I work in disability support. I leave the house, drive to my client, then don my mask and wear it until I leave the client and get back into my car. If I have a client all day I can just wear the mask all day, eating before and after my shift. I have not gotten a cold, flu, or other disease for the last 4 years and I have worked with people who actively have covid, influenza, RSV, and other illnesses.

My mask is a pm 1.0, so a little better than pm 2.5 which is what n95 is, and it works very well. Honestly I can’t see me changing my behaviour around masking ever. I don’t get sick, I don’t carry illness to vulnerable clients, and I don’t have to change my behaviour day to day so habit is solid and easy to maintain.

While it didn’t help my endocarditis last year it has definitely protected against covid and even now I have not gotten it once. I think it is a good deal overall.

I did a whole stack of servers using SNMP based monitoring years ago and it was amazing. I could see loads, memory stats, NIC utilisation, disk space, and all sorts of other things. I tried Cacti and Icinga and settled on the latter but they are all fairly similar. Once you are generating the data you van do whatever you like with it, so monitoring load attributable to which actual executable is definitely manageable. It is also handy for getting notifications for something being down, losing stability, or just being out if whack.

If you are looking for some less garish designs for cases the Fractal Design North is one great looking option, and also some of the mini-itx form factor cases look really nice too, not too far off from some of the ones you mentioned.

That said, you absolutely can add a graphics card to some of the corporate machines, but some are much harder than others. I have not done one recently but honestly I would look for someone else’s build and replicate it as exactly as possible. I have had weird issues with corporate gear before around connectors, weird pinouts, very limited PSUs, and strange limitations on the PCIe port supporting some cards but not others (HP and a generic network card crashing my system randomly). If you find that someone else has done that specific box with a specific card then you should be ok, but if you have to deviate try to make sure that you match closely what they had, such as whether the graphics card has extra power or is PCIe only or if they have to use one of the corporate style graphics cards because gaming cards won’t work.

A few things to start. We need to know more about how things are currently.

lspci -vv

That will give us what modules are being used by what devices along with a bunch of other information.

lsusb -v

That will give us some info about your USB layout, drivers, and so on.

We also need to know what distro you are using, kernel version, and for the distro what exact version, so if Ubuntu is it LTS, current, 23.04, etc.

That should be a good start, after that we can see where we are at and what next steps are.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/sitzpinkler-german-men-pee-sitting-down/

“62% of German men sit down “every time” or “most times” when they go pee. That’s more than men in 12 other countries surveyed worldwide.”

Or have education about how much piss goes everywhere when you pee. In Germany most men sit to pee most of the time, it is a cultural issue and can be changed. That said, if you do urinals, make them stalls too, I don’t want to chat with my pee neighbour.

OK, so good, a clear starting point.

First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.

You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

Can you give more detail about your goals?

I meant to say language in the linguistics sense, a series of abstract items which can be arranged to convey arbitrary meaning. For example, a dog barking can be a threat display, a warning, playful, sad, afraid, and so on. But can you use barking to create grammar? With grammar you could have labels for items in the world and use various barks to refer to them, make requests, ask questions, and so on. Some types of animals have warning calls that are specific to types of predators, for example an eagle call or a leopard call. Leopards require different responses than eagles so the distinction is very useful and helps others to respond. This is not quite language but is definitely a step in the right direction.

So yes, you are correct, lots of animals can communicate things to each other, but it is not the same as language like what humans have. Could we find an animal that does have language? Or something very close? Sure, but we haven’t shown that yet. Maybe we should focus on giving other animals a chance to develop before we wipe them all out.

I have internal voice sometimes but not others. In some things my cognition is far more verbal, working through something like a monologue or conversation. Other times I may have more of a mental image of something, sometimes more in real space and sometimes completely disconnected from real space. Sometimes it is much more abstract with sensations and emotions with very little in terms of concrete metaphores.

Also I can have racing thoughts without it being language. I also have impacts on those racing thoughts from taking Ritalin (ADHD medication) and it is not just the word thoughts but also the flow of other types of cognition.

No, but that is because they don’t have language.

That said, plenty of humans do not have a voiced internal experience. The lack of language does not imply a lack of cognition. I would expect that the brain of a closely related organism, say a chimp, would have many similar experiences generated by the same stimuli. Would they experience green like I experience green? I can’t even say that about a person sitting next to me, but they probably have an equivalent experience.

