I’d wait for independent reviews. The first wave of Intel GPUs had a lot of issues, mostly related to drivers. From what I understand Intel has come a long way on the driver front in the past year, but we don’t have a clear picture on their overall state with the new parts. Reviewers like GamersNexus will call out whether the current state of the drivers are good enough for a recommendation, or if Intel still has more ground to cover.
Having read all of them, I think of these books as three different sets:
TL;DR book 1-6 for sure for sure, books 7-9 probably, novellas if you go through books 1-9 and still want more.
OK, I can do that. For the record I think the books are pretty great, though I do admit they stretch the bounds of believability at times.
OK then, here’s the details.
What’s the deal with their technology?
Technology in the silos is kept deliberately primitive for a number of reasons. First, simpler tech is easier to maintain and repair. While the silo inhabitants can manufacture many things, only so many CPUs, monitors, hard drives etc. were placed inside each silo. Second, simpler tech makes the silos easier to control. I don’t remember if this is mentioned in the show, but in the books they mentions that porters carry paper notes up and down the stairs because computer messages are expensive. There’s no reason for them to be expensive, except that the powers in control of silos don’t want its inhabitants to be able to effectively coordinate and organize resistance across the levels (this is also part of why the silo has no elevator).
The inhabitants are given enough tools and knowledge to build simple things and maintain mechanical devices, but anything involving high magnification is outlawed because if someone looks too closely out how the electronics work then they can start figuring out things they must not know. For example, all the radios in each silo were placed there when they were constructed and were tuned to communicate only within that silo. If someone breaks down a radio and figures out how it works then they might be able to retune it and pick up broadcasts from other silos. Much like the builders didn’t want inhabitants coordinating between levels, they definitely don’t want them to even be aware of the other silos, much less start coordinating with them.
Why are the restrictive and nonsensical rules in place?
Again, control. In order to keep the populace confined and healthy, there have to be strict rules on who can procreate, who needs to do what job, and above all that no one can simply open the doors and let death inside. Humans aren’t inclined to thrive under such conditions, which tends to lead to uprisings that have occurred multiple times in the history of each silo. The rules, the cleanings and the memory-wipe drugs are all part of an effort to keep the populace contained and safe.
What was the ecological disaster?
Self-inflicted genocidal nanobots. Read further to understand why “self-inflicted.”
Who built the silos?
The silo project was the brainchild of a US Senator. Through extensive political horse-trading, leverage, dirty tactics, you name it, he was able to secure funding for the silos and oversee their construction. There are 50 or 51 silos in total, outside Atlanta. The cover story of their construction was that they were to provide deep underground storage for nuclear waste. In actual fact they were long-duration isolated habitats to preserve humanity from the fallout of a nanotech war. The initial population of each silo came from a big ribbon-cutting ceremony / political rally / Democratic convention, where reps from each state were in the area around each silo. Atlanta was nuked to provide a reason to get everyone underground, at which point each silo was sealed.
This is the other reason magnification is verbotten in the silos. If the inhabitants got really good at magnification then they might find the killer nanobots outside their door, and then there would be some very difficult questions with no good answers.
The Senator’s thinking went like this:
Nanobots were actually released by the silos themselves after they were first sealed, as well as being released worldwide to kill everyone not in the silos. Whenever the silo doors are opened, additional nanobots are released to keep the area around the silo uninhabitable so that the inhabitants are strongly motivated to stay inside. There’s actually one silo not like the others, Silo 1. This silo’s inhabitants work in six-month shifts, monitoring the other silos and going into cryosleep between shifts. Silo 1 works with the heads of IT of each other silo, reading them in on part of the history so those IT heads understand the stakes. Of course, the heads of IT are not told that the inhabitants of Silo 1 deliberately caused the disaster in the first place.
Every silo is rigged to blow so that if it looks like its inhabitants have completely escaped control, Silo 1 can remotely detonate and pancake every floor in a silo down to the bottom of its pit. Silo 1 also has bomber drones as a backup, in the event that the inhabitants find and disable the remote detonation capabilities. This is why the head of IT is so frantic to prevent an uprising. He knows that he has to maintain order at all costs, or Silo 1 can literally pull the plug on their silo and all its inhabitants.
So why the head of IT? Because the other part of the plan is the servers in each silo. They maintain records for every silo inhabitant, and Silo 1 has backdoor access to that data. The silo project is also an attempt to prevent a repeat of a nanotech war, by reducing humanity to a homogenous and unified population. At some future date when each silo’s supplies are running out, one lucky silo gets told where to find the digging machine at the bottom of their silo. The chosen silo would be the one with the most cohesive population and the best chance of long-term survival, according to computer models and simulations. All the other silos are to be destroyed.
I briefly experimented with it ages ago. And I mean ages ago, like 20+ years ago. Maybe it’s changed somewhat since then, but my understanding is that Gentoo doesn’t provide binary packages. Everything gets compiled from source using exactly the options you want and compiled exactly for your hardware. That’s great and all but it has two big downsides:
Several years ago I was getting a lot of acid reflux. Went to the doctor, he gave me the “no-fun diet” list with all the foods to avoid because they can cause indigestion. Everything I loved was on that list. Beer. Cheese. Fried foods. Hot peppers. And, of course, coffee. I was highly motivated to achieve some kind of resolution to these stomach problems so I gave up everything on the list except coffee. Lo and behold, the symptoms remained. I switched the roles and gave up only coffee. The stomach symptoms disappeared, to be replaced by the worst fatigue headaches I’ve ever encountered. It took two weeks for the headaches to finally fade, and now I’m a tea drinker for life.
