NielsBohron

I think that’s a “santoku” knife, but I’m not an expert. And I think it’s the style of knife, not a brand, but it works pretty much just like a chef’s knife as near as I can tell (as a home cook that pays attention to techniques but hasn’t sought out training on knife styles before)

If you’re cutting soft soft bread, then a plain blade is fine, but if it’s a crusty bread like a sourdough, the serrated blade is much better at cutting the crust without crushing the soft interior (IME, not a chef)

tell me more…

I’m an AI/comp-sci novice, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but does running the program locally allow you to better control the information that it trains on? I’m a college chemistry instructor that has to write lots of curriculum, assingments and lab protocols; if I ran deepseeks locally and fed it all my chemistry textbooks and previous syllabi and assignments, would I get better results when asking it to write a lab procedure? And could I then train it to cite specific sources when it does so?

Rounders has a young Matt Damon and Edward Norton and is entirely about gamblers making their living as poker players in the late 90’s or early 2000’s.

It’s pretty good

Edit: I just realized you said not entirely about cards, but I still highly recommend the movie. The plot revolves around cards, but it’s also about ambition and knowing when to cut off deadbeat friends

Paracetamol is acetaminophen (Tylenol) for those of us in the States.

Cheers!

That’s great! It’s not super helpful for me, though, since I teach students that often aren’t good at troubleshooting technology issues on their own so I need an app that’s pretty universal and user-friendly. Plus, the question specifically asked about stuff in the Android play store…

CamScanner (intuitive and powerful scanner app that processes images exceptionally well and interfaces cleanly with all sorts of other apps) and Hiper Calc Pro (scientific calculator that shows you your input and looks like a classic calculator interface)

Profession can absolutely affect volume. Even without any hearing damage, any job that regularly requires that you project can become a habit.

I’m a chemistry professor at a community college, fairly well educated, and I flatter myself to say reasonably intelligent, but I still slip into what my wife calls my “teaching voice” in some social settings or even occasionally at home.

Not OP, but mine was really pretty manageable. 2 days of sitting in an easy chair and icing my balls, 2 days of “walking is fine, but avoid any sudden movements,” and a week of “it’s a little sore, but it doesn’t really hurt.” After that, it was about 2-3 weeks where I didn’t really notice it unless I moved the wrong way too suddenly (whereupon I’d get a quick twinge, but nothing too bad).

Really a pretty small cost for the benefits. I don’t really like painkillers, but I do recommend some THC gummies for the first week and a fresh series to binge

I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.

Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)

What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?

Interesting, thanks for the info

No problem! Obviously, I like talking about this stuff. And if you’re interested, I’d also recommend reading the whole book. It’s pretty fascinating, although in his reminiscing and pontificating, Asimov does get a little “get off my lawn” for my taste at times.

great name! I found a first edition of his in a basement bookstore in Switzerland as a teen. Totally random, I know.

Thanks! And it’s not too random, I’d say; we’re in a sci-fi forum talking about historical sci-fi writers, many of whom were also trained as scientists, after all.

In his memoir I, Asimov, Isaac Asimov wrote chapters about his contemporaries and apparently Heinlein was notorious for changing his political convictions based on who he was married to/sleeping with at the time. Hence, free-love hippie in Stranger in a Strange World and boot-licking war-hawk in Starship Troopers.

I think there are some editions of the second book done by Ken Liu, aren’t there? I haven’t read it yet, but I got a copy from a used book shop, and remember thinking that it was the same translator. At least, I thought I thought it was…now I’ve gotta go home and check

It’s a common problem with lots of classic sci-fi authors. Heinlein, Asimov, Philip K Dick, Larry Niven etc. are all terrible at writing believable dialogue and compelling characters. There are some exceptions, but most of their characters are cardboard cutouts so they have a way to move along a story or give exposition about the ideas.

The Expanse did a pretty good job with characterization (in the books), and Kim Stanley Robinson is decent (but is still pretty “hit or miss,” IMHO), but in general, the weakest part of sci-fi writing is almost universally characterization and dialogue.

The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge

Someone what mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and that is really good, but his book Aurora is almost exactly what you are describing.

Highly recommend.