Though how risky is it in reality? Eg for bread, if visible mold means there’s also invisible mold, wouldn’t that imply that there’s a period with just invisible mold that goes unnoticed and eaten? We’re constantly inhaling and consuming mold spores anyways, so is this more of a “I know it’s there and thus deem it icky” or “if it’s soft and has mold, toss it all, and hope that you don’t get unlucky and eat mold you couldn’t see in the first place”?

Solar wind is a decent flavour, though much better if it’s ions sourced from 1000km below the sun’s surface. They say they are the same ions as just one km below the surface, but I can tell the difference between 1km and 1kkm (or 1Mm if you will) jam as soon as those ions start striping the electrons from my tongue (at which point I spit it out because it has become chemicals).

Cleaning can still help if it only slow charges (if you mean it used to be able to use high wattage ones).

Gunk prevents a strong connection, which can mess with the handshake. Charger will say, “yeah, I can fast charge, check out these amps!” but not all of it gets through and the case will decide the charger is a liar and just go with slow charging. Don’t assume that something getting through at all means the connection is fine because USB has fallback options when conditions are sub-optimal.

Soft is good because you want the cleaning tool to break before it can apply enough force to break or scratch the contact. Use a cleaning solution to soften the gunk instead. Doesn’t have to be a part of a kit, just make sure it’s safe for metals, like isopropyl alcohol.

I would not use metal simply because its hardness is going to be similar or higher than the hardness of the contacts themselves, which means there’s a chance it could scratch or break the contact entirely.

The specs of saliva that go along with blowing corrode the contacts over time, so it is actually better to find an alternative with a soft brush and non/less-acidic cleaning solution.

Nintendo sold cartridge cleaning kits in the 90s (maybe even the 80s).

Lol you just saying that made me nervous. Using a staple would make it easy to accidentally break a contact off entirely, and I’m not sure if there are any consequences for shorting any of the USB pins to each other. Even a twist tie would be better, since it has another material to do the rubbing and the metal is less stiff than a staple.

Edit: there’s another comment further down saying the risk of a short isn’t an issue, but I’d still avoid using a staple just because of the hardness probably being higher than the contact.

You don’t want to be too rough on it. There’s electrical contacts that can get blocked by dust, lint, and crap, so cleaning helps, but the contacts themselves aren’t that thick, so you don’t want to wear them down too much while cleaning. A cleaning solution helps loosen up everything with less force and a softer brush/pad is less likely to knock bits of contact off.

So just be careful because that brush might be like blowing in nintendo cartridges (clearing dust but leaving saliva specs that would wear the contacts), where it helps in the short term but makes things worse in the long term (resulting in more blowing and an acceleration of the process).

When I was in school, I wanted a Linux machine (since my school stuff was mostly linux and I wanted to be able to work locally instead of having to ssh in to school machines) but wasn’t comfortable doing it on my main PC, so I bought a cheap laptop and inatalled linux on that. Had the extra bonus of being smaller and lighter than my gaming laptop that was my main PC at the time, too.

Your options will probably be a bit more expensive (and apologies for suggesting a solution that involves throwing money at it if you aren’t in a position to get even a relatively cheap one) since it’s running windows and needs the hardware for that, including TPM if your school stuff requires win 11 (though if you can get away with win 10 or 7, you could probably get a cheaper machine). Though on the other hand, your tasks might not require a GPU, which can save a lot right there.

Then you can truly isolate your personal stuff from winsows, especially if you set your LAN up to never let the windows machine know that the linux machine even exists.

I also use this with consoles to play games I’d like to try but they have DRM or anticheat that I don’t want on my PC. Also kinda doing it with work, though the laptop belongs to them.

I didn’t have the patience to try out a few, but luckily Fedora has met my needs without annoying me as much as windows did. Though I am feeling a bit of an itch to try out some of the others, but am currently just chilling in this local minimum of effort and not regretting going from windows to Fedora one bit.

Yeah, if I want to know what the colour is to find other instances of that thing easier, it takes 2 seconds to determine the colour. But I can’t remember ever actually doing that.

That retunr typo will be caught by the compiler. That’s what pass 1 is pretty much for, spell and syntax check.

Yeah maybe. Could be trying to make it clear it’s not uploading to a cloud or something lol.

Or maybe it means “put it down” (as in record, not discard).

I’ve noticed libreoffice has changed their save symbol. It’s a grey rectangle (taller than it is wide) with a darker grey arrow pointing down.

Libreoffice does this without forcing you to allow them to store all of your files. Because it’s a feature that doesn’t rely on any kind of cloud bs, MS just added that requirement because they are assholes that have no respect for their users.

Hmm I think now they meant the original “switch to linux” bit sarcastically and are stuck in a mindset thinking that it’s way more complicated than windows and thus anyone claiming to have already switched must be lying…?

Though thinking about it more, it kinda feels like a bad faith response, posting about a vague windows solution that they want people to know exists but doesn’t want to share, while treating Linux as big and scary and requiring more effort than fighting against what your OS really wants you to do.

My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.

It would tell me about updates, but wouldn’t do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).

It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn’t want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.

So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it’s actually been easier and I haven’t even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.

Not saying that it’s been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven’t had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn’t even need as much settings tweaking).

And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I’d instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.

I don’t get why it’s not common for people to cut out the middleman with these services that just connect a provider with a seeker. Then the seekers can stick with a reliable provider when they find one and the provider can take the full amount rather than giving away a cut (or, more accurately, accepting whatever the middleman thinks is the least they can give without driving the provider away). By the time they come in contact, the middleman has already added all of the value they can to that interaction.

Metroid Prime OST, too many good options to pick just one.

It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.

Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).