As a rule, non-essential insurance (including pet insurance) is designed to be a losing bet as you are paying for the average cost of an insured animal’s care, plus the overhead of hundreds of people’s wages.

Plus all the other business overhead, plus tidy shareholder profits.

Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

-High premiums

-Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

-needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

-Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

-Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

-high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”

Here is an idea for testing whether a stainless carafe vs glass lined makes a noticeable difference for you:

1. Set up a water bath at whatever serving temp you prefer for your coffee. A quick search’s says this is somewhere from 140-150f. If you have an immersion circulator (used for “sous vide” cooking), you’re golden for this. Otherwise, you’d have to use a pot of water on the stove with a rack in the bottom to keep your coffee vessels from touching the bottom. then keep adjusting the stove to maintain water temp… which would be a PITA.

2. get two clean vessels with lids, one stainless, one glass. You could probably get away with using plastic wrap and a rubber bands for lids in a pinch. Preheat the vessels with water.

3. pour freshly brewed coffee into each vessel, put the lids on, and put them in the water bath for a while (1 hour?).

4. have someone pour you a coffee from each vessel into identical coffee cups. They need to keep track of which is which. And, of course, you shouldn’t know which is which.

5. Taste. Can you tell a difference? Which one is better?

6. repeat until you’re tired of running the test and are sure your answer is solid.

I went down a rabbit hole when the “blue light bad (at night)” thing hit 5-10 years ago. At the time I was curious about what the “dose” relationship was - ie, how much blue light did it take to affect your sleep - and how severely sleep was actually impacted.

What I found was that you will see lots of articles and health advice that said to avoid blue light and digital devices before sleep, but that when you dig into the source that all this advice was based on, it was a handful of really shady studies, such as the one I mentioned in my previous comment.

The belief that blue light affects sleep originated from research on the effect of sunlight on sleep patterns. But studies/articles makes a giant leap from the fact that bright sunlight has a measurable effect on sleep to the belief that any light that matches the sunlight spectrum also affects sleep.

Look at the s actual studies and read them. Draw your own conclusions about the quality of the study. What I found is that studies had to massively “crank up” the factors to show any effect. They do not attempt to replicate real-world usage of devices before sleep.

I remember reading a study on sleep quality, purportedly testing whether people sleep better after reading a print book compared to a digital book. If I remember correctly, this is also one of the studies cited for the “blue light bad” trend.

The study found that reading digital books vs print harmed sleep. Their test conditions were something like this (note: I’m not exaggerating how ridiculous the setup was):

Print book: sit/lay in bed however you wish in a moderately lit room and read for some number of hours before you sleep.

Digital book: in the same room with the same lighting, an iPad is attached to a a device that holds it a prescribed distance from your face. The device cannot be moved, so you must sit in a particular position for the entire reading time. THE IPADS BRIGHTNESS SET TO MAXIMUM. You cannot adjust the brightness.

Yeah, I’m probably going to sleep worse after being forced to sit in the same position for multiple hours while being blinded.

You know how new towels don’t absorb water? It’s because there is some shitty fabric softener on them to make them feel really soft at the store. Wash them once or twice with vinegar (instead of laundry soap) to remove the softener and turn them into proper towels. The same technique should work for your cat.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova

Just curious since you clearly know a lot about this stuff: What are your thoughts on the heat sinks being a part of the issue? Is there a decent chance the device could benefit from replacing whatever adhesive/paste was used to attach them? Or is that even doable?

Looks right to my untrained eye. But I’m not eating them :)

Better pics on this site:

https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/oyster-mushroom.html

Hopefully you’ll get some experts chiming in. I am not. I just found your question interesting and did some searching.

The biggest thing I see to check is whether the gills run vertically *and extend into the stem. If the gills stop at the stem, avoid.

https://grocycle.com/oyster-mushrooms-guide/#:~:text=They should be smooth with,white to brown on top.

Edit: actually you may not need to avoid if the gills don’t run all the way. If they don’t, there’s a good chance they are Elm Oysters, but elm oysters are edible. I’m basing this info on the above link. It seems pretty clear that what you have aren’t the dangerous varieties listed on that page.

While I haven’t dug into anti-chest specifics, I’m pretty sure they all function this way. Not that I like it either, but if you don’t want games accessing this information, you’ll probably want to avoid games with anti-cheat.

Eg Denuvo, which is widely used and recognized (recognized as shit that causes lots of issues, too), gets kernel level access, which means it can do anything it wants.

Ever heard of Sealioning? Look it up. That’s you. Your posts are dripping with pseudo-intellectual “just asking questions” spittle.

Three thoughts:

1. I wonder if you would still have this take if you played a newer, high quality AAA game on a high end setup. I don’t mean to imply that your mind will definitely be blown — really don’t know — but it would be interesting to see what doing so would do to your opinion.

2. Gaming is about entertainment. There is no denying that better/bigger/smoother/more immersive tends to add to the entertainment. So devs push those boundaries both for marketing reasons and because they want to push the limits. I have a hard time seeing a world in which gaming development as a whole says “hey, we could keep pushing the limits, but it would be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for our customers if we all just stopped advancing game performance.”

3. There are SO MANY smaller studios and indie devs making amazing games that can run smoothly on 5/10/15 year old hardware. And there is a huge number of older games that are still a blast to play.

Thanks for that. Looking again, I see now at the top that I’m looking at pull requests and not “issues”. And because I don’t really know, I just looked up what pull requests are:

Pull requests let you tell others about changes you’ve pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch.

So that means that code has been written and requested to be merged into the main branch. Does that mean it’s already been tested in a non-main branch and is (hopefully) ready for prime time after some final review?

I’m not a GitHub user, although I’ve done some browsing of open issues. Am I seeing that this feature has been coded (or is actively being coded) or am I just seeing that people are still discussing the issue?

I ask because last time I looked (probably 2-4 weeks ago), I saw some discussion on the issue dating back to over a year ago, but nothing that looked like actual traction on it getting implemented.

Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.

Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?

I haven’t used other handhelds, but what you say is what I’ve seen from other discussions and reviews. Yes, there are more powerful systems with better screens, but the SD’s OS is miles ahead (but not without a lot of quirks as well). The touchpads are incredible - I couldn’t imagine trying to use a handheld PC without those touchpads. Also, the custom control configuration abilities built in to steam OS are incredibly versatile and detailed.