Not at all. Until roughly 150-200 years ago infant and childhood mortality was almost 50% worldwide, which of course massively brings down the average lifespan. If someone made it to 20, they would probably make it to 60 and have a good chance of seeing 70 or more.

Slightly joking, slightly not: Bi means you’re over 35, Pan means you’re under 35 and Omni means you’ve spent more time thinking about it than getting laid.

Typical rule I’ve seen is don’t date anyone younger than half your age + seven, so for your friend that would be 16. So it’s right on the borderline, but probably ok and will become more ok as time goes on.

It’s really depends on the scam, but some of them really do pick a random person. Or, rather the autodialer/autotexter that they are using does. I’ve gotten several scam texts in the last week fishing for info.

Further, there is a lot of into out on the web. Some is just an easy look up for name and adddres from a phone number, other data is pulled from breaches that ends up public or for sale.

You mean like git?

Back in the day I had my entire phone setup with a custom Metroid 2 sound theme that I put together from MIDIs, plus custom ringtones for my dozen or so most frequent contacts. I remember using Power Puff Girls for my wife, TMNT for her boyfriend, Sailor Moon for my girlfriend, and Little Honda for my dad.

Nowadays it’s on silent all the time so I don’t bother. :(

Exactly this. There are plenty of ML/AI systems that build on public datasets, such as AlexNet for image recognition and even some LLMs that are trained on out of copyright documents such as the Project Gutenberg collection. But they almost certainly aren’t what you are looking for.

I’d do it the same way as the GRACE satellites do, though maybe there is a better way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRACE_and_GRACE-FO

You mean trusted Open Source projects.

To expand on this, there aren’t any gaps left so the only new ones will be increasingly heavyweight and have vanishingly short half-lives, which means that they are increasingly difficult to synthesize and detect. In theory there is an island of stability once we can synthesize sufficiently heavy elements, but it seems pretty far off.

That strongly depends on where you live, how much you need, and how good of a home chemist your are. Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places. Enough to kill a bunch of people in a crowd? Quite easy.

That is a surprisingly strong recommendation. I’m glad everyone was safe, keep it shiny side up.

Thanks for the review; I’m glad it’s working out well for you. Time for me to meander out for a test drive.

Oh, that’s really handy to know. Thanks!

How do you like it? It’s on my short list for my next car.

The most important things are that they happen on a regular basis, at least biweekly, and that it’s possible to have a conversation while doing them or that there are at least enough breaks to have them. So, here’s a list of examples:

• Table top RPGs
• Fiber arts circle
• Hiking group
• Choir/music ensemble
• Ballroom/swing dancing
• Soup kitchen volunteer
• Shibari practice
• Martial arts
• Recreational team sports
• Community theater
• Fraternal organizations e.g. Elks, Kiwanis, etc

If we could do it in a peaceful and democratic way that doesn’t lead to an immediate second civil war, yeah, I’d probably vote for it. It seems to have worked out well enough for Czechia and Slovakia.

Eh, California is mostly water independent. Most of the water that is “imported” comes from the Colorado River and is used for the least productive and least necessary agriculture in the state. Yeah, figuring out how to handle however much water would be lost if California were to secede would be an issue, but it wouldn’t be an impossible situation.

Can confirm. Source: am currently on vacation after yoloing a release on Friday.

Totally unnecessary. A simple price/demand curve can easily be written in a few lines of code.