I’m glad you’ve broken that dating barrier as well! It certainly is difficult to invite people in when life is cluttered, and I can imagine the added complication of the clutter not being your own made things especially tricky. I’m personally on the opposite end of the cannabis spectrum at the moment - I used it for many years, mainly to break down my emotions and get at the root causes of my anxieties. I’m at the point now where I’ve done a lot of self improvement, but the cannabis has become more of a hindrance. I was dependent on it and definitely seeing some side effects from long term usage. I think it did serve a purpose, but it’s become time for me to stop using it as a crutch. Just a minor heads up to use with moderation if possible. I’m happy you’ve found someone though, and that your life is heading in a good direction. Wishing you all kinds of success in your relationship and life!

Well, the best thing that happened to me was meeting my girlfriend. Just happened a month ago, but we already feel like we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together and this is after me not dating at all for almost fifteen years.

So, the second best thing has to be several months ago when my family caught on to the fact that I was depressed and overwhelmed with clutter from stuff I was hoarding because I felt too guilty about throwing things away. They helped me sort through it all so it wasn’t so overwhelming. My living space is nice and tidy now and that’s what allowed me the confidence to go meet a partner who is perfect for me in almost every way.

This is worryingly similar to how toddlers react when I try to teach them how to tie their shoes

Hell, I might be a CFO now and I’ve failed to notice! Hold on, let me check… No… No, I’ve just managed to burn a microwave dinner again.

Get out. No, don’t get your coat. Just go.

Freeze! This is a stick up.

I know that’s what the comic is referencing, but I prefer to imagine they’re giving him the Henry treatment

https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry

690 years since the XT line began. If they started at AA-00, we’re looking at 1,851,690 years.

Playing devil’s advocate, I completely disagree. If two people are making competing arguments, only the one being needlessly contrarian deserves an upvote. Using Up/Down votes as a means to side with someone is a good way to build a Boeing 747-200 engine.

Yeah, it’s specifically the not talking to a kid version that bothers me.

I pick up a subtext of self-importance and I think that’s what I find irksome. A mom is a parent. A momma is a special parent who will do anything for their baby, you’d better watch out. A kid is a child. A kiddo is a specific child who has a close bond with their momma or teacher that you wouldn’t understand. That’s the vibe I get.

Similarly, not a fan of when teachers and parents talk about their “kiddos.”

Feels like they’re needlessly using a more playful childish term to make themselves part of a separate “in group” who “gets it.”

No, you’ve misunderstood. She married the Bigfoot and now she’s suing because she was perfectly happy not knowing he was just a bear. They had a destination wedding in London and the divorce lawyer’s bear-wedding annulment fee was 125 pounds.

Possibly. Is your husband an ass man?

For sure, that’s what I meant by membership. There’s just so many different creators I watch, I can’t afford to support them all directly. Maybe I’ll make some playlists to play on the TV with ads while I’m out of the house.

I’ve used an adblocker for ages as well, though I do wish content creators on YouTube could get some passive non-membership revenue from me without me having to disable my adblock and look directly into the Ark of the Covenant. I could get Premium, but at that point, I feel like I’ve negotiated with a terrorist.

Makes sense. Thanks for the info!

I finally got fed up with my Windows machine and upon seeing symptoms of motherboard failure, I’ve ordered all the parts for a new rig and intend on installing Linux as my primary OS.

Haven’t decided on a distro yet. I’m a DevOps engineer with a few passion projects, so I plan on setting up a couple of kubernetes clusters where I can play. I do all the usual things (word processing, gaming, web browsing, multimedia, etc), plus some AI stuff (stable diffusion, local LLMs, OpenCV). Ideally don’t want to have to fuss with drivers too much, but I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then.

Is Chimera the kind of distro I should be looking at, or should I pick something else for my first go at full-time Linux?

Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.

As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.

Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.

If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.

Haha, somebody did the math wrong.

* does the math *

Oh no.

Oh, you’ll be all right.