BananaTrifleViolin

Well first off have Taco Bell stopped providing napkins? One person couldn’t find napkins in one store and suddenly it’s greed driven corporate policy according to OP?

It seems unlikely that a food chain would completely abolish napkins. It is possible they’re no longer freely available because people were taking them “for their car” whatever that even means!?

Are there bigger versions of the same communities elsewhere? One of the problems at the moment is duplicates, and finding the one where people have coalesced can be be hard, sometimes just dumb luck.

Almost the whole of black Friday is a nonsense. The only things worth buying are things you would have bought anyway but know are on discount.

Many items prices go up for a period before black Friday so they can then be discounted, and manufacturers even have cheaper versions of models of their products that they supply to discount chains and companies like Amazon for black Friday.

The only things I’d buy on sale are items I’m watching via camelcamelcamel which have hit discount, or software on discount. There are a few specific items I need to buy that I might buy if they’re genuinely on discount but most of the stuff thrust in your face during the sales is cheap tat or lies.

I’d go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.

The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it’s hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.

Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).

Yes - because the future of gaming is probably VR spaces so games on a 2D screen will become nostalgic to an extent.

The nostalgia may be loading up a space with a virtual pc and playing an old game on a mouse and keyboard or controller.

VR headsets aren’t yet there but but when they’re light weight and high definition enough, it may make more sense to play a game on a virtual screen which can be 40 inches or room scale, than your desktop. If I could see my hands and the mouse and keyboard I’d probably already be doing it. It already works with virtual desktop and controller based games.

So, alternative take. If you have a home PC would you be better upgrading it and getting a cheaper laptop for more basic use?

Basically do you really need a mobile work horse? If you’re doing video work then you may be better with a graphics card or CPU upgrade £ for £. Do you really want to be editing videos on your sofa or in bed? It doesn’t seem like the easiest or most productive way to work in that particular use.

You can also stream any game from your PC to a low power laptop (or other devices) using Steam or other streaming tech. The pc can be on but with the sound and screen off, while you’re elsewhere streaming a game.

So maybe a PC upgrade and a shared basic laptop for video and internet would be enough? The only downside is if you genuinely think you would want to do full on video work on the go - out of the home or abroad for example. Then it makes more sense. But a powerful laptop around the house when you have a PC that does the same seems a bit pointless. It also means work drifts away into the rest of your home, whereas now when you’re not at your PC you’re not working.

But if this is more talking yourself into buying an expensive toy, there may be better toys to be had for far less. Like a steam deck - under £400 for a decent machine, play games anywhere in the home (on the device or streaming to the device), get a dock and plug it in to your telly.

Edit: other way to think of it: do you really need the laptop? What could you spend that money on instead? There is an opportunity cost if you spend that money or take on debt for something you don’t really need. You could save that £42 a month and treat yourself to something else in 6 months or a year.

Are you sure it’s cats?

Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?

Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.

I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they’re vulnerable when pooping, and normally they’re fastidious about burying it where possible.

iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.

A mesh has others have said. I use Google WiFi as it’s cheaper and gets the job done. But it’s a potential compromise as the more expensive mesh systems offer better bandwidth.

I tried Homeplug systems - they can work well on a well wired house, but mine was giving me about 10% of my bandwidth from the router downstairs to my home office upstairs.

For comparison Google WiFi is giving me 100% of my 250mbs connection. If you’re looking at much higher bandwidths or users, you may need a more expensive system. Alot of mesh systems have a dedicated back channel separate to the user facing channels but Google WiFi does not - that makes it cheaper but could be a bottleneck if you you’re at the very high ends of internet speeds and home usage. For most home users though I suspect Google WiFi is more than enough.

Lens is a visual search tool. Take a picture, ask it to search or answer a question based on what’s in the picture. Like take a picture of a tree and ask it what species is it

Yeah. For apple users Lens is not the simple andtoid camera app (which yes can translate text on the fly and read QR codes) - Lens is a visual search tool that can answer queries based on pictures.

Like if you take a picture of a tree you can ask what species it is, or a picture of a person you can ask where the clothes are from etc.

