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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • You can’t outright, but you can at least try to minimize your exposure. Easiest way is to avoid buying products that use plastic packaging, especially if the product that you’re planning to buy is food. Don’t microwave plastics, even the supposedly “food safe” one - that releases a ton of microplastics into your food. Don’t order takeout - again, lots of plastic in the containers. Even paper food containers contain a plastic coating.

    Don’t touch receipts, especially with wet hands. Or at minimum, wash your hands thoroughly after touching it



  • It’s confusing because both AMD and Nvidia call both frame gen and upscaling as the same thing.

    Upscaling: GPU renders game at low resolution (eg, 720p), and then (semi) smartly guesses what’s in the pixels that weren’t rendered. You get improved framerates because the GPU is doing less work per frame. The downside is typically that the image is typically a bit blurrier, and depending on how the GPU guesses the missing pixels, you might also get ghosting, which is where moving objects leave a smear trail behind them. The general consensus is that if you plan to use an upscaler, you should only use the highest quality mode on the upscaler. Any lower and the blurring becomes too significant

    Use when:

    • your GPU isn’t powerful enough to drive your monitor at its native resolution (ie you were going to run the game at a lower resolution anyways)
    • your game isn’t running as fast as you’d like, but turning down the settings would result in too noticeable of a drop in visual quality
    • your game doesn’t support your monitor’s native resolution (common in older games)

    Do not use when:

    • you could turn down the settings and still be satisfied with the visual quality

    Frame gen: GPU renders a frame, holds on to the frame, renders the next frame, and then guesses at what happened between the two frames. The framerate is improved because the GPU is inserting an entirely guessed frame in between every rendered frame. The downside is that because the GPU has to hold on to a frame, the latency is increased. More specifically, the time between when you move your mouse and when your camera moves will be increased with frame gen.

    Use when:

    • your game isn’t latency-sensitive (eg puzzle games, strategy games, some adventure games)
    • you have a high refresh rate monitor (higher refresh rates typically lead to less added latency)

    Do not use when:

    • your frame rate (without frame gen) is below 60 fps (added latency becomes too noticeable)
    • your game is latency-sensitive (eg competitive multiplayer games)

    Terminology:

    • AMD FSR 1: semi-dumb upscaler

    • AMD RSR: literally just FSR 1

    • AMD FSR 2: semi-smart upscaler

    • AMD FSR 3: very slightly smarter upscaler than FSR 2, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

    • AMD AFMF: literally just the frame generation part of FSR 3, but slightly dumber

    • nVidia DLSS 1: semi-dumb upscaler

    • nVidia NSR: literally just DLSS 1

    • nVidia DLSS 2: semi-smart upscaler

    • nVidia DLSS 3: smarter upscaler than DLSS 3, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

    • Intel XeSS: semi-smart upscaler


  • I expect it’ll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can’t control himself so he’s going to say some unhinged shit, but it’s definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

    Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the “Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me” strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

    I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it’ll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked





  • If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

    Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

    In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need




  • Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

    If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture






  • I’m personally not a fan of Mint - tried it for a month or so. My impression is that if it works with your muscle memory, it works well. If not… then even Windows ends up more user-friendly.

    I’m particularly not a fan of the “start menu” because you don’t really get a lot of space for pinned apps, and there’s no way to really modify that. I ended up liking KDE quite a lot more. It takes a bit longer to set it up to what you like, but its customization means that while there’s a bigger upfront cost to setup, it’s much smoother once it is set up.

    I’m using KDE Neon (Ubuntu + KDE), which I’m pretty happy with. But I’m also debating whether to switch to Kubuntu (also Ubuntu + KDE for some reason)


  • My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

    And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun

    To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

    We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

    My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)