Same thing that would happen if someone proved in a lab they’re filling a cup while removing more water than what they’re putting in. I.e. it won’t happen.

In reality the body is a lot more complex than a cup of water, and it’s possible you gain weight on calories deficit by accumulating water or feces. But you WILL be losing fat and/or muscle, otherwise we will use you as an infinite source of energy.

Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.

Yes, I agree, learning to write English is harder than to write Spanish, in fact Spanish has the most phonetic writing of all the languages I know. But your question was about babies learning, which is solely spoken language, you only learn writing after you’re already a fluent speaker.

Yes, that’s the same with most languages. My point is that being proficient in several languages I find English text a lot more repetitive, whereas Spanish text has multiple turns of phrases used to avoid repetition, which also makes it a lot harder to learn (although I don’t think we expect kids to know many synonyms for stuff, and children books tend to stick to simpler construction of phrases).

The things I’ve seen people point to English to claim it’s hard are not really needed to be fluent in speaking the language (which is what kids do).

Yes, we don’t know the rules to conjugations, we just know them. But you know what’s faster than that? Not having that to begin with.

In Spanish we also have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things, for example Punto means dot, point, spot, stitch, stop (in the meantime of bus stop). Plus, I would argue that’s not a problem when you’re learning the language, in fact the opposite is true, having many words to mean the same thing makes it hard to learn since the same thing can be said in a multitude of ways, and it might be because English is not my first language, but I find Spanish to have lots more synonyms or entirety different ways of saying the same thing.

Since the main question here has already been answered by the Danish/Norwegian post, I would like to address something different. My native language is Spanish, and I completely disagree with you.

English is a lot easier to learn to speak than Spanish. Spanish has everything English has, plus:

• Conjugations (corro, corres, corre, corremos, corréis, corren, corrés, corría, corrías, corríamos, corríais, corrían, corrí, corriste, corrió, corrimos, etc, etc, etc vs run, runs, ran, running)
• Gendered words (La Tienda, Las Tiendas, El Pape, Los Papeles l vs The shop, The shops, The Paper, The Papers)
• Purposefully misgendered words in certain contexts (i.e. Feminine words that use the masculine article in some occasions: El alarma, Los alarmas)
• Particles that change because of sound (Ostras o mejillones/mejillones u ostras : oysters or / mussels/mussels or ousters; insectos y arañas/arañas e insectos : insects and spiders/spiders and insects)
• Extra sounds (hard R as in “Raton”)
• Temporary being verb (Ella es rubia/ella está rubia VS she is blonde/she is currently blonde)

The complications in English are later, after you know how to speak and have to learn how to write it, but we’re talking babies learning here. Spanish writing is much easier than English because it’s very phonetic, but just the conjugations are enough to drive English speakers insane trying to learn them because in English you use constructions to achieve the same effect, e.g. I run: yo corro; I ran: yo corrí; I would run: yo correría; I will run: yo correré; I used to run: yo corría; so that I would run; para que yo corra; so that I could run: para que yo corriera; run!: corre!; don’t run!: no corras!. Different verbs would use the same construction in English but may be different sounds for different verbs in Spanish: e.g. I ran, I walked, I had vs Yo corrí, yo caminé yo tuve (and yes, I get that using run is a bad example here since it’s irregular, but it’s only one of a handful, whereas Spanish has different conjugations for different verbs plus some irregular ones)

1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.

There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.

But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.

In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.

You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.

That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.

I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.

Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.

Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.

On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.

Maybe not yours, but I’ve had a fire in my life that deleted lots of pictures and stuff, whereas all of the digital media we have is still with us because we copied it to several places so no single event could destroy it. If you only had one copy of an important digital file, you’re doing it wrong.

Monopoly is not intended to be un-fun, it’s intended to be unfair, which is different. People find it un-fun because they changed the rules to make it less unfair, but if you play the game by the rules it’s not bad, but the winner gets picked at random very early in the game, and there’s nothing you can do about it, which would be bad for a long game, but Monopoly is meant to be very short if you play by the rules.

I think the first question you should answer is which games do you want to play, the answer will be vastly different if you say Astro Bot or Factorio. So for this I will try to base it on my own gaming preferences, which is mostly single-player games. Answering your points:

1. You don’t really need a separate PC, there’s no reason to be that paranoid.
2. Most games don’t have kernel level anti-cheat, only competitive multiplayer games, and those you can’t pirate, so they’re irrelevant to your other solution.
3. Yeah, long gone are the days of popping a disc and playing.

