It’s hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It’s a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

I mean… you’re surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They’re called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.

I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level “damn, I wanna nap right now.”

It’s probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that’s an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.

• Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
• Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
• Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

I understand the sentiment, but… HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to “thing everyone uses” for no good reason.

That sounds like more effort than just… writing the code.

A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.

My guy, see a doctor. Temporary blindness/blacking out is not a normal reaction to nicotine, even in excess. “Nic sick” should just mean nausea/vomiting, dizziness and headaches.

A few posters I bought from the campus poster sale at the start of the year. (Specifically, a woodblock print, a solar system map and a Cowboy Bebop poster.)

I have a huge window with a nice view (in a university owned apartment no less!) so I can afford to skimp on the other walls.

At least five years. Even if the company goes under tomorrow, it’ll be a while before the mainboard is truly obsolete. The main “consumable” would be the battery, which I can probably hack a replacement for if official parts are no longer available.

I’ve had mine (first generation 13" model) for over a year now. I’m very happy with it, and I intend to make it last me through university (3 years) and then some. I would consider it a good investment for me.

… Eh, no. I’ve seen GPT generate some incredibly unsound C despite being given half a page of text on the problem.

You forget that many people live in areas where passenger rail infrastructure is not economically (or practically) viable. I, for one, pity the grain truck that has to drive over an unpaved road.

The Rocinante is an obvious pick.

I also really like the ships in Starfield, mainly because I’m a cassette futurism shill.

Most of them, yes. The reddest stars (like Proxima Centauri) are too cool and dim to be visible to the naked eye, but if you go somewhere with no light pollution and let your eyes adjust you should be able to perceive some differences between stars.

Most of the more exotic colors (such as green) are caused by various optical tricks.

Physically speaking, all true stars are roughly one of these colors:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• White
• Blue

The exact color of a star depends on its size/temperature. Red stars are the coolest, while blue stars are the hottest.

This is what we in the business call a “skill issue.”

There are ways around it, yes. But none of them are plug-and-play unless you’re lucky, and a reliable solution will require a combination of technical ability, stealth and social engineering.

Just read a book my man.

Off the top of my head, for those that are curious:

• The show depicts radiation as similar to a contagion. In real life, once you strip and wash someone exposed to radioactive contaminants, they pose no danger to others.
• The reactor was never in danger of turning into a nuke or rendering huge swathes of Europe uninhabitable. Nuclear explosions only happen under tightly engineered conditions. A big pile of molten reactor slag, while certainly dangerous, can’t turn into a bomb.

However, the utter incompetence of the USSR is very accurate.

unless it’s freely available data (like a Linux distro).

Tell that to my university. Got a nasty email because I… downloaded Fedora Silverblue 38 😭