into the stove, depending on what kind of delivery system/hopper your stove uses?

But there’s other colours between green and blue like teal. I got a few clicks in before the colours looked equally green and blue and wished there was a teal option.

My favorite so far has been Enshrouded. Voxel world that doesn’t look like it’s made of cubes, plus souls like combat (though not nearly the same difficulty).

WoW probably holds the most cases of this for me.

World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn’t even get the stealth advantage.

So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.

Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.

Kinda misses the point because they have their own money to pay for whatever treatments they want, even if their company regularly denies them to clients. Buying insurance is gambling against the house, just health insurance has that extra bit where the insurance companies somehow have a say in what treatments they’ll cover.

That’s why the rich don’t gaf about ruining public services. They can still just hire someone to do it for them and if the government isn’t providing the service for everyone else, they’ll also need to hire someone to do those things, meaning some capitalist can set up a business to profit from the need the government no longer meets.

Move the battlefield to one where the outcome doesn’t affect you and you’ll never really lose.

Plus, while you’re winning, it being a normal thing will mean you’ll get plenty of blackmail material on those who it does affect but who also prefer the connections that staying on your side gives. And you can prosecute your opponents that openly defy the ban.

Whatever it is, I don’t believe paradoxes are possible (other than language ones that basically just confuse any attempts to resolve a statement or set of statements to true or false without breaking any physical laws or causality).

That said, I don’t think an unstable time loop would necessarily be impossible. Eg, you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is conceived, which results in you never existing in the timeline, which then means no one is there to go back in time and kill your grandfather, which means the loop disappears and the timeline snaps back to the version where you do go back, and it continually alternates from there.

Not sure if any future outside of the unstable loop would exist, I think that would depend on if there’s a higher dimension of time that these loops could play out over.

Or, if everything experiences the same present at the same time, it’s also possible that after the first loop, it wouldn’t go back to resolve the whole “killer pops out of literally nowhere” because it was in the past and no time traveler is bringing the timeline back to there, so it’s all in the past. Though I think in that case, you wouldn’t disappear after killing your grandfather. You’d just be an enigma that would require going outside of time to understand the origin of.

Tbh though I’m 99% sure time travel just isn’t possible (paradoxes or not), just a fun thing to think about. And no, I don’t consider quantum effects being symmetrical in time to be time travel, they are just cases where you can reverse cause and effect and still have a valid cause and effect sequence.

Funny thing is, they’d be right but not realize that Trump is a part of it rather than the solution to it.

Not sure where anything in that link contradicts what I said. A character used in a logo is one of those cases where a character is used as a trademark, but it only applies to that logo. Having a trademark of a Mario logo wouldn’t mean that Mario couldn’t show up in works that aren’t by Nintendo, it’s purely the copyright that prevents that.

The part where it gets complicated is more about, for example, a video of Mario playing Palworld and saying “This is-a better than-a pokemon!” was used to try to imply Nintendo themselves recommended Palworld over Pokemon, since Mario is a trademark of Nintendo and strongly associated with them.

Trademarks are about marketing and the origin and/or endorsement of something. Copyrights are about the presentation and creative use of the copyrighted works.

That said, if trademarks are used in the creative work, it seems as though they would need to be removed for someone else to sell that work. So if steamboat Willie has the Disney logo as a part of its opening credits and someone else tries to show it without removing that logo, Disney world likely have a trademark infringement case. But they wouldn’t have a case simply because Mickey mouse could be considered they spokesman and is a character in it.

For the Nintendo ones, once super Mario Bros’ copyright lapses, “Super Mario” might need to be removed from the title for others to sell it to avoid infringing on Nintendo’s trademark. But the characters of Mario, Luigi, Mushroom Man, King Koopa, and the Princess would be fair game, either in the game’s original format or derivative works.