Ok, so, this is my personal opinion, but as long as you don’t care about competitive multiplayer games it should be a valid option for you as well.

Get a Steam Deck. Pros:

• It’s plug-and-play for most stuff, so while you will need to download the content it should just work without fiddling.
• Pricewise is very good, you might be able to build a desktop for cheaper, but that would require a lot more effort than going to steam and clicking buy.
• It’s a separate device, also it’s portable, and while that might not be important currently, it’s nice to be able to pack a gaming rig in your backpack when you have to travel for some reason.
• With some minimal setup can run emulation of anything up to ps2 era very comfortably. It’s a very simple setup with just running one script to set things up.
• It can (if you’re willing to jump through hoops to set it up) run and even download pirates content, although with the ease of access of games on Steam I hardly think it’s worth it.

Cons:

• It’s Linux, so it can’t run games that actively try to prevent you from running Linux, e.g. some online competitive games, in short anything that would require kernel-level anti-cheat.
• It’s a lot more expensive than running games on whatever laptop/desktop you have with you.
• It’s not that powerful, because it’s portable it’s very low power, so while it can run Cyberpunk, it won’t look good or flow nicely. If this is your only deal breaker, you might want to wait a bit because very shortly Steam will launch Steam Machines which are the same thing except trading portability for power.

What is pretty cheap for you? Last time I was in Canada a 15GB plan costed something like $45, whereas in Europe that would be enough to get at least 2 unlimited plans and still have money for a coffee.

According to my phone I use around 4/6GB per month (I have an unlimited plan). But I’m guessing you’re in the US or Canada, I’m always boggled when I remember that data is expensive to you guys.

How does it work on Android? One of my main use cases for Nextcloud is to be able to access some of my pdfs on my phone, the app seems to be focused on uploading which is something that while I do sometimes from my phone is much less often.

That poker hands reminded me of the episode in Malcolm in the Middle where they’re playing and suddenly realize there are 6 5s in the deck

Tell me you’re a front end programmer, without telling me you’re a front end programmer.

I had to do FE for a freelance work, I learned Angular built the thing and delivered, a few year later I wanted to do some other stuff went to check Angular documentation and it had changed completely, plus no one else was using it because everyone had migrated to React.

That would make Mint unstable. That is exactly what unstable means in Linux context. There are debian based rolling-release distros, including Debian Sid. This is one of the reasons people choose Arch, because it’s a rolling release you never have to worry about version.

There’s a good chance you might break stuff by upgrading major version like you fear, and that’s why it doesn’t happen automatically. That being said it should be safe, but good on you to prepare backups.

Hospitals and other critical locations have generators, so while blackouts are an inconvenience they rarely cause deaths. They might not be common where you live in part thanks to you, but other parts of the world have blackouts and people are fine. I’m not saying your job is not dangerous or important, but you might be overestimating your importance.

Regardless your job is something that would be considered “essential” on a broader scope, therefore would be highly compensated in any form of communism. During a transitional period it would be highly paid, and if ever money gets abolished it would be recompensated in other ways. On the other hand in capitalism your job is not that highly recompensated, because capitalism pays more for what makes more money regardless of how useful or dangerous it is. For example a quick search tells me that the median salary in the US for your position is 88k, whereas the median salary for a programmer is 133k, and I assure you my job is less dangerous and essential than yours.

That being said, dangerous or undesirable jobs should be automated away, if you think no one would want to be a power plant operator if they could do whatever they want to, then the proper solution is to get rid of the job entirely. No one should be forced to do something they don’t like just so they can pay their bills, we have enough technology to automate at least the dangerous parts of the job, it’s just that under capitalism that money it’s better spent elsewhere because your life is worth approximately 88k per year.

Are you suggesting your skill is more valuable than others? If so by which standard? What determines how valuable a skill is?. Or do you think other people don’t develop their skills as well?

I don’t know what you do for a living, but realistically unless you are a farmer your job is not actually essential. People can survive decades without doctors, can police themselves, etc, granted it would be a worse life than currently, but it’s survivable (and I don’t think you’re in either of these positions either, if I were to bet I would say you work in something that’s completely irrelevant to society but that earns money to some rich guy). However everyone needs to eat, so why do you think your skill is more important than the skill of the people actually keeping you alive?.