Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer has his arm stuck in a drink vending machine and it becomes clear that he would have been free if only he’d let go of the soda can inside it? And everyone laughs at him?

Here we see “Homer” Putin with his army stuck in a war holding onto a Ukraine. He even has the same haircut. D’oh!

That would appear to have been founded after the invention of water bottles.

Yes. Throughout history, people have almost always built their settlements close to major bodies of (fresh) water. For example, you’d be hard-pressed to find a major city anywhere in the world that doesn’t have at least a stream near where it was founded, if not a full-blown river that still runs through the middle of it.

3D doesn’t necessarily mean 3D. Web browsers and video players (including those inside web browsers) will often use the 3D pipeline to write 2D rectangles to the screen. Other software may do the same sorts of thing.

And even if you’re not actually viewing anything in particular, software might be loading things that don’t show obvious on-screen changes but which still might pre-calculate via the GPU.

As for how to reconfigure GPU behaviour, that’s heavily dependent on the software. I know Firefox has things in about:config for it. Can’t speak to Chrome or other browsers, but I assume something similar exists. Other programs may or may not have any settings for it.

Given the only moving parts on a graphics card tend to be the fan, maybe there’s another fan on there you haven’t accounted for?

At your own risk you could try gently stopping fans - on the graphics card and otherwise - with your finger. On the hub, preferably. Most will handle this and spin right back up again. If not give it a flick in the right direction. If the grinding noise continues, the noise probably isn’t coming from the fan you’re stopping. (FWIW, I have an old NVIDIA card whose fan sometimes makes noise at low speeds, which is kind of the opposite problem. I manually ‘reset’ that fan at least a hundred times with no issues, but I imagine it hasn’t been great for the motor.)

Obviously, don’t hold a fan stopped for any significant length of time. It’s there for a reason.

Another possibility is sympathetic vibration to a fan or fans at certain speeds. My last PC case loved to sing along with the CPU fan during moderate use. I cured that with shims of cardboard and a few bits of old packing sponge in the most vibrational parts. (Not enough to hamper airflow though.)

They have backups. Even if your old comments and posts stop resurrecting and permanently become invisible to the web, Reddit can do what they please with their backups, including selling them to AI companies. It stops the scrapers, sure, but then Reddit wants the scrapers to stop as well.

GDPR removal requests are worth a try, but they technically only cover personally identifying information, so you’d have to make a strong case that your comments in whole or in part could be tied back to your real self. And they could get around most of the edge cases there if they were to anonymise that information further, such as by disconnecting each of your comments from any commonality.

This is part of the reason I never bothered to delete anything over there. No point closing that stable door. Those horses are long gone.

The given reason is that it enables gambling. Presumably they’ll also be banning the other sports and games that are mentioned in the article, including those deeply beloved of whoever it is setting these rules.

If not, we can safely assume that the ban is probably because it’s something that might get the ordinary folk thinking for themselves, and that won’t do. Can’t be having the proles thinking for themselves, let alone practising an approximation of military strategy.

Alternatively, the top brass can’t get their heads around chess and they’re jealous that other people can, so therefore they ban it. (For this one, I cite myself. I’m so bad at chess that I can lose any game from a winning position by playing the moves I genuinely think are best, so I’m kind of jealous of anyone without this amazing anti-power. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’d ban it, but if I was running a country, maybe that’d go to my head and I would.)

The Easter bunny is in all bunny-like things. Is Bugs Bunny the Easter bunny? If necessary.

That rabbit you saw in a field munching on a dandelion and then running to hide? Probably not, but if it was necessary, then yes.

Your toy bun who doesn’t seem to do much and is almost always exactly where you left him? Almost certainly, but only when you’re not looking.

It’s magic.

I would have worded this differently, but you’re right in that it’s probably a good idea not to give anyone an extra excuse.

“Oh but we had to” isn’t a great excuse, but it is one, and if you take away the threat, it takes it away that argument.

Once you get out of a monoculture, you start to better appreciate that ‘best’ is a subjective term.

Some distros are better for some users (and purposes) and others for others.

But it’s got to be Mint ;p

Some of us are old enough to remember when it was 01 811 8055. There wasn’t a catchy jingle for it at the time though.

How about that spelling of “diarrhoea”? The US decided to go with simplified spellings and they chose to go with one that only dropped the “o” from the British spelling. Only that? I can see at least two other letters that could go.

A podcast or a stand-up could probably get a few minutes out of that, easy. Not necessarily a good podcast or stand-up (or internet comment), but definitely a couple of minutes either way.

“Reasonable”, unfortunately, is subjective. Just ask Rupert Murdoch.

Religious conservative nuts feel the same way about people who are in favour of abortion as many people in the US feel about health insurance CEOs.

From certain standpoints, assassinations appear acceptable.

This could all depend on where you’re living. I get the impression you’re in a country that may have been or may currently be an enemy of Russia (or thought of as a threat by those running Russia right now). If that’s the case, could your folks be Russian ops in some form?

They would have stopped having those sorts of conversations around you as you got older and they’d deny that they said anything of the sort for those you did remember.

The phrase “we won’t wait (for) when the war starts” could mean that they’re going to do whatever they need to do even if there’s no actual guns, bombs and fighting going on. You know. Cold war things.

There’s that phrase that Khrushchev allegedly said about the US, for example. Putin has revived all of that. Assuming it ever went away.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Wait until you learn that postfix conditionals are syntactic sugar and the compiler* turns that line into the equivalent of $debug and print(debug message), putting the conditional in first place, a lot like the ternary operator.

* Perl compiles to bytecode before running.

The ternary operator itself isn’t implemented in terms of and (and or) but it could be.

One witch made one man trans. It doesn’t mean that the mission of all witches is to give out gender dysphoria, nor does it mean that trans people are trans because a witch did it. Life assigns these sorts of things apparently at random anyway.

I mean, a true sceptic could imagine that the witch in this comic had no magical power at all, but her words filtered down through the man’s psyche to where he has always been struggling with his identity, and they gave him the excuse to face it.

There’s no way Windows would just access non-readable partition

I knew that was true back in the day, but I haven’t tried dual booting in a long, long time. Also, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft’s current incarnation to “accidentally” decide that that “empty” partition would be great for virtual memory and the hibernation image.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.