I’ve read that red variants of veggies like cabbage get less attacked by caterpillars, and anecdotally, it seems to be true. It makes sense that insects would be evolved to target the more “natural” color.

Here is a really good article about the topic. The gist is that typically in mountaineering, there’s not often an official definition of the “start point”, but the “end point” is back at the start, so people who die midway on the return journey don’t “count”. The “top” should be easy to define, but often, the top of a mountain is a large area, and you aren’t going to hike around looking for which part is just barely the highest. Also, some true summits are habitually avoided as sacred places to the locals.

I think it ends up being the same amount of work for me. Rinse rice (optional), figure out correct amount of water for that type of rice, place on heat until done. Rice cookers can effectively detect that there’s no more liquid water, but that isn’t the same as “done” unless you used the right amount of water.

IMO, rice cookers are really handy if you are the type of person who eats rice as a staple food item that you buy in giant sacks and eat the same variety of every day. I have like 6 kinds of rice I rotate through, so I think it wouldn’t save me enough work to justify a separate gadget.

I’ve never used one of the really fancy pressure cooker rice cookers, though, so maybe my feelings would be different.

Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don’t use as much as I hoped (I’m staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting “thing” to be something that I will use/be excited about.

That’s why, for me, fixing stuff that’s broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.

The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.

I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.

Wow, you couldn’t be more different than I am. Over the years, I’ve bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there’s better tutorials for things now than “make a bunch of LEDs blink in order”, so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into “contains every part of a specific project” or “contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here’s a booklet of tutorials for some”. I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just “necropsies” on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you’ll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the “premium” widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

I guess maybe it’s been a while since I’ve looked, but that soldering iron seems like a crazy good deal. I’ve been using a crappy iron with a way too stiff cord for the longest time cause I figured it wasn’t worth it for how little I have to solder.

If you wanted pizza to be “italian”, it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.

Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will

Coffee beans aren’t beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don’t stick with them. There’s a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

It’s also useful as a visual notice of a parenthetical comment.

All news has a bias, some news just doesn’t tell you what their bias is. I’m not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I’m advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that’s not possible, and like I said, it’s very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.

News sites often have multiple feeds, but many these days don’t. And the feeds still aren’t as granular as I’d like sometimes. My regional newspaper has a feed for news more specifically local to me, but it’s bogged down with children’s sports and obituaries.

I think my dream setup would allow some intelligent filters to get rid of any categories I just don’t care about, and any “top 8 widgets to do X” filler advertisement articles. Also, a way to lump together all news articles covering the same story, so I could either choose which outlets to actually read/compare, or mark all as read.

I’ve not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I’d offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be “just facts”. You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It’s sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don’t have any.

Trains use steel wheels (unless the government is in the pocket of Big Rubber, like the Michelin trains in Paris)

The first $120k is exempt, though, so unless you are bringing almost $1/4 million a year, the majority is not taxed.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/foreign-earned-income-exclusion

There’s also tax treaties that can make things more convoluted.

I think most jus soli countries also have jus sanguinis

This is especially weird because the Netherlands does not normally permit dual citizenship.

It seems like many (most?) countries don’t like/recognize dual citizenship. The way it ends up working is that each country doesn’t have the power to tell the other country that someone isn’t a citizen. Each country just enforces it’s own citizenship within it’s borders. If you had US/Netherlands citizenship, and use a Dutch passport to try to enter the US, you will probably get yelled at by customs if they realize that you are a US citizen. They can’t stop you from entering the US but they can hold you for a while and pester you.

If you have a US citizenship but live in another country, most of your income will be exempt from US taxes (unless you are a millionaire, in which case you probably aren’t paying many taxes anyway).

A similar thing happens with countries that have mandatory military or civil service; you can be required to travel back to serve.

In my experience, “joined up” is the British English way of referring to the mostly informal way that people write “joining up” their letters. I don’t think it’s as formally structured and taught like it is (was?) in America, where pretty much every letter is different than in print.

Peppers are a north/south American thing, there aren’t any native to the old world, so it has to be a coincidence.

There are a lot of problems with it. Lots of people could probably tell you about security concerns and wasted energy. Also there’s the whole comically silly concept of them marketing having AI write your texts and emails for you, and then having it summarize the texts and emails you get. Just needlessly complicating things.

Conceptually, though, most people aren’t too against it. In my opinion, all the stuff they are labeling “generative AI” isn’t really “AI” or “generative”. There are lots of ways that people define AI, and without being too pedantic about definitions, the main reason I think they call it that, other than marketing, is that they are really trying to sway public opinion by controlling language. Scraping all sorts of copywritten material, and re-jumbling it to spit out something similar, is arguably something we should prohibit as copyright infringement. It’s enough of a gray area to get away with short term. By convincing people with the very language they use to describe it that they aren’t just putting other people’s material in a mixer, they are “generating new content”, they hope to have us roll over and sign off on what they’ve been doing.

Saying that humans create stories by jumbling together previous stories is a BS cop out, too. Obviously, we do, but humans have not, and do not have to give computers that same right. Also, LLMs are very complex, but they are also way way less complex than human minds. The way they put together text is closer to running a story through Google translate 10 times than it is to a human using a story for inspiration.

There are real, definite benefits of using LLMs, but selling it as AI and trying to force it into everything is a gimmick.

Normally, they try to talk you into overshooting your AC needs, so you end up with a house that’s the right temperature, but too humid. Strange that they undersold.

I get the sense that across the board, hvac people literally just glance at a house and proclaim the size of system you need. There’s all sorts of calculators online where you can put in all the relevant info, and it will calculate your needs accordingly, but they just ignore that.