In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That’s CRAZY right?..Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

How about the Borg’s willingness to join? What we’ve been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they’ve experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they’ve allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager’s return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation’s intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, “We come in peace”, assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to “come in peace”, casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet’s virtues to the rest of their race.

Hmm, may also possible that vendor/carrier versions of the app carry more ads. This would nevertheless still be an android problem because I don’t think Apple allows other companies to do that with their apps.

It looks bad, but try replicating it.

When I search two dots, I find exactly the matching app, with screenshot previews and details about it. I get only 1/4 of the screen as ad suggestions. The rest of the screen is related suggestions (non-ad suggestions). So about 3/4 is non-ads for me vs. 1/8th from the OP screenshot.

If I search something more generic like “card battle games”, I get a listing of about 7 games, with tags, and zero ads.

I think what’s shown in the OP is what remains after the user has already read the details and approved installing the app. Considering that this is the end of the user story, what else should be on that page?

Or maybe he’s got a different version of play store than me from A/B testing? Anyway, try it out yourself. I don’t have a problem with too many ads on playstore, my main issue is more that the good apps go to apple store first and only sometimes port to android because apple users are more lucrative.

Hm, can you elaborate further? I don’t think you’ve supported in your point in that you say that AI art can achieve the same subjective outcome of invoking emotion and getting a person to think, but you concluded that it’s not the same.

I feel like there’s a finer point you want to make but haven’t gotten across yet.

Yeah I have that too! 20 minutes to dawn leans much harder into the bullethell genre and less about the skinnerbox progression aspect of vampire survivors. It’s much more challenging with fewer ways to make successive runs easier. I should get back into that one since a lot of updates were probably made. Back then it felt like the starting pistol and character as stronger than all the unlocked weapons and characters.

I have been absolutely hooked on this game. I loved Vampire survivors and Holocure and this was a great blend of those games with a diablo aesthetic.

The part that makes it so good is the sharply tuned enemy design to feed you levels steadily with interesting enemy movement patterns to dodge. Well done! Has such a good balance of challenge and progression.

I cook most of my meals too. I just barcode scan the ingredients. For vegetables it’s the same as grocery selfcheckout, just type a few letters in the search bar and tap the corresponding listing, like “USDA broccoli” or “USDA red potato”.

They have a “create a recipe function” where you just scan in all the ingredients. So like I put in my turkey chili components, it resulted in 3994g of chili, so basically 10 servings of 400g each. Because I put in all the ingredients, it knows the total nutrients, and the amount in each serving. So when it comes to actually eating, I just go into “My Recipes”, tap “Turkey chili” 1 serving. I measure 400g into my bowl and I know I’ve consumed 26g carbs 22g fat and 66g protein, totaling 538 calories.

This is also applicable the first time I cook it, because on subsequent cooking times it’s already been entered. Also, it keeps a recent history so you don’t need to search frequently for eaten foods, it’s already available to tap.

It definitely takes a fair bit of time in the first weeks, you’re not wrong about that. But it also gets a lot faster and easier after those first few weeks.

Nah, they pay for Gympass membership (a service that gives you access to various gym franchises around the country) and the Gympass membership gives me access to a bunch of apps. (The other nice one I get is premium Strava, since I’d been using the free version of that for a long while)

MyFitnessPal. I had heard of it, but counting calories is a pain in the ass, no way I’d waste my time with that shit.

Workplace gives it to me for free, so why not take a look? Damn it’s so fast and easy and it has made such a huge difference in dirt success. Just wave the camera over barcodes and the rest of the data falls in place. When you actually get enough protein instead of thinking you’ve got enough protein, then you don’t have to feel hungry in a calorie deficit.

It seemed like a frivolous app, but it turned out to be the biggest driving factor for success. The key thing is, I didn’t realize how much it appealed to the nerd gamer instincts. The same way out optimize a build/load out for increased performance like in Diablo, that’s the same way rewarding feeling you get when you figure out new life hacks to optimize your macros even more to pack even more food into your calorie budget

Some women’s libido goes down from the stress of seeing a lot of chores needing to be taken care of. Doing those chores reduced the stress. Going further and doing what is normally their share of housework can be an act of affection.

It’s also noted in a study of women asked to rate a number of pictures of men on various factors including attractiveness and reliability. When they are also asked for dating preferences, as the age range went up, the prioritization on reliability ratings also went up. Doing chores is reliable AF.

More to the point, she’s already told you she likes it. Just believe her.

Yeah, that was my immediate next thought as well. I’ve gotten so much benefit, developed so many interests from large scale community postings. I don’t know where such a thing will exist in the future for my kids, if at all. I hope time proves this to be a foolish concern and I’ll look dumb for posting such a question on the platform that answers the question.

I feel like Reddit had improved me a lot in other ways. It taught me a lot about the experiences of demographics that I don’t deal with frequently, learned a lot of guitar, apps, shows, science, cooking, lawncare, etc, etc.

I used it to consume jokes and entertainment and stuff sure, but it also was my entry point into a lot of topics and really jump-started my ingestion of that information in a way that would be hard to replicate on any platform without a similar scale of adoption.

All the negative aspects of using electronics still applied, but I was getting a lot of positive results that I’ll miss now.

To a degree yes. Moisture in general will limit browning. Fresh ground beef is usually dry enough. Frozen and defrosted ground beefwill have ice/water. Patting it dry with a paper towel takes care of this.

Ground turkey in particular is super wet all the way through so paper towels won’t really be able to get it all. To brown ground turkey, you put a big patty on the grill and don’t break it up, then wait for several minutes. This allows the surface to evaporate the water and then begin browning. If you break it open it will release the water inside the big ball of meat and it’ll take forever to evaporate enough for browning to start. You break it open later on after you’ve browned top and bottom.