colonial

colonial , 2 months ago

It's hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. A miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

colonial , 2 months ago

I mean... you're surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They're called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.

colonial , 2 months ago

I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level "damn, I wanna nap right now."

It's probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.

colonial , 2 months ago

Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it's what I got stuck with.

• Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
• Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
• Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

colonial , 2 months ago

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that's an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

colonial , 4 months ago

I understand the sentiment, but... HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to "thing everyone uses" for no good reason.

colonial , 5 months ago

A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent... even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority "thinking machine" viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.

colonial , 5 months ago

My guy, see a doctor. Temporary blindness/blacking out is not a normal reaction to nicotine, even in excess. "Nic sick" should just mean nausea/vomiting, dizziness and headaches.

colonial , 8 months ago

I've had mine (first generation 13" model) for over a year now. I'm very happy with it, and I intend to make it last me through university (3 years) and then some. I would consider it a good investment for me.

colonial , 8 months ago

At least five years. Even if the company goes under tomorrow, it'll be a while before the mainboard is truly obsolete. The main "consumable" would be the battery, which I can probably hack a replacement for if official parts are no longer available.

colonial , 8 months ago

Let the arms race begin

colonial , 10 months ago

Too many people conflate the evils of corporatism and corruption with the general concept of "capitalism"/a market economy.

Now, I'm hardly an advocate of laissez-faire economics. But I'm not a full-on socialist either. I think the majority of problems people attribute to modern market economies can be corrected with aggressive anti-trust and pro-consumer regulation.

(The keyword here is majority. I'm sure it makes sense to socialize some things, but those details are best left to people smarter than me.)

colonial , 11 months ago

Firefox and its derivatives. They're the last free bastion preventing a Chromium monopoly on the browser market, which is hugely important - especially these days with Google's push for Mv3.

colonial , 11 months ago

I was only ever really into Reddit, which Lemmy has handily replaced.

• I technically have an Instagram, but I scrubbed it and removed the app to stop me from doomscrolling and giving Meta ad revenue.
• Microblogging like Twitter or Tumblr never really appealed to me.
• I was born after 2000, so Facebook doesn't exist in my world.

I do use Discord, but mainly because all my friends and family are on there. I would love if a federated alternative like Matrix became the standard. Hopefully the EU's Digital Markets Act will help - if I understand it correctly, Discord and other platforms will be forced to allow seamless bridges (which currently will get you banned) under interoperability requirements.