That said, if we had a way of communicating could we reach agreed terms? I can do that with my cat, so I would think he has an understanding of me and my behaviours along with what tends to happen when I do certain things like clap then shake my hands at the end of a treat session. He knows there are no more treats, he associates that with my hands clapping and shaking, so we communicate. Does he have a voice in his head describing it? Probably not. Does he have Meows? Again, probably not, but he would have a sense and memories of previous times.

So in my experience methylphenidate and dexamphetamine are the two most common. I tried dex and it was not useful, it made small differences but also made me jumpy, but methylphenidate is my personal ambrosia. Maybe consider also the dose, for methylphenidate which is my ideal drug the lowest dose was not very useful, the highest dose was pure Satan, but the dose I have is absolutely perfect, giving me support without side effects most of the time.

ADHD and ASD are commonly comorbid diagnoses. If you have an ASD diagnosis you are more likely than the average person to also have ADHD, and visa versa.

A good way to see it is ADHD, ASD, and a few other things are on a spectrum together. Various factors drive which features present at a given level and particular patterns are groups together because the are common, but your specific configuration is different to mine. Mine is ADHD with ASD as a more minor but definitely present thing, but my partner is the inverse, much more ASD than ADHD but definitely both.

Chicken wings in an air fryer take about 20 minutes all up. If you cook them for two meals a day you can clean it every second day no worries, third if you have a bad day.

You don’t actually have to have complex meals with sides and so on. Beef mince fried as patties or a scramble on a low heat will give you a reasonable meal with a pan, implement, and bowl. Chicken thighs cook well with just a little fat in the pan and a high heat at the start dropping to a medium. Eggs covered with water in a pot, bring to boil, take off heat, wait 17 minutes, perfect hard boiled eggs every time.

Outsource and obscelete yourself. Do you have to do your taxes? Maybe someone else can do that and you can pay them and use the energy you saved to work more hours, ending up net positive. Obviously not always applicable, but my washer and dryer mean I don’t spend multiple hours a week hanging and forgetting and rewashing washing, I just wash and then into the heat pump dryer and it is done.

Ask her about the topic. Learn a little yourself and show a genuine interest then ask for her help understanding it. This creates salience in the learning for her and also shifts her from arbitrary retention to learning to explain to you, so the mental structures are much more dynamic.

I would also recommend finding interesting things that are on the other side of understanding that material. For example, what is in the next unit? What cool things will learning this stuff unlock? It is not always the best strategy especially at the start of the unit, but as you get towards the end of the unit it can help bring the focus back to getting through the exams.

A handy thing for this situation is a second hand machine. It is a whole lot cheaper, still very much an upgrade, but reselling for a reasonable price is possible.

The option I would actually recommend is to reinstall your OS. A fresh install if Windows or Linux is like a new computer in many ways. Add a few changes, like maybe changing theme and trying new software, can also make it better.

If you wanted to satisfy that ADHD itch with Linux I would recommend trying something like ElementaryOS if you come from Mac world or EndeavourOS with KDE if you are from Windows world. Great operating systems with sane defaults and an easy install but well put together appearance and utility.

Also, if you know where you are going maybe consider researching local options from there? Like calculate the postage, find the local stores, look for local second hand computer stores, etc.

Ah yes, great idea, take a vulnerable group and then use them to push a nationalist pseudoscience. Honestly, acupuncture has been shown to not work, it has no viable mechanism of action, and if there is any effect it is extremely small and unreliable. Obviously not upset about the post of the study, just the absolutely pointless waste of the study itself.

The slick shits

Resistance is fertile

Blorg

Robert

Bang twang sang

Diphthong

Telepathic

The cringe minge

Over duress

Stabby yabbie

Endocrine control system

No idea, but I put it together from ideas around algorithmic decision making and anarchistic thought. Design a society where you would be happy to be dropped in as a random person and you can’t have massive power and wealth imbalances. As soon as you get rid of the idea that you will be on top you gain the drive for equality and fairness.

If nobody wants to do a job then people will pay more to not have to do it. In that way people getting paid to do shitty jobs at least get well compensated and that makes the job more attractive, leading to it being less shitty.

First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.