January was $1262 in AUD. I eat a fairly meat based diet with ribs, pork belly, eggs, butter, and good coffee. I would consider it reasonable for myself, my partner, and my cat. That also includes other household things like cling wrap, dish liquid, and so on, so actual food cost is probably more like $1000-1100. In USD that is $697-767, so well under $200 per week. Also my meat is top grade Australian beef, widely considered some of the best in the world, and the butter is grass fed cow butter. I work 20-25 hours per week and can support my partner and myself on my pay and my partner’s disability payment.

The lack of a charger comes partly from an EU measure. They essentially don’t want huge numbers of unnecessary chargers made and sold while passing that cost to the consumer. On that basis they think you should be able to use the existing charger you have or buy one separately to suit your needs.

This is actually a good move overall. You are paying for the charger when you get it with your phone, you just pay more for the phone. They made it a requirement that devices have a USB C port for charging so they are all compatible. That means if you like fast charging you can get a charger which supports that and suitable cables. If you prefer lower charging speeds and want a longer cable you can do that instead. Or if you want to exclusively use wireless charging you can do so too.

I personally have not found the chargers from phones to be of good quality, mostly they were just barely passable.

Lol, true, the planned obsolescence is real. That said, I use Choice, a consumer advocacy group in Australia. They do reviews of products independent of the organisations they are reviewing. They get their funding from member subscriptions, not deals with manufacturers, so their financial interests are well aligned. They reviewed my washer and dryer and said they were the quietest and close to the most energy efficient available. If they die in a few years I will have made the difference up in electricity usage savings and not going mad from the noise, so it seems like a good deal.

Consider a heat pump dryer. They use way less energy and make the house much less humid by condensing the water for drainage. It is a much more efficient system and saves money over the fairly short term.

Lol, yes, though they secretly love the attention and love. Mine is absolutely clear about wanting pets and cuddles at all times and will even come sit on my chest when I lay down to be gently rocked by my breathing just like he did when we was a tiny kitten. Nothing is better than giving a cat what they need.

I like to think of it as saving the brush for when the replacement breaks. It is a spare now, having a lovely early retirement with the possibility of returning to work depending on circumstances.

That said, I have found that putting things back where they go is the second best tool. The best for me is to literally tie it to myself. My belt bags have all the important things including a first aid kit, phone, headphones, power bank and cables, nitrile gloves, pen, notepad, car keys, and so on.

For your cat I would recommend buying a few of the brush, identical ones are what I would go for, and place them where you would expect to find the brush. Maybe try looking for the brush and just note all the places you check in order. Then load each up with a brush and you will never be without.

The most important thing in life is to pet the cat so anything we can do to ensure we pet the cat is good.

I don’t know about how cureent mods are but there used to be one which had save slots you could copy and back up. It was a fairly large mod and took Pixel Dungeon in a fairly different direction with you starting in a town and being able to return through a portal every few levels. It was cool but doesn’t solve your issue.

Could you back up the entire game data? Maybe that would do the trick?

https://www.foxbatteries.com.au/c22n2107-battery-for-asus-zenbook-14-flip-oled-up3404va-kn060w-ux3402va

That is a suitable replacement. It is a simple pouch battery with an easy connector so the actual physical work to replace it is fairly simple and the cost is very low for the convenience of using your system for long hours. It should also prolong the life of your laptop delaying replacement for a fairly long time.

The big question is about the quality of the internals of the battery. Is the material consistently folded? Are there overhangs or under hangs? Are there areas where the anode and cathode are close and will short in a few years of usage? I honestly don’t know how to actually check for this.

I don’t know about your local area and associated limitations but I can speak more generally.

Volunteering your time is a really rewarding thing and it can feel better than donating money. But that is feeling better for you. If you have specific skills, for example web development, then volunteering your time in that expert capacity can be very helpful. If that skillset is not needed then using that skillset to generate funds to donate is more effective. Your efforts are not fungible, but money is, meaning the organisation can use the effect of your efforts in the most beneficial way for their goals, even if it is not a good match for your skills.

Considering specific hours of your work as volunteering hours and donating those hours of earning may help you get the feeling you need, feeling like you are helping and involved, while turning that effort into something useful for the cause you care about.

