If you’re referring to the wavy pattern along the cutting edge, that’s not from the folding process. The hamon is added to the blade during the quenching process, by adding clay to the steel. The clay causes the covered steel to heat differently than the uncovered steel. That differential heating is what is visible as the hamon.

It’s largely decorative, but does have function as it determines what part of the blade can be sharpened to an edge.

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

Bathroom attendants are there to discourage drug use and bathroom sex. That’s literally their primary purpose. The fact that they have towels and mints is secondary to the fact that they’re just a walking overdose deterrent.

That’s why they’re commonly seen in clubs and bars where people would be inclined to do drugs or have bathroom sex.

Yeah, something like that. Dump five gallons of apple juice and two pounds of glucose into a carboy. Add champagne yeast, cap with an airlock full of vodka, and let sit for a few months.

The result is an extremely dry apple wine that’ll kick your ass. If you’re not a fan of dry wines, just add a splash of sprite or 7-up to the glass to back sweeten it.

Reminder to avoid using Amazon boxes for this: Their boxes contain a rodenticide to keep rats/mice away from their products.

If your drink has more than one type of alcohol in it, you need to go to the ER. Methanol is horribly poisonous, and it is not a pleasant death.

Alternatively, I have had several injuries that should have gotten stitches, but have never been in the ER. Growing up poor in the US means you end up rawdogging your injuries.

Sports are just soap operas for men. What will happen next? Who will get traded? Who will be benched vs played? Who will get injured? Which team will throw a game at a critical time? Find out next week!

Same. I was just kind of a boring kid. Went to parties, but was just never interested in getting wasted. Saw all of my friends getting blackout and puking their guts out 15 minutes later, and wanted no part of it. My first drink was actually on my 21st. And it was just enough to get buzzed, not even wasted. It turns out “just say no” is really fucking easy when you’re autistic; Peer pressure just doesn’t work on you.

Once I started drinking, I quickly realized how many young people have binge drinking tendencies as a result of their younger drinking habits. Kids drink to get wasted before they get busted. There’s a time limit on how long they can drink, so they binge to get drunk as quickly as possible when it’s available.

Ironically, now I homebrew mead and apfelwein.

To reiterate how bad public transit is, even in populated areas: I’m also in DFW. This is my daily commute…

It’s ~9.6km. Note that the bus/train option is entirely greyed out, because there is no public transit which runs from my house to my job. If I were to walk, the only option would be on the side of a highway. I would have cars passing me at ~70 MPH without even a curb for protection.

To walk to the nearest grocery store, it’s ~4km, with a large part of it along the shoulder of that same highway. Same with a major chain.

Nearest bus stop is ~6.9km, but that only takes me in a direction I wouldn’t need to go; There are no local bus or train stops that land me near where I work or live.

Honestly, it would probably be easier to just build a *arr program specifically for downloading YouTube videos directly. Tie it into the rest of the *arr suite, with naming conventions for Plex/Jellyfin.

For those who don’t get the joke. During the Cold War, China had a habit of issuing “final warnings” which didn’t have any teeth. Since the propaganda was regularly aired over the radio in Russia, Russians began joking about “oh this is china’s third final warning this week, I bet people are scared now” type of stuff.

Mozilla doesn’t have a VPN. It’s literally Mullvad servers, with Mozilla’s branding on top. Mozilla doesn’t deal with any of the actual server stuff; It’s all handled by Mullvad.

FWIW, it’s a nice little drop shipping side hustle for Mozilla. They get to skim off the top of every Mozilla VPN sale, while doing none of the actual server maintenance and having no ongoing costs (hosting, electricity, etc) related to the VPN servers. But to be clear, you can get the exact same service (for a little cheaper because Mozilla isn’t skimming off the top) directly from Mullvad.

Paying for a VPN through Mozilla is like paying for a Spotify subscription through Apple’s App Store; You get the exact same service as if you had gone straight to Spotify’s site, but with an added convenience fee tacked on by Apple.

Cats do pant, but they’re also just better adapted to heat than dogs are.

Smaller frame means less body heat to disperse; As size increases, the volume:surface area ratio heavily skews towards volume. More volume means more trapped heat. By minimizing volume and maximizing surface area (skin) cats are able to effectively stay cool passively.

Cats also have a higher basal metabolism, which means their body temperature is naturally higher. And creatures don’t feel heat in an absolute sense. Temperature is felt relative to your own body temperature. That’s why a warm shower after swimming feels downright scalding, (because you’re cooled down from swimming, then hopped into a warm shower,) or why the regular room temperature bedroom feels chilly when you have a fever (because you’re warmed up from the fever, so the room feels colder than it normally would.) You’re feeling those things relative to your own body temperature. Since cats have a higher base body temperature, they feel warm environments less than we do. This is also why they spend so much time lazing around in patches of sunlight, or snuggled up next to the radiator; Room temperature is comfortable for us, but slightly chilly to them.

Third, they are originally adapted from the desert. This means they also have some quirks, like tolerating high temperatures better, and having a high tolerance for thirst, (the latter often leads to kidney issues later in life, since cats don’t tend to drink enough water even when it’s readily available.)

Plot: The Ezio trilogy.
Core Gameplay: Black Flag/Rogue.
Replay value: Odyssey.
I just want to chill out after a long day: Odyssey.
I actually want to get sucked into the setting and characters: Black Flag.

This looks like it was a timing analysis attack. Basically, they’re trying to figure out which user did something specific. They match the timing of the event with the traffic from the user, and now they know which user did the thing.

It can be fuzzed by streaming something at the same time, because now your traffic is way harder to time analyze when you have a semi-constant stream of data running. But streaming something over Tor is an exercise in patience, (and it’s not something the typical user will just always have running in the background) so timing analysis attacks are gaining popularity.

Sure, but it’s worth asking why the management is so poor. Many people have theorized that it’s because Google is pulling the strings; It would be in Google’s best interest to keep Firefox around on life support, because it helps them avoid antitrust lawsuits if they can point to Firefox and go “nope not every browser is Chromium based!” But it’s also in Google’s best interest to whittle Firefox’s usage down to near zero, which is what every single recent Mozilla decision has been aiming to do.

Mozilla was getting paid a lot of money by Google before Google got their hand slapped in an antitrust lawsuit. Many people have theorized that since that lawsuit, Google has pivoted to making deals directly with Mozilla’s management instead.

They also recently added built-in AI chat support, which just gives you contextual “summarize this text” type of stuff on your right click menu. But still, it just goes to show that Mozilla is really leaning into AI.

That’s more on the OS than the text protocol. The protocol doesn’t just hold a text in the ether until it’s time for delivery. A scheduled text is you telling the phone “hey, wait to send this message until it’s time.” Then your phone sends it at the proper time.

iOS still doesn’t have built in text scheduling. There are workarounds, (like using the Shortcuts app to build a “send this text” automation that runs at a specific time), but that’s not the same thing as native support.

It’s more about the lack of iMessage features. Things like editing, unsend, text effects, etc are absent in regular texts. If everyone is on iMessage, everyone can use those enhanced features. They’re apparently pretty popular in group chats, but even a single android user will drag the entire conversation into regular text messages instead. So lots of iPhone users (especially the younger gen Z and alpha) started complaining whenever someone had an android, or even outright bullying them for it.

And for android users, texting with an iPhone user is a horrible experience; Images are horribly compressed, videos are severely limited in file size and compressed, group texts need to be opened as an attachment to be read, etc… All because iOS refused to use the more modern RCS texting protocols.