I drink Earl Grey tea, mostly because I’m forgetful as hell and I need a tea where I can just leave the tea bag in there for as long as it takes me to remember that I made tea. With most other black teas if you don’t yank the bag out at the right time your tea will get bitter as hell. Not Earl Grey, you can forget that shit for half an hour and the Earl don’t mind. You’ll still come back to a cup of tea that’s still perfectly drinkable. When I want to take it to the next level I get some Cream of Earl Grey, the kind with the little blue flower petals in it. Heavenly.
How can you be sure it’s the eggnog? To rule out other causes you should drink only the eggnog for the next 7 days. Y’know, for science!
Some of the alt UIs mentioned in this thread can be test-driven on lemmy.world:
And as others have said, once you find one you like you can self-host it and use it with any instance you prefer.
You could install LineageOS on your existing phone instead of upgrading. The OnePlus 7 Pro is supported. The install process can be daunting depending on your technical skills, but it’s a one-time process since the phone gets updates over-the-air after the OS is installed.
I did this with my OnePlus 6 a few months ago and the experience has been good. Switching to LineageOS bumped Android to version 13, whereas it was stuck on Android 11 on stock OnePlus firmware. I’m getting regular updates again, including open-source Android security patches. Not everything gets patched though, some of the core firmware is proprietary to OnePlus and that cannot be patched by anyone but them. It’s letting me extend the life of a phone still works well and has a 3.5mm headphone jack.
What you describe sounds like a flexetarian or semi-vegetarian diet, Wikipedia has a handy comparison of the various types. Pescatarianism looks to be the closest to what you describe.
Where do you stand on eggs and dairy products? The unborn egg may not suffer, and cheese and milk cannot suffer, but the animals that produce them can and do suffer immensely under factory farming conditions.
I personally couldn’t lump chickens in with domesticated mammals. I’ve encountered a fair number of animals that clearly had significant intelligence and capability to form emotional attachments (i.e. many dogs and cats of course, but also cows and horses), and I’ve never seen anything to indicate a similar level of cognition in chickens.
I’ve got a Garmin Vivoactive 3 and it works great. Heart rate tracking seems decent, and it will also do pulse oxygen though I usually leave that off because it drains the battery faster. The price is good too, they can be had new for $230 Canadian, so probably sub-$200 US.
Android app works well often, mostly I just use it as a bridge to get my calories burned data into a calorie tracking app (Chronometer, free version). The calories burned estimate seems to be decently accurate. I’ve been trying to eat 500 calories under the estimated burn rate, and I’ve lost 30 pounds since last November. Not a linear process, there were lots of events and trips where my willpower went right out the window, but those weren’t the watch’s fault!
Yes. Raise the tab just enough to equalise the pressure, then use your thumb to slowly open the can hole, working from one side to the other. This video gives a tutorial using a beer, but it’ll work for any aluminum drink can.
The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
MEC used to be the Canadian equivalent to REI. The “C” in MEC stood for “cooperative,” as in cooperative corporation. Members are supposed to be part-owners and have a say in how the business is run. Despite that, in 2020 the MEC board sold the company to a US firm without consulting the member-owners.
Atlassian doesn’t even have consistency within single products! I’m using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira’s own notation (e.g. {code} to start a code block). It’s always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn’t support it for some inexplicable reason.
Hard cheeses are dense enough that the mold can only grow on the surface. If you cut off the moldy parts and discard them, you’re getting rid of the vast majority of the mold. There will likely be some spores on the rest of the cheese, but not enough to harm you.
Soft cheeses are much less dense, meaning that the mold can penetrate below the surface more easily. If you can see mold on top then it’s likely throughout the cheese, and thus it’s much less safe to eat.
It seems pretty poor, especially for 2023. This article from four years ago has TSMC touting an 80% yield rate on their new-at-the-time 5nm process. Still, the fact that Huawei is able to produce 7nm parts at all is something of a victory. Huawei is probably around five years behind TSMC at this point but may be able to close that gap over time.
To be honest, I didn’t either but I wanted to know where all these names come from. So I did some Googling and that’s what I found. Apologies if I’ve mangled anything, but I think I got the broad strokes right. Etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is neat!
Essex comes from Old English Eastseaxan, literally “East Saxons”. In other words, this is the part of England that was invaded/settled by the Saxons and they divided their lands into east, south and west regions, plus a middle region (middle Saxons, modern-day Middlesex).
There’s no Norsex because at that time the lands to north of Saxon territory were held by the Angles. They also divided themselves into East Angles, South Angles, etc., but those names don’t seem to have survived into the modern day. Interestingly though, the Kingdom of East Anglia was divided into “North Folk” and “South Folk”, which is the origin of the modern-day names for Norfolk and Suffolk.
If you’ve heard of the Anglo-Saxons, yeah, that’s these guys, the Angles and the Saxons. The Angles came from parts of modern-day Denmark, the Saxons from parts of modern-day northern Germany. They shared a lot of common Germanic culture but were also rivals.
A fitness watch. Having a more accurate estimate of calories burned makes it easier to maintain a consistent calorie deficit every day. Down 20 pounds since Xmas!
The next tech bubble, IMO.