“On Saturdays I volunteer for my favourite charity by working my normal job and donating the proceeds”

People have tried this a bit and it doesn’t work well. Remember that most games have some sort of plot which needs to move forward without deviating too far and this is not easy to manage with AI. AI systems are predictive text tuned up, so they tend to wander in the conversation and this can be disastrous for something like a video game.

The world is there to support the illusion but also to direct the player to game material. An AI agent going off on a tengent about some random thing that kind of fits the world could lead to users running around wasting their time and being frustrated.

Add to that the risk of the AI system stepping into awful places like reproducing Nazi ideology and it is a nightmare for developeds. Imagine getting your game rated when it can randomly start telling your character not to worry about saving those people over there because their skin tone is darker and that makes them less than human.

Now as a tool for building scripts quickly? Maybe, but it does produce slop now and if that will change I cannot predict when. Maybe it could be used as part of the process but I think it is so toxic now I would not bet on it. I also think it should be labeled as the use of AI comes with moral issues around the environmental impact and theft of content from other people. If a game has AI generated content I won’t be playing it, and I am not alone. Just the push back from audiences could be enough to discourage the use of AI systems.

Now on the other hand using a neural network design for making character behaviours more believable, for example using a series of needs and having the algorithm decide what to do next and so on, that could be cool, but we have that already and it isn’t considered AI.

I still occasionally open up Alley Cat which is much easier now that you can do it in a browser.

https://www.playdosgames.com/online/alley-cat/

That’s from 1984 so fairly old, but it just feels amazing. Amazingly clunky, but amazing. I love the fish bowl so much, the mice are evil, and dating is hard for a cat.

I also regularly replay SNES games and recently finished The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. So much fun, such a well balanced game.

For most played it would have to be various solitaire games, especially Fourty Thieves. I have played these so much my phone has burned in card shapes, but that’s fine for me, worth it.

If I exclude cards it is Creeper World 3 which has at least 50 full days of play, but probably much more by now.

Gotta try ZyEl, such a good mod, cranks everything up to 11

Check out Open Arena. It is based in the source for Q3A but it is fully fleshed out with new characters and weapons. Absolutely frenetic and great fun.

+1 for micro machines, though I prefer v3.

And older GTA, GTA2 was my favourite. I play it every so often and always enjoy it, but it is hard to play GTA 1 with modern expectations, they really improved for 2. “And remember, respect is everything”

And fun. It is actually quite fun. The graphics are really nice, right in that midrange of not too low quality to be ugly but not too pretty to cook your machine.

This is exciting! I have wanted this since I was young and 30 years later VR monitors are finally getting here. I want to be able to switch into random positions and have my screens visible without rotation and angle issues. I have fairly severe ADHD and I move around a lot. Having this would mean I could throw my legs up the wall and still use my screen, then roll over to my belly and keep going. A phone works fairly well for this but does mess with shoulder position and is a strain, so getting something more reasonable would be awesome. Also I work with people with fairly significant mobility disabilities and I think this would be amazing for them. No dependence on where they can aim their head, just use software to correct the monitor to match their needs. Add some good inputs and it would be life changing.

Man, I really don’t like this study.

First, this is 44 people, 22 pairs of twins, followed for 8 weeks. This in not enough to be meaningful and the researchers knew this at the start. A sample of 44 people is so small you would only use it for a pilot study to show your study design and get funding.

Second, 8 weeks? That is an insanely short time. Again, pilot study, not real study.

Third, they didn’t measure heart disease, they measured LDL cholesterol. This is a proxy marker, not a measure of heart disease. It would be like measuring how many fires a city has by counting firefighters. It doesn’t measure how many actual fires there are, just how many resources are available to fight them. What if there is low funding? What if there is an issue with training? What if there is another disaster which is more urgent than the fires? LDL is not a good measure on its own for heart health.

There are lots of other issues but they all boil down to this being bad science. We know what questions should be asked and how to ask them. They chose not to ask questions correctly and get meaningful answers. This is not worth the paper it was printed on and means close to nothing.

If we get enough countries over time and the EU ends up encompassing the whole world it could become the Everybody Union and that would be cool.

What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.

First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”

It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.