My Mint laptop audio stopped working for a couple months and then miraculously fixed itself this week. I made various attempts to fix it with no luck. It’s either a hardware issue or some obscure software issue.

In the past, I had plugged in a HDMI cable to mirror the screen and couldn’t get the audio working again until I plugged it back into HDMI and switched it back to the internal speakers before unplugging HDMI. Before the audio broke this time, I had connected a USB microphone, so it’s possible that’s what did it.

I’m assuming ads visible from Earth will be among the first developments.

I assume at this point, the world sees us as the 3rd picture.

Reading Tesla workers shared images from car cameras, including “scenes of intimacy” was enough to put me off Tesla. The build quality being garbage and Musk also being a garbage human being make the company just a complete waste of space.

Yeah, like Anthropic’s leaked code that was converted to Python and open sourced. It seems proprietary to open source is a bigger opportunity than open source to proprietary. If there’s already a FOSS version, why would anyone bother with a proprietary bastardization of it?

The Bible doesn’t specifically condemn pedophilia, and in fact seems to endorse it, so I guess he was technically practicing Christian ethics.

https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/pedophilia.html

Everyone knows a real picture of Earth would have the North American centered. This is clearly fake.

I would’ve been inclined to agree with you as of 10 minutes ago, until I read this Wikipedia article saying Starship refueling will require 10 or more launches. Damn, that means at least $1b to leave LEO assuming each launch is around $100m, so not really all that much cheaper than expendable stages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Propellant_Transfer_Demonstration

I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.

Edit:

This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.

It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.

Edit 2:

Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles

This seems plausible, whereas Starship shuttling between Earth and Mars to “build a colony” does not. More like Starship is a shuttle to LEO and then something like the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian that remains in space and uses ion drive would be what actually transfers humans to Mars orbit, with perhaps Starship also doing the shuttling between the surface and low orbit. It seems we are a really long way off from what The Martian depicts, though it’s possible the first human may step foot on Mars in the next couple decades.

If you’re not gay, you must prove it by wearing a birthday tiara and listening to nothing but Judy Garland the whole day.

AFAIK, the service module is European, built by the ESA, so this is not 100% an American accomplishment.

While Whitey’s on the moon

At least the crew for this mission includes a black guy and a woman, unlike the 24 white dudes who crewed the Apollo missions.

SLS has gotten a lot of well-deserved hate for being an expendable money pit. All that aside, damn, it lifted off with humans in it and off to the moon! There’s no other currently available rocket that can do that, including Starship.

The coal miners were told to learn to code, but maybe software engineers should be learning coal mining at this point. With all the AI data centers being built, there sure is going to be a lot of demand for coal.

Yep, I’d really like to stick to SoCs in the future as well. I’m holding off on hardware purchases until 2027 when AMD’s RDNA 5 will be available. Apple Silicon is amazing, but I’d like a less expensive alternative that has broader Linux distro support. RDNA 5 will bring true RTX cores, which is critical for my Blender rendering workloads, and is the main reason why I couldn’t justify AMD GPUs in the past for anything other than a dedicated gaming machine (e.g., Steam Deck).

My friend was part of the layoff and said they are providing 2 weeks of benefits. So, no health insurance after 2 weeks. It’s barbaric that access to healthcare is tied to employers in this country.

My kids’ devices are blocked from internet access in my OpenWRT firewall and I run a Squid proxy on my server with an allowlist of domains they can access.

Rahhh, shove it, shove it, shove it!

Glyphosate has also been linked to gluten intolerance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/

Maybe at some point, all the “gluten free” products will switch to “glyphosate free”. Until then, I’ve been buying imported flour from Italy, where its use is significantly more regulated than here in the US, although not entirely banned.

This movie gets horrible reviews, but I always found it hilarious.