I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.

Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.

And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)

My personal opinion (as a dispassionate atheist) is that religion isn’t the problem with human nature. In the U.S., for instance, we have some Christians who have strayed so far, I don’t get how they’ve even seen a Bible verse. But also, basically every major Civil Rights leader was a Christian preacher or woman of faith. There are similar situations everywhere. There’s Buddhists who are so non-violent they wouldn’t kill a fly and other “Buddhists” who commit genocide, which doesn’t even make fucking sense.

So, my view of religion is that it’s mostly not the thing to focus on. People can be organized for good or evil and there’s plenty of secular things where people define an identity. I suspect if religion never existed, we’d have all the same problems. I mean, we have soccer hooligans and it’s not because people object to 22 people getting some exercise on a lovely afternoon. (Or a miserable, rainy Wednesday night in England.)

I get what you’re saying but I like that Lemmy has a left wing bias (with a dash of libertarians). If it was the dominant media site, I’d agree about the echo chamber risk but so much media (in the English speaking world, anyway) is under right wing ownership now. Having a handful of sites that are a refuge from it all is a feature for me, not a bug. It’s an escape from the echo chamber.

When the pandemic happened, there were people who didn’t know how to make the easiest meals. I was shocked. So, my rule on recipes is that nothing is too basic.

It’s usually just to take a small amount of delicious oil or fat — whatever you have on hand — and saute diced onions with diced bell pepper (or local equivalent) until the onions are slightly transparent. Keep going if you want the onions start being brown and have a sweet flavor. That brown is just the natural sugars coming out of the onion and is what “caramelizes” means. Caramel is sugar. And then add garlic and/or ginger and whatever spices you like.

If you want to, add meat. If you don’t, do not. (Often, that very oil step is done from browning meat and not wasting the fat.)

If you want soup, add a lot of liquid and whatever and cook it slowly. If you want paella, jambalaya, jollof, biryani, or equivalent — every culture has a rice dish — use the rice recipe on the bag as if it were water. (Use stock if you have any but water works fine.)

There are dishes that are different. Like fried rice and French Toast use old rice and toast respectively. Baking is a science. But anyone can make a pot of delicious with a few ingredients and it’s a 10 minute, one pot meal.

Ok, I wrestled a cop and pinned him. What’s step 2? Please respond before his backup arrives.

Learn to cook the base of meals in different cultures. Like a Sofrito.

Most of the best classic dishes in the world really start with three or four ingredients and are just variations. You shouldn’t overthink it or buy rare ingredients. You’re better off picking one and mastering the basic steps. Learning to cook isn’t about learning to recreate a chef-cooked meal. It’s about learning to cook simple, cheap ingredients.

When I was in high school, I wrote a TI-86 program in BASIC to do geography/physics formulae. Like “find the volume of a cube” and then it would ask you for the variables and solve for whichever one was missing.

My teachers found out and actually ruled it not cheating because I wrote the program myself and hadn’t shared it with everyone. (I eventually became a computer programmer so they were probably right.)

So, I’d say by that precedent, as long as you gave yourself the tattoo and learned a new trade, it’s fine. But looking at a friend’s tattoo would be cheating.

I’d definitely fuck with another country. Good Britain. Or maybe Macedonia to fuck with Greece and North Macedonia. (Though bad Britain arguably has 3 countries.) Maybe The United State of America if it’s in the Americas.

Or maybe WaterParksylvania if I the water park budget is where I’d expect it to be.

I technically have both since I’m a developer but my daily driver is my iPhone because when I have an android phone, I constantly want to put different roms on it so it ends up unstable. So, Apple’s walled garden saves me from myself making my phone unstable when I need a phone for calls/messages and not tinkering.

I don’t notice much of a difference these days, though. Sometimes, I charge my iPhone and grab my Pixel and I don’t even notice. Back in the day, iOS was generally more polished and Android was either slightly behind or ahead on specific features but I find that both are pretty much mature at this point. Flagship cameras are both excellent. Accessory ecosystems exist. There’s really not an overwhelming reason to switch, (especially if the Android phone is also a walled garden, which seems more common now).

In 2003, The Onion had an “article” with no text that was just the headline “Taste Acquired” and a picture of empty beer cans.

Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?

Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.

If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.

And party on dudes!

My favorites are cocktail sauce and creole mustard. Cocktail sauce has ketchup in it and creole mustard is a type of mustard but it’s pretty different from typical yellow mustard.

Both also have horseradish and I also love “horseradish sauce” (sometimes aka “prime rib sauce”) which is basically mayo, sour cream, and horseradish. So, I might just really like horseradish.