Doctors will not perform lethal injection. It goes against the Hippocratic Oath:“First do no harm”

Correct. Green hydrogen is expensive and energy intensive, and is not as cost effective as getting it from natural gas. So currently most hydrogen comes from natural gas.

But, unless we find ways to make batteries without rare earth metals, we will be better suited to moving towards fuel cell, once we have the excess electricity from renewables needed to split hydrogen from water. For now, batteries are the better option.

Correct. Splitting hydrogen from water is quite energy intensive. Burning hydrogen into oxygen to make water releases energy, but not as much energy as it takes to split the hydrogen off in the first place. The reason to use hydrogen fuel cells is that the extra energy needed to generate the hydrogen is still far better than the carbon output and costly materials needed for making and charging a battery. Batteries need rare earth metals, and they lose their charging ability over time. Splitting water into hydrogen creates “potential energy” from the later creation of water again, making it a useful, clean way to store electricity.

Same as the plans for using cranes stacking concrete bricks to store electricity. It takes more electric to stack them than is produced by unstacking them. But it’s a clean way to store potential energy, and far more efficient and sustainable than a battery.

Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that’s just for these self driving cars. There’s a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

But if we did that, there’d still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

But it’d be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we’d want to set schedules of when they’re running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

And if they’re really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

sure, but not having POPCNT means way older than not having TPM

When was the last time there was a conservative president in the US who didn’t cause tremendous lasting damage to the country?

They’re so insistent on getting people to do their Subscribe & Save stuff, with lots of discounts for making a subscription. And I take the discount and cancel the subscription as soon as it shows up. The entire point seems to be to get people to subscribe at the low price, and then jack the price up, sometimes double, when it starts recurring.

Thanks for noticing my fear of abandonment. It’s from being abandoned so many times.

Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.

Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.

They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.

I’ve been using Kagi for 2 months and swear by it. It might feel silly paying for a search engine, but I’m now the customer instead of the product, and I can customize my searches the way I want.

It’s specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.

Right. If the UK tries to rejoin they’re going to get no favors from the rest of the EU, as an example to other member states that you can’t just play hokey pokey with a continental union. The UK will be miffed as a response. It’ll potentially take decades for a deal to work out for the UK to rejoin the EU, if that’s even its form at that point.

On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.

I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn’t know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.

Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.

Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.

Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There’s only one set of games I still have easy access to – Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I’m sure none of them work. But any game I’ve bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.

Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there’s a new one.

My point is that, if someone really leverages the power of AWS, it is entwined into their software stack to such an extent that it is not just a service anymore. It’s a platform. It’s the glue that keeps everything together. The lines between service and proprietary software blur real quick. It’s one of the reasons for the AGPL.

Everything in development involves risk, and products will move real slow if you don’t depend on someone for some services. But developers aren’t very good at risk management, not being reliant on a single service to butter your bread. It is very quick to bring a minimum value product to market on AWS, but the followup to that MVP needs to be moving to a more sustainable, less risky infrastructure.

The vendor lock in from AWS doesn’t come from just using EC2 servers. EC2 is just linux servers, like you say. You could run them anywhere. In fact, if you’re just running AWS EC2 servers without leveraging their other features, particularly auto-scaling, you’re probably just setting money on fire. Everything EC2 offers can be done much cheaper at a different host.

The AWS lock-in comes when you expand to their other services. Route 53 DNS, Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, etc etc. AWS offers a ton of different services that are quite useful, and they add new ones all the time. And if your company uses a bunch of them, and then realizes they need to leave AWS, doing so is incredibly painful. Which is the point.

It’s hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you’re actively developing, whether it’s for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.

We’re a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it’d take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It’s free for my open source projects, it’s a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I’m discussing my development.