Nah, it is all transparent for me. I don’t decide to run something with the dedicated graphics, it just runs as needed it seems. Maybe I have it misconfigured and it is using the dedicated graphics all the time, I’m not sure, but it works fairly well given the hardware it has.

ausclusive

Ftfy

Just to start, it was definitely not meant as any sort of “fuck you”. Genuinely. Please reread with the opposite emotional valence as that was definitely not what I wanted to achieve at all. I honestly did want to say good luck and have fun, but not like some sort of sassy sign off, I will work on that for the future.

In my opinion, which you are free to dismiss, your previous language was somewhat aggressive and dismissive. Your conversational partner seemed to find it to be so and reacted to that, so I don’t think it is just my bad reading of your statements. It is entirely possible that you meant no harm, had no aggression at all, and your personal expressive language was just not a great fit for either myself or the other conversational partner.

When I said “Something you may find helpful” I meant those words, not something else. You may find a 10mm socket wrench useful, you may not, it depends on your current needs which I don’t have access to, but hey, if you need a 10mm socket wrench I have one, along with my opinion above. It is offered in the spirit of kindness and also a lack of obligation, you don’t have to take my opinion on or show why it is wrong, you are free to just ignore it and mark it as read.

I don’t have an investment in you beyond hoping things go well for any other person. I do have an investment in the communities I participate in, so when I see something like your previous conversation and think I can make things a little better, a touch nicer, I feel motivated to do so. Feel free to look through my history, I really do try to consistently explain things, make things clearer, and resolve conflicts with discussion. I try not to dismiss the concerns of other people and in this case I have failed to note and respond to your concerns effectively.

I do not consider what I was doing as mediating, but I can see how you would read it that way and I perhaps should have used a direct message to prevent that interpretation. Do you think that would have been better? A less public forum? Please do answer this, I actually do care about your thoughts here.

I don’t have any ego invested in this. I hope things go well for you, I have some tools it has taken a long time to acquire, they seemed possibly useful for you in this situation, so I tried to offer them.

Suppressing conflict is not the goal. The goal is resolving conflict, or at least for me. Agreeing to disagree is a perfectly good resolution. Finding a common ground and having someone expand or change their mind is a good resolution. Having someone change my mind is just as good as someone else changing their mind, and both are a little better than just agreeing to disagree. I am not trying to preserve peace at the cost of resolution, I believe that the level of conflict present was not conducive to a resolution and pulling back a tiny bit would make a resolution more achievable.

Anyway, I really truly hope things go well for you, no hard feelings if not, and feel free to ignore, reply, reply with a DM, or whatever else floats your boat, I genuinely hope you have a good day from here.

Just a quick clarification. This is a mouse study. This is not a study in humans.

What do mice eat? What do humans eat? Are we closely related to mice? Do we occupy the same niche? No. This tells us about mice eating a ketogenic diet, not about humans doing so.

Monkeys exaggerate, mice lie. Something shown in primates is likely, though not guaranteed, to be similar in humans, though the degree may be very different. Something shown in mice may or may not replicate in humans at all, and the degree is often very different even if it does.

Mouse studies are great in some ways. They are cheap, fast, and very well understood. You can copy the study design from someone else and save a lot of effort designing your study. You can control for really specific factors by choosing what specific mice you use. You can control their diet perfectly, use large numbers at low cost, and see their full life cycle in just a couple of years.

Mouse studies also suck in a bunch of ways. Humans are not mice, so translating the research is not easy or reliable. Something that causes an issue in mice may or may not translate to humans for a bunch of reasons. They make their own vitamin C for example, so you may have to knock out their genes for making vitamin C if you want to make them get scurvy. You have to humanise them and these changes are always approximations.

So this study does show that a high fat diet that causes obesity IN MICE does increase tumorgenesis in the small intestine. In mice. Not in humans. Every claim here needs that caveat to be made clearly and directly. If they do a translational study in humans I will happily read it, but this study? To me it is worse than useless. It is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

Largely correct. It is more about your body either holding on to body fat or using it for energy. There are various ways you can make the body hold on to fat or release fat. Some are more or less healthy depending on personal context.

Many psychiatric meds cause weight gain, specifically fat gain, by driving up insulin. Some others cause increases in appetite. Others cause a reduction in BMR which with no change in diet will cause more fat gain. Some psychiatric meds made getting enough food hard (I’m looking at your Ritalin) and thus have an opposing effect.

