A foolish way to die, but that exposed end of the concrete barrier is unforgivable.

Slashdot is one of the very few sites that I choose to allow ads. That's about to change.

I thought the first movie was essentially Pocahontas with blue people. I haven't seen the others.

Rails doesn't scale.

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

You can always tell boomers because they are obsessed with asset value.

Who cares if your battery gets swapped out? Whenever you get low on charge you swap and it's a neverending cycle. They already have this in China, an advanced country, for electric scooters. The batteries are all the same and when you get low you can recharge or stop at a swap station and put your current one in and get another fully charged one out.

Why aren't you cheering? The Trumptards are getting what they voted for, good and hard. Oh, how we will all laugh the next time a hurricane blows down the McMansions of these racist science-hating rebels

. We can even have FEMA mark any house with a Trump yard sign off-limits and refuse to give federal disaster assistance, like they did under Biden.

trumptards don't believe in welfare, remember?

so we can unfuck all the things he's fucked.

But the reality is, Trump is a symptom, not a disease. He was elected by the people. Those who voted Trump once were either Nazi sympathizers or fools. Those who voted Trump the second time around were definitely Nazi sympathizers, or definitely fools.

Impeaching Trump won't do anything. The next Nazi in line is JD Vance and he's ten times worse because, unlike Trump, he's not an idiot with a case of fronto-temporal dementia.

And even if Vance and the rest of the Nazi goons are out, the people will vote another fascist in the next time around because the people has proven twice now that they're fucking fascists or fucking morons.

In short, America is fucked because Americans are hopeless.

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.

Your "junk" is someone else's "must-have".
Your "must-have" is someone else's "junk".

Fed up customers fleeing in droves.

Nobody likes Microsoft. Nobody has ever really liked Microsoft. But everybody puts up with Microsoft's low quality products and abuse because Microsoft is a monopoly that's hard to escape - particularly in corporate settings, and for gaming.

But they've really cranked up the abuse to 11 recently, with Windows becoming a terrible advertisement platform, requiring new hardware when people's old machines were still serviceable, the constant privacy invasion, relentless push for online accounts, for their cloud offerings, and now their godforsaken AI shit that literally nobody likes nor want. Not to mention upcoming price hikes for the privilege of getting all that enshittification thrown at your face...

Microsoft has gone too far for a lot of people, and people react by going to Apple or Linux. And quite frankly, personally, I desperately want Microsoft to continue shooting themselves in both feet like they're doing so they make themselves irrelevant as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, and we're finally, at long last, rid of them at last. 50 years we've been waiting! That's like half a century dude...

I mean, from a horticultural perspective, there is some potential to gain more of other nutrients, in that if you have more energy, you can develop a larger root system, or generally more effectively, better feed mycorrhizal associations (fungal hyphae are much finer than root hairs, so can get into smaller cracks, and fungi can "acid mine" nutrients out of mineral grains - as an example, here's a microscopic image showing what they did to a garnet)

That said, yeah, in general if you can provide more energy, you expect the storage of "calories" to grow much faster than the acquisition of other minerals. Also, it's important to note that while more CO2 is generally good for most plants, more heat, or greater periods of drought (land dries out faster, monsoon belts spread) and flooding (atmosphere holds more moisture, monsoon belts spread) are not. In regards to heat as well, there's a lot of details. First off, though we commonly don't think about it, heat management in plants is critical. Their proteins are designed for function within an optimal temperature range, and to maintain it, they have to cool themselves down with transpiration, creating more water stress. Also it's worth noting that C3 plants (most plants) fundamentally don't tolerate heat as well as C4 or CAM plants (there's work to engineer C4 into some common agricultural crops... it's frankly amazing to me that they're getting some success, as it's not a trivial change).

BTW, the reason that plants grow better with more CO2 isn't what most people might think. The TL/DR is that the protein that sequesters CO2 so that (using ATP and NADPH from photosynthesis) - RuBisCo (the most abundant protein on Earth, something that has been evolving for billions of years) frankly sucks at its job. Something like 20-25% of the time (at normal CO2 levels), instead of binding with CO2, it binds with O2 instead ("photorespiration"), which means not only does it not sequester a carbon, but the plant has to *give up a carbon* to regenerate the RuBisCo. This is disastrous in terms of energy efficiency. And as a side effect, you also have to keep the stomata open more, which means more water loss. But as you increase the CO2 levels, the ratio between binding CO2 and binding O2 improves, and photorespiration waste drops. C4 plants "fix" this problem by instead of having RuBisCo directly bind CO2, they first bind CO2 into malate (with high selectivity), then the malate transports into bundle sheath cells, the CO2 is re-released, and THEN - in a high-CO2 environment - RuBisCo takes it up. This reduces photorespiration, but also introduces some more wasteful chemical conversions. (CAM plants to even further by storing malate inside vacuules - at the cost of even more energy - so that they can store it up during the night, and then use it during the day, which - although even more wasteful - lets them keep their stomata closed during the day to conserve water)

(BTW, there are some microbes that have developed a more efficient RuBisCo, but it's proving challenging to engineer it into higher plants)

They're ovens that are faster to preheat. Which shortens the cooking time of meals that are mostly pre-prepared, which is what most people eat (if you're preparing a meal from scratch, usually prep work takes up the preheating time)

The point is that people who willingly contributed to the enshittification of the internet have no ground to stand no to complain about the enshittification of the internet.