a fat crow

Beware of reverse survivorship bias. We’d know relatively little about the smart deviants if they rarely get caught.

The software subscription fee was an ongoing cost to whoever installed the equipment, now that fee has been replaced by a per-use fee that’s part of what drivers pay.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.

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.

The owner of the Cantina doesn’t like droids, so my head canon is that he’s repurposed scavenged droid heads as drink dispensers. Kind of a “drinking from the skull of your enemy” type thing.

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.

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.

I think you’re referring to FlareSolverr. If so, I’m not aware of a direct replacement.

Main issue is it’s heavy on resources (I have an rpi4b)

FlareSolverr does add some memory overhead, but otherwise it’s fairly lightweight. On my system FlareSolverr has been up for 8 days and is using ~300MB:

NAME           CPU %     MEM USAGE
flaresolverr   0.01%     310.3MiB

Note that any CPU usage introduced by FlareSolverr is unavoidable because that’s how CloudFlare protection works. CloudFlare creates a workload in the client browser that should be trivial if you’re making a single request, but brings your system to a crawl if you’re trying to send many requests, e.g. DDOSing or scraping. You need to execute that browser-based work somewhere to get past those CloudFlare checks.

If hosting the FlareSolverr container on your rpi4b would put it under memory or CPU pressure, you could run the docker container on a different system. When setting up Flaresolverr in Prowlarr you create an indexer proxy with a tag. Any indexer with that tag sends their requests through the proxy instead of sending them directly to the tracker site. When Flaresolverr is running in a local Docker container the address for the proxy is localhost, e.g.:

If you run Flaresolverr’s Docker container on another system that’s accessible to your rpi4b, you could create an indexer proxy whose Host is “http://<other_system_IP>:8191”. Keep security in mind when doing this, if you’ve got a VPN connection on your rpi4b with split tunneling enabled (i.e. connections to local network resources are allowed when the tunnel is up) then this setup would allow requests to these indexers to escape the VPN tunnel.

On a side note, I’d strongly recommend trying out a Docker-based setup. Aside from Flaresolverr, I ran my servarr setup without containers for years and that was fine, but moving over to Docker made the configuration a lot easier. Before Docker I had a complex set of firewall rules to allow traffic to my local network and my VPN server, but drop any other traffic that wasn’t using the VPN tunnel. All the firewall complexity has now been replaced with a gluetun container, which is much easier to manage and probably more secure. You don’t have to switch to Docker-based all in go, you can run hybrid if need be.

If you really don’t want to use Docker then you could attempt to install from source on the rpi4b. Be advised that you’re absolutely going offroad if you do this as it’s not officially supported by the FlareSolverr devs. It requires install an ARM-based Chromium browser, then setting some environment variables so that FlareSolverr uses that browser instead of trying to download its own. Exact steps are documented in this GitHub comment. I haven’t tested these steps, so YMMV. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea because the full browser will almost certainly require more memory. The browser included in the FlareSolverr container is stripped down to the bare minimum required to pass the CloudFlare checks.

If you’re just strongly opposed to Docker for whatever reason then I think your best bet would be to combine the two approaches above. Host the FlareSolverr proxy on an x86-based system so you can install from source using the officially supported steps.

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.

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.

There is a Unicode Technical Standard for this, called the Unicode Collation Algorithm. Whether everyone uses it, I can’t say. As it says on the linked page:

Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.

So in other words it’s possible to conform to the Unicode Standard without adhering to the Unicode Collation Algorithm.

whatever this is: ¦

That is the pipe symbol, or vertical bar. When it has a gap in the middle it may be known as the broken pipe symbol or broken bar. It’s considered the same symbol with or without the gap. Early terminals displayed it with a gap to make it distinguishable from lower-case L characters.

Summing a balance column is never correct. Take any example that doesn’t end in a zero balance and it’s easy to see that the balance column’s sum is meaningless:

There are some viruses that have targeted Linux, but they’re rare compared to other platforms and their ability to spread is relatively low. One of the main reasons is just down to how software tends to be installed on each platform. Viruses have an easier time spreading on Windows or OSX where users are more accustomed to downloading an executable and running it. Once there’s a malicious running process, it has a comparatively high chance to spread because it can attempt to escalate its privileges either by exploiting a bug or socially engineering the user to click through a privilege escalation prompt. That entire workflow is practically nonexistent on Linux, users just don’t tend to download and execute random binaries. Instead most Linux software gets delivered in one of these ways, each of which has impediments that reduce the chance a virus could spread:

• through an OS repo; it would be difficult for a malicious actor to get a virus through the release process and into a trusted repo
• through a public source like Github; again it would be difficult for a malicious actor to get a virus into public source code without someone noticing
• through a container image from an image library like DockerHub; I believe a malicious container would be sandboxed, making it hard if not impossible for that container to take over the host system
• through an application image like a snap, flatpak or appimage; again, I believe these run in their own sandbox from which they would have difficulty breaking out

There are some exceptions, for example some companies like Hashicorp will distribute their stuff as precompiled binaries. Even in that case you’re probably fine as long as you don’t run the downloaded binary as root. Users in the habit of downloading strange binaries from sketchy places and running them as root just aren’t very common among the Linux userbase. I’m sure there are some (and they should really stop doing that), but there aren’t enough of them to allow a virus to spread unchecked.

I don’t think dedicated antivirus software is really required anymore. I haven’t run third-party AV software on any of my systems in the last decade.

On Windows, the built-in Windows Defender is good enough for most use cases. When it first launched Defender had a pretty bad track record at stopping viruses, but now it routinely ranks at the top.

On Linux, antivirus software has never really been required. One major exception I can think of would be if you’re running a file server or mail server that talks to OSX or Windows systems. Even then the AV software isn’t really there to protect the server, it’s there to make sure you don’t pass malware or viruses to those non-Linux clients.

I didn’t say I’d downvote in those situations. I would guess that Rule 5 needs to exist for a reason. Without it the community could get overrun with ragebait posts. Personally I wouldn’t consider any of your examples questions to be ones that violate Rule 5, but I’m not a mod and I don’t make or enforce the rules. I also wouldn’t downvote such a question myself, but I would consider reporting it if it seemed like the OP was consistently trying to pull the conversation into fractious territory. Anyway, if we want to to discuss the rules and downvoting vs. reporting, that should probably go in a meta post.