I’d need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.

No fabric at all, just metal rings and a bit of string. They are far from see-through though because they are pretty dense. If you’re close enough you can see a bit of… anatomy… but it’s more on the side of a coarsly knit sweater than transparent fabric.

I remember that Australia was the exact opposite. It has a single outside connection and once it reaches a stable state, it stays there. Every impulse that goes in will come out again and leave the inside unchanged.

Let’s see:

• Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
• I’ve created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn’t result in a well-defined solution but I’ve recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don’t have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
• My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I’ve acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
• I’ve made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.
• Edit: One more because it might be my magnum opus. Have you ever played KJumpingCube? That doesn’t only work on grids but on arbitrary graphs. My friends and I chose a Risk board. Not a digital one. A real life physical Risk board with actual dice on every country that need to be turned by hand. A single game took us about 6-7 hours with the winning move alone taking up the last hour.

That’s just what I comes to mind at the moment. I’m sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.

Well… I don’t think it would be the weirdest thing I’ve done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.

Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.

That’s VGA, it’s gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they’re also pretty robust against noise.

So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.

Yes. That’s literally the first point in my job description.

Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

I think it’s meant to be short for Mega-elements, so millions of elements.

Yeah, that should be fixed as soon as possible. But compared to the hoops Americans need to jump through to be able to vote, 40€ every 10 years to renew your ID card is not that much.

Fascists cosplaying as Christians? If they had ever opened a bible, they might have noticed that one of the gospels’ most important message is loving your neighbors. Not just your cis white hetero normative neighbors, all of them. Even those who might not follow all the rules should be treated with compassion, not hate.

I’m not a practicing Christian by any measure but I think the world would be a far better place if self-declared Christians actually read their fancy book instead of blindly repeating something they heard from a TV preacher.

Edit: there also seem to be huge regional differences in interpretation. Protestant churches in Germany allow gay and trans people not only to participate and get married but even to become pastors. A couple of churches (but certainly not all of them) fly pride flags outside to signal that if God made you queer, you’re more than welcome. The Catholics are slowly coming to the same conclusion but I figure they might still need a decade or two.

Okay, that changes my first sentence a bit but the rest still stands. Because as a German I am required by law to have valid ID and the government is required to issue one to me, it would be incredibly hard to invalidate any ID that they themselves issued without providing a replacement.

I’m still baffled by the fact that for most US citizens, a drivers license is the only government ID they have. It’s not that hard to issue an ID card to everyone and when everyone is required by law to have one, it’s way harder for rogue lawmakers to take it away.

Here in Germany we’ve had mandatory ID for decades and it works really well. Even if our government suddenly decided that being trans isn’t acceptable anymore, the worst that would happen ID-wise is that your card shows your deadname (gender isn’t listed explicitly). Sure, that sucks (a lot!) but at least it doesn’t take away people’s ability to vote or otherwise identify themselves.

Hey, at least this one won’t become a murderer when the relationship breaks apart.

Wäre es gut gewesen, die Gemeinden, die die Strom- und Wasserkosten für den Spabereich übernehmen, darüber zu informieren? Bestimmt.

Aber daraus jetzt so ein Theater zu machen, finde ich dann doch ziemlich unangebracht. Die Leute, die da arbeiten, machen wortwörtlich einen der beschissensten Jobs der Welt und haben es sich mehr als verdient, im Anschluss sauber und entspannt nach Hause zu gehen. So wie die Kommission damit umgeht, muss man nicht lange überlegen, warum das geheim gehalten wurde.

To add some more: that’s just not how genetics works.

The reason why humans can decide to be vegans is because we’re already omnivores. We have evolved over a long time to be able to eat pretty much anything.

Most predators aren’t. They are strict carnivores, not because they choose to be but because their whole body plan has evolved that way. Take wolves for example. Their teeth are designed to kill and rip apart their prey. Their stomachs are designed to digest meat. Their eyes, ears and noses are designed to find prey. Their legs are designed to run after prey. Every single cell in their bodies is hyper-specialized on one thing: eating other animals. You can’t replace all that with traits that help it survive on a plant-based diet and expect to still have a wolf. You won’t even have a dog. I don’t know what you would get but it would probably be closer to a sheep.

Several points:

Taking away a predator’s ability to eat meat causes at least as much suffering as protecting prey from being eaten takes away. They are hardwired to hunt. There is a reason why everything from a pet dog to a lion in a zoo needs constant enrichment activities to stay healthy - both physically and mentally. If they can’t hunt (or simulate hunting), they suffer.

Evolution would be stopped dead in its tracks. The reason why we have so many different species on our planet is mainly because they compete with each other. Predators adapt to catch more prey. Prey adapt to not get eaten. At the same time, there is competition between species that rely on the same limited food sources. If we ever managed to make sure every single animal has exactly what it needs (which in itself is utterly unrealistic), there would be no pressure to adapt. Biodiversity would slowly dwindle when species get wiped out by factors we can’t control and without natural selection, nothing new would evolve to fill a certain niche because every mutation that occurs is equally viable. Ecosystems would destabilize rapidly and eventually collapse when your super technology can’t keep up anymore.

And most importantly: it’s not our job to control nature. We’re not god-like creatures who can just force our will onto everything else. Doing so is pure hubris. Nature has managed to regulate itself for hundreds of millions of years. Who are we to decide that the way things have always been is incorrect? Genetically engineering animals not to eat other animals is no more ethical than engineering them to be tastier.

You would turn the whole planet into a zoo that exists only to please your personal worldview. For me, that is the opposite of animal ethics. It reeks of ultra-conservative prescriptivism. Everyone must follow your ethics because anything else is icky and barbaric and certainly you’re doing those less enlightened than you a favor by showing them the light.

No.

Honestly, that sounds absolutely insane to the point where I’m not sure if you’re trolling. Playing God for no reason except forcing our personal morals on animals that neither understand nor care for those morals. Nature is not “pretty awful”. Nature is amazing! Millions of years of evolution have created more species than we can ever hope to even discover, let alone study. Who are we to decide we’re so important and all-knowing that we can just undo that because animals eating each other feels icky to some of us?

Practicability and ethics aside, do people not understand how ecosystems work? What do they think keeps herbivore populations from growing uncontrollably and overrunning our fields? Ask China about the sparrows.