Most of the effects on body fat are mediated by hormones like insulin, grehlin, glucagon, and so on. GLP-1 (Glucagon Like Peptide 1) medications target the receptors for glucagon and activate them in a more sustained way that glucagon does, causing changes in appetite along with every availability. There are other effects as well, thus the side effects, but that is the basic mechanism. We actually don’t understand GLP-1 medications fully at this point so we can expect any current description to change over time, but for now that is basically how they work.

It is a little more than cutting sugar. If you replace all your simple sugar with complex sugar you will have an improvement in blood sugar control, that is true. You won’t reverse insulin resistance with that change because you will still have elevated insulin levels all the time.

What ketosis allows is a period of time where you are not using large amounts of insulin to push your blood sugar down to safe levels. Instead you use gluconeogenesis (making sugar in the liver from fat) to push blood sugar up. This means you don’t overshoot and have to push it back down.

If you stop using insulin all the time your body becomes less resistant and it becomes more effective, allowing you to actually push your blood sugar down when you need to. This is one of the core issues with diabetes and can actually be solved.

As for your wife’s mum, what she is eating is up to her. She is an adult and has to make her own decisions. If she chooses something you wouldn’t choose it isn’t an indictment of your and your choices. She can do what she wants and so can you. It isn’t a personal insult. If she chooses to take keto very seriously and won’t eat beans then treat it like you would vegetarianism, don’t be dismissive or rude, just be a supportive person and don’t make bean (or other high carb) dishes when she is around for dinner. Or make the high carb dish as well as something for her. Or just make parts of the meal keto and others high carb and mix and match on your plate. Or don’t have her over for dinner. Lots of options that don’t require you matching her diet or pushing back on what she eats.

Diet is personal. It is personal for her, and yours is for you. Her diet is not personal for you. You don’t need to concern yourself with her choice of food just like you don’t need to be concerned with her choice of underwear.

If you eat sufficient carbs yes, you will be knocked out of ketosis, but beans are not too high carb to have in moderation. You can’t maintain ketosis if you are having hundreds of grams of beans but if you have a small amount to make a dish more enjoyable you can get by and make food much more manageable if that I’d important for you.

Personally I have had a small amount of refried beans in my Mexican beef dishes because of the flavour and especially the texture. They do add carbs but they add something important in the texture and I find then worthwhile. I actually also add some black beans, but only a small number, and capsicum (bell peppers) as well.

Hey, just as an outsider to your conversation above, I don’t think the overall attitude here is super helpful or positive. That person read your post in a way you didn’t mean it, you bounced back a couple of times, and it ended in telling someone to take their attitude and shove it. That is a fairly aggressive response and probably not great for them or for you. Living with that kind of outward aggression is painful and not actually helpful for defending yourself.

Something you may find helpful is restructuring with the assumption that they have misunderstood in good faith, without malice or accusation. For example,

“Ah, yes, they did list psyllium husk as working, it is one of the raw fibres, but the refined and processed ones don’t work, they fail to gel. As for invalidating your symptoms, that wasn’t my intention, I was trying to provide useful information of what not to do. If I were doing the wrong thing to manage a health condition I would want to know. Good to know psyllium husk is working for you.”

It is much better for you and them, and honestly I have had a large number of interactions like this where the other person comes back and apologises for any confusion, seeing my tone and changing from defensive to conciliatory. It feels nicer than “winning”. Anyway, good luck, have fun.

I think this should be a thing. At the same time, I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists, but that is unlikely to end up being done. I think a simple tag, the [AI] one would work, is the best current solution. I think extra detail in the post is a good thing to do, for example AI assisted documentation, AI assisted bug finding, AI assisted vibe coding. They are all different and have different effects on the product and community. If someone uses AI to find bugs in their own code I am all for it, that is a great use if it. If they use AI to write their login system I am not keen at all given the likelihood of intense security issues and the low likelihood that they will ever fix it.

Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don’t bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

ls /dev

Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

/dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

A quick question, what accent do you have? As an Aussie I have real trouble speaking naturally with most speech to text software, open or closed source. I feel like the guys in that Scottish sketch show in the voice activated elevator. I sometimes use voice dictation for my notes for work and I spend almost as much time correcting as I do speaking.

That said, I have found a perfect solution. I can get well over the 95% correct mark by simply using an English or American accent. I can do both fairly well and the speech to text has no complaints. I imagine someone from Boston would have a tonne of trouble being understood, as would a Welsh person, but pretending to be a Californian or similar can help immensely.

