Possibly although I’ve heard a few different theories about what Russia really wants. One theory is that their goal was to get their hands on Ukraine’s lithium mines since the value of gas and oil is declining while lithium is rising.

In either case what Russia wanted and what they’re capable of achieving right now are two different things. It seems highly unlikely that Russia is capable of a complete military victory and occupation of Ukraine at this point, at least not without pulling their armed forces off most of their border, something Putin very much does not want to do. This entire thing has turned into a giant quagmire for Russia as originally they expected this to play out as a fast blitz to seize the capital and instead they got dragged into a prolonged siege that has severely weakened their military not to mention exposed exactly how shabby and 3rd rate it is.

Considering the rocky position Putin is in now no matter his original intent he may consider it worth while to take the small gains he has made and quit while he’s ahead. If he believes he can prevent Ukraine from joining NATO then he can always just re-invade in the future after he’s reinforced his troops and replenished his weapons stockpiles.

I’m rooting for Ukraine but with donvict taking office it’s not looking great. I’m fully expecting all US support to be cut off as soon as he can manage it (just like his puppet master Putin has ordered), and unless one of the EU countries steps in to fill that gap it’s going to get rough over there. Well, rougher. I’m afraid Ukraine might actually be forced into accepting a surrender condition that lets Russia retain all the land they’ve taken, although that could be partially mitigated by Ukraine being let into NATO. On the other hand I’m not sure how much ability Trump will have to block Ukraine’s NATO membership but if he has any ability to do so at all I expect him to do just that.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. None of this is based on anything claimed by the corn industry but rather on a series of studies that were done (technically one paper followed by a paper by a different group refuting that paper due to it overlooking an important detail).

For a pretty good explanation of all of this check this video out: https://youtu.be/NY66qpMFOYo

You actually can’t taste a difference. The taste tests are between so called Mexican coke and US coke, but it’s not apples to apples. Mexican coke is a different formula which is why it tastes different, it’s not just corn syrup replaced with sugar. For instance Mexican coke has less than half the sodium of US coke. People prefer the Mexican formula, not the sugar.

Edit: for comparison here’s the nutrition label of Mexican coke and US coke. Notice the sodium and carbohydrate quantities. The formulas are different, it’s like comparing Sprite and Sierra Mist, they’re a similar flavor but ultimately different.

You can also just watch this: https://youtu.be/NY66qpMFOYo

It explains all of this and debunks every possible argument for why sugar might be better than corn syrup in soda.

Edit 2: For those downvoting you do realize that doesn’t change reality right? You’re still wrong and there is no difference between a soda sweetened with sugar and one sweetened with corn syrup (no not even taste). If you have two sodas that are completely identical except one is sweetened with sugar and one with corn syrup if it’s been more than a month since they were made they are chemically identical, there will be no actual sugar left in the one made with sugar. They will taste identical, even in a blind taste test. Mexican Coke is not US Coke with the corn syrup replaced! It’s a different soda entirely.

So, not to detract from your overall point, but apparently there’s functionally no difference between soda sweetened with sugar and corn syrup. The reason why is after a month or so of sitting on the shelf the acidity of a carbonated drink has converted all the sucrose (table sugar) into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose. Corn syrup is a 45/55 mix of glucose and fructose.

So while a corn syrup sweetened coke would have ~5% more fructose than one sweetened by sugar, the difference is so minuscule as to be effectively identical. In other contexts (such as in baked goods, candies, or non-carbonated drinks) there is a difference between using sugar and corn syrup, it’s just in the specific case of carbonated drinks that it doesn’t matter.

I don’t see any mention in there of Thalidomide being a mirror molecule, do you have a source for that?

Only exception would be if they can produce those wafers at 1/10th of the previous cost, but I highly doubt that’s the case.

That was my plan until MS installed copilot on my system without asking. A month later I installed Linux and haven’t looked back. I did dual boot just in case I needed it, but I actually haven’t had to boot into windows for the last 4 months. It’s gone so well I’m currently planning to do the same to my wife’s computer in a few months when I give it its hardware refresh.

I believe Framework has their webcam LED setup like this. At a minimum the physical switch cuts power to the whole webcam assembly.

Not that it will matter, the orange moron is going to do everything he can to gut the FTC. Unless they’re going to do something in the next month they might as well just start wrapping things up now.

Both can be true.

India is just like anywhere else, you get what you pay for. There’s plenty of cheap dogshit contractors there but there’s also some pretty good “expensive” ones. I say “expensive” because they’re still cheaper than domestic, just a lot more than the cheap ones.

The interesting bit though is that the end state of all this outsourcing is an inversion. As US companies pour more and more money into foreign contractors the quality of those contractors steadily increases which then drives their prices up. Concurrently with that as the domestic market languishes and skills atrophy domestic prices fall. Eventually the US will find itself as the cheap 3rd world country the other countries are outsourcing to. That assumes of course other countries are as blindingly short sighted and stupid as the US. The more likely scenario is that those countries enact subsidies, tariffs, and tax breaks to protect their domestic markets in which case the US doesn’t become the hot outsourcing market and instead just continues to fade into irrelevancy.

That was my first thought as well, but per the article it sounds like EU regulators requested that data from Google.

It’s an alternative to Twitter in the same way Pepsi is an alternative to Coke, it’s still essentially the same thing. This is just trading one really shitty corporation for a different not as shitty yet corporation. As it grows it will eventually become the exact same thing and everyone will be back here celebrating the rise of some other corporate social-media network.

JS is a cancer infecting the programming world. It never should have escaped the browser. If null is the worst programming mistake ever made, JS is a strong contender for the second worst mistake.

The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?

Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.

If you don’t see the point, then Microsoft has successfully boiled the frog.

One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.

Not every game that uses anti-cheat, there’s plenty that do run fine in Linux, but the major ones it’s unsupported. Technically the games run, and run really well, it’s just you’ll get banned for running under Linux. The big ones I’m aware of that don’t work are Valorant, GTA5, Destiny 2, LoL, and Apex Legends.

Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).

Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.

Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.