Google Lens doesn’t just translate text, it contextually searches based on what it sees and interprets in an image. The translation stuff is already built into the Android camera app; Lens is something more

You can make zips using 7Zip. I use 7zip and send Zips to other people, but use 7z compression for my own files. Zip files are more ubiquitous and readily opened by most OS; certainly Windows opens them natively, and I assume MacOs does.

Of course it also depends what you’re sending. I wouldn’t send secure files in just a zip even with encryption due to zips flaws. I would use 7z eoth encryption as a minimum, and more secure methods depending on how valuable the data is.

Instead, the researcher claims “a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch”: open-source AI models that the researcher says are “faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.”

The sentence you quote says who the 3rd faction is: Open-source AI models.

I’d keep it a secret except from the closest people to me. I’d be incredibly boring about what I’d do with it.

First I would pay off my mortgage and invest a chunk in “safe” investments - so shares in utility companies, funeral business - boring reliable investments - and property and land, across borders. All to try and guarentee I would stay financially secure long term for the rest of my life, and weather financial storms.

I’d help my immediate family financially (siblings and parents, and closest friends) but would not go over board - I’d make their lives better but not ruin them, and would aim to keep most of the money ready to keep helping for years to come rather than splurge out. And I wouldn’t tell them how much I had so as not to ruin relationships.

For what I do for me I would think very hard. I’d probably not quit work immediately and I’d try not to ruin my life.

I’d probably look to travel but in bursts - either nice holidays and keep working (I like my job) or quit work and live 3 months at a time in places I’ve always wanted to be for a bit before settling down again.

Anything I do or buy I would do as someone “middle class”. So I’d travel economy plus, I’d stay in decent hotal but not the most flashy, I’d buy a decent home but not a mansion (I don’t need a 10 bed home, I’d just get a nicer version of what I have now - 3 beds but maybe detached and in a nicer area).

Basically I’d upgrade my life a little but I wouldn’t go wild. I don’t see the value in the conspicuously wealthy lifestyle - I’d see money as buying freedom but I wouldn’t want to be wasteful, and I wouldn’t want to be a target for criminals or leeches.

And the rest i’d start puting to good causes. That would probably be conservation charities, green charities, social projects I believe in. Id want to use it to create some kind of legacy even if anonymous - for me that would be something that meaningfully improved the world in some small but realistic way.

Basically I’d be very boring, stay anonymous and try and make relatively small but meaningful changes to my life and those I love.

It depends what you use it for.

If you’re watching your own content within your home then Jellyfin is better. It’s free, open source and private. Your Jellyfin instance is yours and secure, and entirely under your control.

Plex’s differences are mostly behind it’s plex pass pay wall, and you sacrifice privacy using their platform. The key difference is really offline and remote viewing of content which is easier and slicker with plex (but doable with jellyfin), and the plex App maybe available a few more devices. There are also some credits and ad skipping features. That’s about it - I struggle to see the benefit in plex. The only other thing I can think of is some people prefer the interface?

I used to use Plex and got annoyed when I couldn’t view my content, which I host locally, because their login servers were down. Made me realise why did I need them so I researched a bit and switched to Jellyfin.

I like and trust Proton Mail, and they support setting up custom domains while hosting your email data (for subscriber users).

You can then access it via their web mail box, via their Android and iOS apps, or via a desktop email client if you install their “bridge” application. The bridge application basically maintains the secure encryption ethos of their email system by ensuring all email traffic between your desktop and their servers remains encrypted, but can still be accessed via your preferred email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. The bridge is available for Windows, iOS and Linux.

I personally recommend Protonmail as it’s primary focus is security and encryption, yet it does this in a very well developed and slick interface, so you get the best of both worlds. I’m a subscriber and moved from Gmail about 2 years ago as I wanted better privacy and security (they even have great tools for importing your old emails from major web providers). I don’t have a custom domain but from my experiences of everything else they provide, I’d be confident it works as intended.

EDIT: In terms of cost, its €4 a month for the first tier which includes support for 1 custom domain, 10 email addresses, and 15GB of storage, or €10 for 500GB, 3 domains, 15 emails. They also include VPN, calendar, drive storage and a password manager in both.