I would love to find something that can be trained by my speech like Dragon Naturally Speaking used to be. I used that in the early 2000s and at first it was awful, but training it for a few hours really did offer a noticeable improvement, and ongoing use continued to improve further. My computer died and I lost all the trained data, so I never went back, but if I could I would definitely do that again.

Noooch?

Sad to see this play out again. Lots of people are deficient in B12 and various other essential nutrients. The worst part from my perspective is obviously the loss of life, but the second worst is how easy this is to fix. I am by no means a vegan, I definitely eat my fair share of meat and eggs, but B12 deficiency is easy enough to get, especially if you eat a lot of processed foods or have a mono diet, eating the same thing every day.

For B12 I would recommend nutritional yeast. It gives a cheesy sort of flavour and can be added to foods like beans, refried beans, ragu/bolognaise, various pasta dishes, the list goes on. A fairly small amount packs a lot of B vitamins and you can have quite a bit without any issue. It also keeps very well, just requiring an airtight container and maybe a dessicant packet for longer term storage.

If you take some tapioca starch and add it to water then slowly reduce it you can make a really nice cheese sauce substitute, very similar to Mac and cheese. Nutritional yeast adds the full flavour and colour, making it actually tasty.

Something to consider is differences in absorption and context. One angle is coabsorbtion, where two molecules can be absorbed better together than apart. Another is binding, such as with lectins which can bind to some micro nutrients and prevent absorption. So if you add lots of something which is not bound like it naturally would be with foods that contain it then absorption may be disregulated and you may have wildly different levels absorbed than the nutritional label would suggest.

Adding lots of vitamin C to foods because of a cosmetic or preservative function may not be the best idea given how active it is in the body. Maybe it has a similar effect in the gut to what it does in the food in the packet, killing a bunch of microbes, and therefore could impact our gut microbiome. We don’t have the data yet on the mechanisms, so we should withhold judgement for now.

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

Physorg is a great resource for someone who is not currently fully educated in the field but has a strong interest. They do really good summaries of each topic and provide just enough context to go and find out more. They also do have good RSS feeds available, so you can easily use whatever client you like to get their content.

As for FOSS clients, just have a look in F-Droid and you will find a bunch. I use Feedflow at the moment but I have tried a few from F-Droid and they are all similar. On desktop I would recommend looking at a different one depending on your desktop environment. On EndeavourOS with KDE I have used a few but be one included with the Kontact suite is fairly good.

I will add that this study looked at biological markers of inflammation and so on with cells exposed to vape vapor. If you are looking at it and saying “looks like there is activity, so maybe there is harm, more likely than not” but not saying anything about how much harm then it is not very useful for making choices. Sure, it is not without some risk, but a quantified risk assessment would say that based on the current best evidence it is likely not anywhere near as bad as smoking and it is easier to taper nicotine out if you want to do that.

From a public health/harm reduction perspective vapes may be a useful tool if used correctly, or a terrible additional harm with increased addictiveness and known dangerous chemicals, such as the popcorn lung issues. We need rational science and appropriate regulation, not panic and bizarre policies.

To be clear, we have more guns now than we did in the 1990s. The big thing that changed was casual, unregisted, random firearm ownership, especially around the major cities. If you were rural you didn’t have much of a change, just registering your guns and vetting rid of any that were no longer legal like sawn off shotguns etc. For someone such as myself living in a major city while growing up I just didn’t see guns. Not until cops started carrying guns, which was a mistake in my opinion.

So we didn’t ban guns. We regulated them. The average person could gain access to a firearm by going through the process of licencing, registration, and so on. The average person couldn’t be bothered and just didn’t. We don’t really have handguns here for the most part, our gun culture is much more focused on rifles and shotguns, things that are useful for hunting and pest control.

Now the criminal side has always had guns. They won’t obey the laws for theft, violence, extortion, drugs, and so on, so why would they obey for guns? The handy thing is they would not have registered guns and if they get caught with those they get serious time, so they only carry when they really think they need it. That means fewer gang members running around with guns most of the time, so fewer options for things to go south all of a sudden in a crowded place. A targeted attack though is still a thing and yes, a drive by shooting is still a thing here, just rare. I was living two blocks down from one in the early 2010s in Melbourne, but that is honestly the rare case that it actually happens.

Given the rise of tobacco as a black market though, we are getting way more violence. The war on drugs is fought on both sides, and society is the bystander.

Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.