I used it for almost a year at the lowest tier, then got the couples plan more recently and it has high spouse approval factor, even though there was some initial setup

Dunno. Check their about page, but appears to be through GCP?

Kagi. Privacy focussed, no ads, and excellent results with options for sorting preferred sources to appear at the top, or not. Costs money but man, it’s fast and good in the way Google was back in the day. Some plans also include anonymous access to a variety of LLMs though they are older models, and if they can run them locally, they do. Really liking it.

For those who haven’t, please consider reading the short story on which it is based by Ted Chiang.

Villeneuve made a number of changes, but there is one in particular that may (or may not) reframe your perception of a character in a notable way. Also, read everything else by Ted Chiang!

There are also a number of popular media articles on how the language piece was developed for depiction on screen.

Without knowing the specific curry you’re looking to replicate makes it hard to make specific recommendations but a few things have helped me up my game.

The first is what you use to add a sour note. In the west we often use lime juice, which is great to add sprinkled at the end, but you need to get some tamarind paste for the depth of flavour. It also adds sweetness, but you can instead use some sugar, preferably brown or palm.

Fish sauce is a must to round out the depth of umami and I find soy really doesn’t work for me. If that’s a no-go because of dietary restrictions you might have to add some yeast flakes with the soy sauce, but it’s not going to have the same depth.

If you can get galangal, use it. Same with lemon grass. But again all depends on the specific curry.

That was my initial reaction, thinking China MUST hold more treasury bonds than anyone else, right? Turns out that’s typically Japan ($1 trillion), and the UK has generally held roughly the same number as China (both in the $700B range). Maybe the US anticipated and had contingencies ready if it was just China doing the selling, but when the other big holders started a slow bleed, it might’ve given them pause? Dunno.

We also don’t know who held what more recently than January and I don’t know if the data gap is the usual lag or if the the people who do this work at the Treasury department got “DOGE’d”.

Bottom line, it’s been fun to think about but I don’t think we should put too much stock in conspiracy theories originating on Substack.

There’s a theory being batted around without too much evidence (hold tight, Snopes is on it) that Mark Carney talked European and Japanese leaders into accumulating US Treasury bonds, and then slow-selling them to make Trump squirm once he imposed the broad-brush tariffs to spook the T-bill market.

The theory sounds mostly plausible in that Carney was in Europe for closed door meetings with European leaders shortly after being designated PM, and that Trump backed off so quickly and used the language of “the bond market is tricky” to justify the change in direction. Dropping demand for T-bills leads the Fed to increase yields to keep the borrowing taps on, means expensive borrowing for them, means no money for tax cuts for billionaires.

On the other hand, the story originates from a twice-fired shock-jock’s Substack.

But it sounds like something a wicked smart Harvard/Oxford educated economist would dream up and pull off…

¯\(ツ)/¯

The deceased girl’s father insisted that measles helps build up a person’s immune system.

So here’s the thing…and I know that everyone here knows this, but it doesn’t.

Measles causes immune amnesia.

It’s pretty sneaky - integrating into respiratory tract macrophages, and avoiding destructive phagocytosis by binding directly to certain membrane receptors, and then being transported to lymph nodes where B and T cells get infected by the measles virus too. These memory B and T cells contain the memory of past infections, and when they’re destroyed (because they’re infected), you no longer have the ability to quickly ramp up a response to past infections and you get to start all over from the start.

So even if their other kids survived, their chances of dying from another infection goes up. It takes somewhere between 2.5 and 5 years for that risk to come back to baseline.

The infection itself might not have been “that bad” (despite killing one of their children) but the mortality risk isn’t over by a long shot.

But did you solve your own problem?

The National Film Board is totally free, and you can watch the Log Driver’s Waltz anytime you please!

Except without the living wages, public works infrastructure investments, emphasis on education, and tax rates!

You may want check out Infuse for the AppleTV. I have found it fixed every audio drift and video jitter concern that I’ve ever had with Plex or Jellyfin.

You can point it either directly at an SMB share, or a library hosted on Jellyfin or Plex. The advantage of this is it caches the artwork in the library, not on the AppleTV, because the AppleTV will periodically flush its local cache, leading to long re-fetching times and waiting to watch things.

I have no recommendations for the Chromecast.

Maybe. I was a kid so probably was given crap equipment anf cheap film and likely didn’t treat it well. But the principle is the same. Having deeper shadows that preserve detail, and brighter highlights that aren’t blown out is what, for me, evokes a more visceral response when watching content, whereas Increasing the number of pixels from 1080p to 4K doesn’t.

First, good job on not having a smart TV. They’re truly awful.

I would de-emphasize the actual resolution benefits of 4K. Most of us don’t sit close enough to notice the difference.

For me, it’s about high dynamic range (HDR).

For example, when I was a kid, I was always annoyed by how the photos I took of what I thought was a gorgeous landscape, and then developed the film (yes, I’m an old) it always looked horribly bland and drab.

Watching 4K content on a TV for the first time was like looking at the beautiful landscape again. (It actually was - Netflix’s Marco Polo had the most stunning vistas!)

Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.

On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.

Thank you for introducing me to Wilhoit’s Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

generate some minor descriptions for generic stuff in my TTRPG campaigns.

Need a quick 200 word description of the interior of an apothecary? Or a band of marauding orcs? It’s been a huge time saver for me.

3 Astronauts. 1 candidate. Only really got to know one astronaut (family friend) and one candidate (supervised her training in an unrelated field) super well. I’ve had long term interactions with two wannabes who were disasters.

Unfortunately, in contrast to astronauts, most of the politicians I’ve met are complete shits. Only met a few at the civic level who are excellent. And one at the federal level. Everyone else has been truly🤮.

It’s funny. Literally every astronaut I’ve met is exactly like this - quietly competent, affable, team player. As is the astronaut candidate I’ve met.

And yet…

Every person I’ve met who has been keen on becoming an astronaut or astronaut candidate has been an insufferable self-aggrandizing jerk face. Like, just awful people who suck all the air out of any room they’re in, expounding on how they (or the idea they’re selling) are the most amazing thing ever.