matsdis

Also in Europe. I’ve heard about Grenoble (France), but there seem to be more now. Check out adfreecities.org.uk too. Most don’t seem to ban 100% of all ads, but close enough for me.

Maybe people who are used to this will become less tolerant of online ads, too.

If I’m clearly not understanding a key concept in biology

Yes, you’re misunderstanding the concept of death. Death is bad only from the individual’s point of view. It’s how life renews itself, making room for change. Nothing wrong with trying to reduce suffering, of course, but immortality clearly falls into the “nefarious reasons” category. It’s what happens when you focus too much on the individual’s perspective of life. If you want to study biology you have to consider death from a different angle.

“In case of an emergency, Exits are here, here, here, here, and here.”

– Walt Disney’s original Aladdin

“I’m not going to ride on a magic carpet! I’m afraid of grounds!”<br> “You mean heights, and stop being silly!”<br> “I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you!”

– Terry Pratchet, “Sourcery”

The same story told from an environmentalist perspective: https://edconway.substack.com/p/no-kerosene-did-not-save-the-sperm

So what really saved the whales? Well, the answer is first, the whaling bans. […] In the face of this enforced shortage of whale oil, lubricant manufacturers and other users of whale oil had to try to find a satisfactory substitute.

Lo and behold, in the 1970s there was a sharp rise in research and development spending on esters. Chemists worked out how to create synthetic alternatives.

(The posted article has this too, and expands on the business side of it.)

As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.

TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You can build a voice server that just exposes a TCP port, but… latency. And corporate firewalls love to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.

You don’t focus blindly on your feet and invent stuff. You watch someone else do things and you copy what they do. You are standing on a very large pyramid of hobbits. The big brain is mainly to remember what everyone else has figured out years ago.

You can have many shower thoughts, and most of them will not work out. But don’t stop having them, because eventually you will stumble upon something of value. Then you get to tell your grand-children, and they will listen and copy what you did.

Try Libera Chat if you like the free/libre software community. About 30’000 users connected right now.

If you’re running the latest Debian (or even the stable one), IRC is still a good place to go for support. And there is an electronics channel on Libera that was still big last time I checked. If you don’t know which IC to use for your project someone there will probably know. I would stick around there if I were still into electronics.

Also, IRC is just more relaxing by being text-only. No flashy avatars, pictures, reactions, and for most parts no gamification.

I’ve read it too, and this is a perfect summary. (The book is relatively long and the topic is complex, not an easy read.)

About marriage between cousins: Historically, the christian church has forbidden marriage between even very distant cousins. Intended or not, this has dismantled the power of large family clans.

Over centuries this has a clear effect on psychology: more individualism, a higher willingness to trust strangers (cooperation between non-relatives) and more. Joseph Henrich (anthropologist) has a whole book about this called The WEIRDest People in the World .