Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.

1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.

There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.

But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.

In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.

You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.

That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.

I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.

Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.

Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.

On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.

Maybe not yours, but I’ve had a fire in my life that deleted lots of pictures and stuff, whereas all of the digital media we have is still with us because we copied it to several places so no single event could destroy it. If you only had one copy of an important digital file, you’re doing it wrong.

The quote needs a bit of context, to get the full weight, but essentially when asked what to do with his body after his death, Diogenes would reply with statements like “throw me in the forest without a burial”. People would be agast and ask him about vultures, wolves and other animals that might eat him, so he would say Just give me a stick to chase them away which is the quote I wanted.

I mean, calories in/out is real, you can’t get fat if you’re eating less than what you’re spending. On the other hand you definitely can thin up eating more calories than you spend by for example going into ketosis where calories don’t matter all that much.

All of that being said, calories in/out is not the whole picture, like you mentioned there are plenty of other stuff that might make it so that two people eating the same and exercising the same amount get drastically opposite results. At the end of the day our bodies have a calorie budget they’re trying to stick to, eating less (or actually eating better) is the solution, exercising helps but not in increasing your calorie budget, only in directing your budget to be more healthy.

Honestly modern python is not that bad because of the typing hints and checks you can run on them nowadays. Also it’s worth noting that python has very strong types, so it’s not illy willy magical types, and while it is possible to use it like that it’s normally not encouraged (unlike other languages).

That being said, if you haven’t learnt Rust I strongly encourage you to read the book and go through the rustling exercises. Honestly while still a new and relatively nieche language, it fixes so many of the issues that exist in other languages that I think it will slowly take over everything. Sure. It’s slower to write, but you avoid so much hassle on maintenance afterwards.

No it’s not, they’re completely different concepts. In C/C++ lingo Dynamic typing is having every variable be a void * whereas type coercion is implementing conversion functions for your types to allow casting between types, e.g. having a temperature class that can be casted to a double (or from it).

This is a function with dynamic typing and no type coercion in C/C++:

int foo(void* param) {
  Temperature* t = (Temperature*) param;
   return t->intValue() + 10;
}

This is the same function with type coercion and no dynamic typing in C/C++:

int foo(Temperature& t) {
  return t + 10;
}

What are you talking about? What do you think C/C++/Rust/Java do?

Being slop or not is not the issue, the real question is is it morally correct. To me it depends on your usage, are you generating stuff for yourself? Then it doesn’t matter. Are you generating stuff to communicate to the artist you’re hiring your intended vision of the thing, or building a mood board or similar? Then it’s probably okay in my book. Are you using the generated image for something or selling it? Then it’s wrong.

The problem with dynamic typing is not one that can be solved, even with a live running program you might not be hitting the edge case where you’re passing a wrong type.

It’s fine for small stuff, but when you’re developing a piece of software with hundreds or thousands of classes, functions, and APIs it’s impossible to mentally keep track of everything. And adding a type checker is tangential to overriding all of the benefits of a dynamic typing system.

This is one of those things like a trick picture where you can’t see it until you do, and then you can’t unsee it.

I started with C/C++ so typing was static, and I never thought about it too much. Then when I started with Python I loved the dynamic typing, until it started to cause problems and typing hints weren’t a thing back then. Now it’s one of my largest annoyances with Python.

A similar one is None type, seems like a great idea, until it’s not, Rust solution is much, much better. Similar for error handling, although I feel less strongly about this one.

Keto is about carbohydrates, not calories. Whip cream (as long as you don’t do it with sugar) is absolutely keto, it has almost no carbs, despite the high calorie and fat count, but those are supposedly irrelevant on keto diets.

https://xkcd.com/641/

Non-stick has to be cleaned by hand, whereas stainless steel can go in the dishwasher, so for me that’s easier to cleanup.

Non-stick has Teflon on top, which shouldn’t be heated above a certain temperature, and to sear steak you need to leave the pan in the stove for long without anything on it so it gets extremely hot (which would damage the Teflon coating of non-stick and release poisonous gases on your kitchen, not enough to kill you, but still can’t be healthy).

So, in short, stainless steel is a good middle ground, easier to clean and maintain than non-stick and cast iron.

As for gas/electric/induction it’s about efficiency, induction heats the bottom of the pan, electric heats the glass where the pan is resting, and gas heats everything. There’s a video from a YouTuber that measures time for a pot of water to get to 100° in all 3 (I don’t remember who, I thought it was technology connections but can’t find it), and in short induction is the fastest, electric takes a while longer, and gas melted his thermometer before the water boiled (which shows you just how much heat you’re putting in a place that’s not the pan).

That being said there’s certain stuff that is easier to do on gas stoves, possible on electric and impossible on induction. Namely anything that requires the pan to be heated at an angle. It’s very niche, I would say most people wouldn’t even notice or care about this limitation, but professional chefs sometimes prefer gas because it allows to be used like this.

I have over 10 years as a software engineer, and the vast majority of that was Linux. The only two exceptions are my current job where we develop a software that runs on Windows so I need a Windows build box for it (although my laptop is Linux), and my previous job that had a weird windows only policy (didn’t stay too much after that got enforced). So it’s very much doable, depending on what you work with.

I hold a very similar view, I usually express it like so:

If you were to develop a simulation of a universe you would have to make some concession to be able to run such a large simulation:

• You would have to limit causality, since the communication from one part of the cluster to the next would not be instantaneous you would need to limit the speed at which those communications can happen, that way you guarantee that one part of your cluster can’t interfere with another, think of it like a loading screen.
• Speaking of loading screens, you could make the vast majority of the thing empty, that would limit stuff going over from one part to another.
• You could gain lots of performance by only simulating the micro stuff when required, so an electron could be a wave of possibilities until they need to be somewhere, think of it in the same manner as current games don’t draw what’s not on screen.

I know it’s not what you meant, but Paranoia (the TTRPG) has a great mechanic where each player’s choices pisses off other player, ah you picked weapons skill 2, cool, so the next player gets -2 on weapons, hope you didn’t expected a high skill there.

I would be very weary of doing that, some of my favorite media was good because of the circumstances I was in when I first consumed it.

One such example for me is Metal Gear Solid, a lot of what made that game so special for me would not be the same today, some examples:

• Controls were good back then, but today they would be very bad.
• I didn’t spoke English back then, so a lot was trial and error until I found a version in Spanish, and then I loved the way the game tells you what to do (by radio calls) but that would be very annoying today
• There’s one part that it needs you to look at her physical game box, which wouldn’t be a thing nowadays.
• Psycho mantis, all of it, but namely:
  • He named other games I played (by reading my memory card, which is not a thing anymore)
  • He made my controller move by itself (nowadays everyone knows controllers vibrate, I sure didn’t back then)
  • I needed to plug my controller to the second slot (controllers no longer have slots now)
• At the time I liked the story, nowadays I think I would roll my eyes to lots of it.

And just like that I feel that every media I liked might have lots of stuff that depends on the situation I consumed it originally.