125 / 40 = approx 3.

That’s really an absurdly huge cup if it is about 1/3 of your entire daily water intake.

Hmm, for me, swimming is fun when the sun is trying to bake me alive. It offers immediate relief that’s very pleasant.

Do you not like going outside? Do you not enjoy swimming?

Nope, Canada.

I’ve lived in half a dozen cities on multiple continents and have never lived somewhere where summer was the worst season. Even living in a place where winter temps meant overnight lows of 5 and highs of 15, summer was still much better. I’ve even spent time in tropical locations where the seasons are “rainy” and “not rainy”, so it was basically summer all the time, and I liked that a lot better than even a mild winter.

Also, you basically can’t go outside. Sure, you can go from a heated building to a heated vehicle then into a different heated building. Or, when it isn’t too cold you can do certain sports outside. But, even going for a walk means putting on a huge number of layers, and then trudging through snow which slows you down, trips you up, and gives you very little traction.

Not to mention that never being able to open a window means no nature sounds for months on end. The cold and snow means no sight of living nature (other than pine trees) for months.

It’s also extremely difficult and dangerous to bike (at least here) so you either need to own a car, spend a lot on taxis / lyft, or spend nearly as long as it would take to walk and take public transit.

If I lived somewhere where winter lasted 1-2 months I might enjoy it. But, where I live it’s 5+ months, and I fucking hate it.

When it’s winter my outdoor thoughts are “I g-g-g-gotta g-g-get i-i-ins-s-side w-w-where i-i-it’s w-w-warm”.

And for those who say “touch grass”, “Ok, I’ll get to that in late May”.

Once upon a time, I was traveling in Thailand and went to a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere that mostly served tourists. There were two guys there who thought they could handle spice, so they told the waiter to bring them something spiced for Thai locals. He tried to discourage them, and offered to give them something that was really spicy for westerners, but they insisted that they wanted what locals eat.

When they received their dish, they couldn’t even manage a single bite. I could overhear them, and they were convinced that the waiter was playing a joke on them, so when he came back they asked him to try it to see if it was good, trying to catch him out. The waiter had a few bites, said “yeah, tastes good”, asked if they needed anything else, and when they said no, just went on to help his other customers. The tourists were just gobsmacked.

I know my limits, and decently high for “The West”, but it’s nowhere near the limits of a Thai person who likes spicy food. And, I know enough to know that when I’m on vacation, I want it even less spicy than normal. If I get something ultra spicy at home, I might have to spend some unpleasant time on the toilet. But, at least it’s my own toilet. I really didn’t want to be caught out in some rural Thai toilet or outhouse trying to process something that was too much for me and missing out on enjoying my vacation.

That’s not why. It’s because jalapenos are used in a lot of packaged food, and they need a uniform level of spiciness for that food. It’s easier for them to start with a bland pepper then add a specific amount of capcacin to bring up the spice to the required level. If they rely on cultivated jalapenos that are spicy, there’s a range of heat depending on growing conditions, etc.

Same, and if the street is empty I’ll often push the button and then cross while the light / crosswalk is still red.

If a driver is inconvenienced, good. Little nudges that make driving less pleasant are good for humanity.

Are you talking about the induction loops, where you can see lines cut in the street near the stop line? Where I live they work fine for bicycles. There are a few intersections without them where I need to hit the pedestrian button though.

A smart fridge is the only one that tempts me a bit, but only if I could trust the OS, and there’s no way I’m trusting any of the current major fridge makers.

But, there are some useful ideas. If it has a built-in scanner or camera, it could theoretically keep an inventory of what’s inside, when it was bought, and if it’s something like milk, when it expires. I’d love to get an alert that my milk was expiring soon rather than find out by accidentally drinking sour milk.

In theory, it could also pre-populate a grocery list for me, based on what I’m lacking.

I have a recipe app that I like called Paprika, that has the concept of a “pantry”. If I’m looking at a recipe in there I can click a button to add all the ingredients in the recipe to a shopping list. When it does that, it checks what you have in your pantry, and doesn’t add those items to the list. That way, you only buy the items you need for the recipe but don’t currently have. But, the “pantry” in the app is something you have to add things to yourself. It doesn’t know if that list is accurate, or if it was accurate but you recently ran out of something.

It would be great if Paprika could talk to the fridge and figure out “hmm, this recipe calls for butter, which is normally in your pantry, but you’re currently low on butter, so I’ll add it to the list” or “this recipe calls for milk, but your milk has expired, so I’ll add it to the list”. Or, the reverse, when you come home from shopping, you throw a bunch of things in the fridge and it updates what you currently have in your “pantry”. Similarly, a smart “pantry” would also be useful for those same reasons. Probably even more than a fridge, because I see what’s in my fridge (except the stuff at the back) nearly every day. I really forget what’s at the back of the pantry.

It would also be nice if my fridge was “leftover aware”. Like, if I put the rest of my casserole in the fridge on Monday, it would know about it. If it knew that casserole leftovers typically lasted 3 days it could alert me if I was about to lose those leftovers.

Really what I’d want though is a fridge that came with sensors (cameras, barcode scanners, spoilage smell sensors, temperature sensors, etc.) and and API for them. But, from that point on, it was an open platform where you could install your own apps. That way I’m not stuck with say Samsung’s fridge software, which would no doubt be full of surveillance and ads. I’d want to run open source KFridge or something that might be a bit janky but that I could trust wasn’t trying to gouge me for money, or show me ads, or sell my data, or whatever.

Getting out appropriately would have been reversing to the place where it entered the flex-posted area, not simply smashing through them.

Remove Teslas from that and now what are the stats?

As usual, anything Musk touches turns to shit, including self-driving cars.

That’s not likely. What is likely is that computers that can still work with very small memory footprints become more popular. Microsoft is going to scramble. Apple is going to raise prices, and has already started selling cell phones on payment plans. Linux can often be better at running with low-memory setups, and those are going to be more and more popular.

You want to know about the big money? Look into cutting down trees on other people’s property.

Cut down a mature hardwood tree on your neighbour’s lawn and it might cost you tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There’s got to be a way to monetize that.

If you compare it with Gold

Which you shouldn’t do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other “vibes”.

In addition, a lot of the world’s gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It’s not even used as a direct “investment”, it’s just a pretty, shiny metal.

the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]

You’ll never guess why that happened… although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.

which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s

In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.

The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren’t living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.

In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.

So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary wasn’t typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague – and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world’s developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.

(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)

Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.

Yeah, that’s the one thing that’s missing for me. On Reddit I was on the Arsenal subreddit where after a game there would be thousands of comments. Here, there are maybe 5.

Lemmy is doing great when it comes to general news, politics, memes, programming stuff, etc. But, it will be a while before the more niche communities are healthy.

OTOH, Reddit is changing too – not just that it’s becoming more corporate. But also, more and more posts on /r/all are about India and India-related things. People in general seem to be dumber – angry about dumb stuff, more spelling mistakes, just little things I’ve noticed.

Anyhow, I really appreciate sh.itjust.works and The Dude, and especially the openness of how things are going.