Rattlesnakes and alligators (and non-unionized automobile manufacturing facilities)

Biden said he saw the pictures.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/meeting-with-jewish-leaders-biden-confirms-reports-that-hamas-beheaded-israeli-children/

“Allegably”

“Howdy” for me. I’m from and live in the Northeast.

Started saying it ironically on work calls to break up the monotony of saying “Hey” when the host joined the meeting and said hello. It was pretty much just a joke at first. Now it’s about 50% of what I say in response to someone joining the meeting saying hello.

Honestly, I kind of like it. It’s folksy, friendly, simple, and informal. It’s slipped out a couple of times when guests arrive at a family party and are walking in the door and saying their hellos, but it’s mostly relegated to work meetings.

A few of my coworkers have even started doing it occasionally, so it seems like it’s catching on.

Just to reinforce your point, the difference between a cheap running shoe and an expensive running shoe is incredible. When I first started running a few years ago, I was using a very old pair of running shoes I’ve had for a long time. I’ve since been sticking with the New Balance Fresh Foam X 880s (because I have very wide feet and NB seems like the only brand that actually makes their best running shoes in 4E) and it’s like running on a cloud.

And then there’s also the Garmin watch that cost $300 (that I’m now stupidly considering upgrading to the new $600 Forerunner 965), the $120 HRM Pro chest strap, the $3000 Nordic Track x22i for indoor runs I got lightly used on Craigslist for a steal at $900, etc.

And then there’s the races where you’re spending $40, $50, $100+ depending on whether it’s a 5K or 10K or half-marathon. And good running clothes are pricey too.

While I agree with you, and I do dearly love garlic, I feel obligated to give you a word of caution:

If you eat too much roasted garlic, for the next 24-48 hours, every room you enter will smell like garlic, your sweat will smell like garlic, your farts (and there will be many) will smell like garlic, and your poop will smell like garlic. It will not be a pleasant experience.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

That’s not really a solid argument. Blocking is likely implemented as a very tiny piece of what is already very likely a massive table join operation. Computationally, it’s likely to have as much an impact on their compute costs as the floor mats in your car have on fuel efficiency.

Everyone already sees different content. It’s an inherent part of Twitter. It’s not a static site where everyone sees the same thing. You see the tweets of who you’re following, and don’t see tweets of those you’ve muted. All that filtering is happening at the server level. Any new tweets or edited tweets or deleted tweets change that content too, which is happening potentially hundreds of times a second for some users.

Anyway, caching would be implemented after a query for what tweets the user sees is performed to reduce network traffic between a browser and the Twitter servers. There’s some memoization that can be done at the server level, but the blocking feature is likely to have almost no impact on that given the fundamental functionality of Twitter.

People like to stick with what they know, and anyone who used Sync on Reddit will now be that much more inclined to give Lemmy a try because they get an interface that feels familiar. I can see this only benefiting the communities on Lemmy over time as the user base increases. Other popular apps like Boost coming to Lemmy would also draw in new users.

It’s great to have a base layer of free, good quality apps to accomplish some goal because it creates a very low barrier to entry. I keep F-Droid installed on my phone because there are times I need a very basic app to do something simple and the risk of malware is inherently lower in an app whose source is public vs private. I can check out the repository and take a look for myself if the permissions it requests are concerning.

That said, there are real advantages to a proprietary app. The developer has a financial incentive to keep the product up to date and add more features to maintain or increase the user base. This benefits not only paid users but also unpaid, ad-supported users.

Like you said, it’s about choice. If FOSS is important to you, go ahead and pick one of those clients. If you like snazzy new features or you want to stick with a client you’re familiar with, go ahead and do that. Nobody should be shamed or criticized for their choice either way.

The short answer is that it’s ultimately down to the number 43 (the number of protons technetium has) and the number of neutrons that could potentially form stable isotopes being atomically weird numbers.

The picture below shows relative stabilities of isotopes of different elements. N represents the number of neutrons, Z represents the number of protons. As a starting rule, moving above or below the N=Z line (creating an excess of protons or an excess of neutrons) tends to decrease overall stability.

You can see for lower atomic numbers, the most stable isotopes closely follow N=Z because protons and neutrons “balance” each other in the nucleus. But as you increase the atomic number (and therefore the number of protons), the protons begin to repel each other more strongly, which means additional neutrons are needed to make the nucleus stable. This is why the “line of stability” (the line of dark red “stable” elements) increases above the N=Z line as you increase the atomic number. Deviation from this line means an atom is less “beta stable” (and therefore more likely to beta-decay).

There are certain “magic” numbers of protons and neutrons that are more stable than others because they comprise a full shell. These occur at 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This means nuclei that have (or are very close to) one of these numbers of protons, or neutrons, or protons + neutrons, are inherently more stable. If you look at the other stable isotopes on the graph, you would expect a stable isotope of technetium would need around 55 neutrons to follow the line of stability.

As it turns out, the combinations of 43 protons and 55 (± a few) neutrons just can’t form a stable enough configuration to not beta-decay.

I had the Samsung Note 2 back in the day. I installed a custom bootloader and OS that worked fantastically. I had GPS issues, and all the guides I read said I have to reinstall Samsung’s OS, get a GPS fix, then reinstall my custom OS.

I made the mistake of installing a newer version of the Samsung OS which installed Knox and locked down my bootloader. I was now locked into an old, insecure Android version with no possibility of ever upgrading because Samsung abandoned it.

From that day on, I vowed never to buy another Samsung product again. Screw them and their anti-choice bullshit.

During computer learning in a computer lab 15 years ago, I figured out that the student passwords were sequential, so I could easily guess other students’ passwords. If I logged in to their account while they were logged in, they would get booted and I’d hear the inevitable “Mrs Teacher! It says my session expired!”

I did that 2 or 3 times over the course of a few minutes before I got caught. The vice principal rambled on and on about how I was “disrupting learning” and how I “should be suspended for this” before finally telling me, “my mentor taught me a really important lesson. If your students don’t hate you, you aren’t doing your job.”

What a horrible piece of shit.