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How do I clean a cinderblock?
  • Because you don't have a driveway/hose, I would try something like the Simple Green "OxySolve" cleaning concentrate (it says it's for power washers but there are mixing instructions for "manual cleaning"). Most concrete cleaners have some pretty harsh chemicals in them that could damage your bathtub, but the Simple Green stuff seems pretty tame.

  • Claude 3.5 solved my mapping problem very nicely
  • LLMs are also really good at generating regex based on a short description. It's saved me a bunch of time, since I don't use regex often enough to become proficient at it, but it's necessary for certain particular things (such as find/replace with Notepad++, or hyper-specific URIs in Bitwarden)

  • Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST)
  • Personally, I would not recommend diving into Linux headfirst by installing it as your only operating system. If you can afford an additional small drive (128GB should be plenty), I would suggest buying one and installing something like Linux Mint on that, while putting Windows on your main drive.

    That way, you can switch between them whenever you want to (when you turn on your computer, you can just use a menu to choose which drive to boot to), and get somewhat familiar with Linux before deciding if it's worth your time to really dive in.

    (There's a way to put both operating systems on the same drive, but it's really easy for something to go wrong and end up with one of the operating systems inaccessible. Since you're inexperienced, I would avoid going that route for the time being, and just keep both on separate drives.)

  • Is there a subsect of the minimalist community that's focused on portable/utilitarian living?
  • That's a pretty sexist outlook. I don't think the image makes an entire 51% of the population angry. And I think people like Jeff Bezos show that not all men require "so little to be happy". It's almost like genders are not hive-minds, and generalizing anything that broadly is only going to result in looking like a boomer who complains about how terrible their spouse is.

  • Why do people form cults around bad companies?
  • Same here. I only support those companies because they're the best options for what they offer, and I'm not gonna let perfection get in the way of progress. Even though Mozilla is making some business choices I don't agree with, I'm gonna keep recommending Firefox until some other non-Chromium browser comes along (which unfortunately isn't gonna happen for a long time).

    Same with AMD- they are so much more friendly to the open-source community than Nvidia or Intel, so I will recommend them to everyone, until the moment they start being worse. At that point, I'll start recommending whoever seems best at that point in time.

  • How do you lure a stray cat to your yard/house?
  • Start feeding it too, or get one of the neighbors who's been feeding it to help out. Your best bet is a feral cat trap, which are kinda pricey, but if you call around to a few local rescues or "trap, neuter, release" programs, they may be able to lend you one. Then you can likely just use food to lure it into the trap.

    Of course, if this cat used to be someone's pet, you could even just try luring it into a garage or, hell, a big cardboard box, from which you could put some thick gloves on and transfer it into a pet carrier

  • Is Google Maps getting worse?
  • That's fair, although I think that depends a lot on the type of car you drive. There's an option to tell Maps what type of car you drive (electric, hybrid, or gas), which will change the results, because cars with regenerative breaking often get better "city" milage than "highway" milage.

    It also probably depends on factors like how aerodynamic your vehicle is, because it makes a huge difference above ~50mph (air resistance/drag increases exponentially with speed)

  • Is Google Maps getting worse?
  • It does indicate the "fuel efficient" route pretty clearly though, and always gives multiple other options including the quickest one that isn't as efficient. If this is what's causing the issue, OP just needs to look closer at what's on their screen.

  • Counterfeit PS1 Games Are All Over AliExpress
  • They totally might have figured something out. Hell, they could have gotten a hold of some of Sony's original disc-pressing hardware to reproduce the copy protection. It really is the Wild West when it comes to these retailers

  • Nate Silver issues "good news" for Harris on electoral college chances
  • Just so you know, Lemmy has an option in every person's account to hide posts and comments from bot accounts ("bot" in this context meaning accounts that have voluntarily tagged themselves as bots, which is the case for the one you replied to.)

  • Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water — AI data centers also raise power and water bills for nearby residents
  • Data centers don't have "water cooling loops" that are anything like the ones in consumer PCs. To maximize cooling capacity, a lot of the systems use some sort of evaporative cooling that results in some of the water just floating away into the atmosphere (after which point it would need to be purified again before it could be used for human consumption)

    It also seems from what I can find like some data centers just pipe in clean ambient-temperature water, use it to cool the servers, and then pipe it right back out into the municipal sewer system. Which is even more stupid, because you're taking potable water, sending it through systems that should be pretty clean, and then mixing it with waste water. If anything, that should be considered "gray water", which is still fine to use for things like flushing toilets.

  • Indestructible quartz crystal can store 360TB of data for billions of years
  • It sounds kinda like the "trick" on the internet for fitting more notes onto a note-sheet for an exam. You're still using the same physical space to store information, but you're introducing a new degree of freedom that allows you to increase storage density.

  • Apps can now block sideloading more easily and force downloads through Google Play
  • Aw shit, it says this is supposed to detect when an app's binary has been tampered with... That means it's probably gonna be used to block stuff like ReVanced. I hope they can find a way around this that doesn't require root.

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    Nawor3565 @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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