I don't know why you were downvoted, I think for the right purpose tape drives are great.

Used drives from a few generations back work just fine, and are affordable. I have an LTO-5 drive, and new tapes are around $30 where I am. One tape holds 1,5TB uncompressed.

I think they are great for critical data. I have documents and photos on them.

Is there not a problem where companies stop manufacturing the tape media because it is obsolete?

I'm not 100% up to speed with the current standing of things, but tapes (specifically the LTO technology) is still being relied on very heavily by the enterprise, both in data centers for things like cold storage or critical backups, and other corporate uses. Archival use is also very strong with libraries and other such institutions having large tape libraries with autoloaders and all that automation jazz. The LTO-5 generation I mentioned was released in 2010, and the first LTO generation was released in 2000 I believe. The current generation is LTO-10, with an uncompressed capacity of 30TB. New LTO tapes are still being produced, the last batch I purchased was made in 2023.

The LTO consortium consists of HP, IBM and one other company I believe. Now, in my opinion, none of this guarantees the longevity of the medium any more than any other medium, but when I initially looked into it, this was enough to convince me to buy a drive and a couple of tapes.

My reasoning was that with the advertised longevity of 30 years under "ideal archival conditions", if I can get 10 years of mileage from tapes that are just sitting on my non-environmentally-controlled shelf, that means I'll only have to hunt down new tapes 3 times in my remaining lifetime, and after that it will be someone else's problem.

I’m pretty out of the loop on this one - could I ask you to chime in why you feel so strongly about Neuralink? I knew they were ethicaly in the gray area what with the test animal living conditions etc., but I don’t know much beyond that.

In the long term (if the do have a long term, I expect them to fail due to technical reasons i.e. fibrosis around electrodes not being a solved problem)

Test animal living conditions?!

Last I checked they where probably treating their animals the best out any research lab world wide?

I'd love to hear more about your experience! How you went about it, what (if anything) did you do to prepare, if it was hard or easy, or if you have any tips or any specific thing about the experience you think would be beneficial to mention.

If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you reached out to me. You can find my contact info on my profile page, there's also a link to an anonymous contact form, if you'd prefer that. Thank you!

Liposuction is actually a very risky procedure, at least in relation to its benefits. For example, fat embolisms in liposuction occur in 8-9% of patients that undergo the procedure. There are other risks that are non-trivial as well.

If I had to advise a patient on whether they should consider liposuction vs gastric bypass vs GLP1R agonists, I would tell them to not consider liposuction in that equation at all.

As with most cosmetic surgery, risks like these are downplayed by practitioners (willfully and otherwise) as well as by people in these social media circles.

This doesn't mean liposuction shouldn't ever be used, however. It can have good uses in reconstructive surgery, for example, where fat is sucked up to be used in reconstructing a different area. In this case, the potential reduction in morbidity and restoration of function to the patient, or increasing their autonomy, might make the risks associated with lipo worth it.

Removing triglycerides from blood would technically work, however lipids in blood, including triglycerides typically travel attached to task-specific proteins. So, you'd have to remove the entire protein-lipid complex, and that might have additional ramifications complicating the process.

Bear in mind, dialysis does work, however it certainly does not work as well as we hope it should. Dialysis, in all of its different forms, takes a huge toll on the body, and dialysis itself significantly increases mortality; it is also an invasive intervention.

All that being said, we certainly should be doing more research on this.

I've been fantasizing about building an iPXE netbooting phone for a while now, glad to see that I'm not the only one. Mine was sparked by seeing some journalists in my country getting arrested recently.

I think it should be doable _technically_, but I think getting the mobile radios working before the OS boots would be challenging.

If the phone can boot off a thumb-drive then people could have a keychain thumb-drive that serves the sole purpose of a minimal OS that can iPXE, boot the real OS and pull down the users contacts, apps, etc... maybe?

Without a verified boot chain, security would be greatly compromised.

Like I could just grab your thumb drive, and put a new system on there that looks the same, and steals your password.

In the 20 or so years I've owned laptops, I think I only upgraded my memory once or twice, and yet I still can't warm up to integrated memory.

I've upgraded memory on every laptop I owned. In Serbia (and I assume other smaller markets) you can't just freely configure your laptop, you pick from a selection that was imported, and you typically have to make some kind of compromise between performance, display, keyboard, etc. Having option to upgrade RAM or disk increases your choices in other variables.

Last year I bought MacBook Air, and only options available immediatelly were 8/256, 8/512 and 16/256. Since I wanted more RAM and more SSD I had to wait 2 months for delivery.

For some reason upgrading memory seems more cost efficient than just buying a better computer. For example I bought a mini PC for 140 EUR and upgraded to 32GB for additional 80 EUR. Meanwhile actual 32GB mini PCs with rougly equivalent CPU start at much higher prices.

I've done it more than that because I've been buying refurbished or used laptops (generally ThinkPads) and maxing them out cheaply. If I were buying a new flagship machine every 5 years or so I doubt it would matter to me. But that used market is extremely important for keeping this stuff out of landfill for a few more years.

Counterpoint: I've maxxed out memory in all my laptop and desktop pcs so far, even the machines for secondary uses I max them out using budget parts.

The article mentions that their method relies on blood sampling rather than biopsy, however I concede to the verity of your comment.

The patch does wear off but the main reason is because there's a finite amount of enzyme (glucose oxidase) on the filament that does the actual glucose measurement on the sensor. So over time the enzyme is "spent". That, and of course it's lucrative. There are clever ways people have come up with (particularly from low income regions) where you can trick these sensors or the apps to reset and apparently you can get way longer lifespans like that (for the dexcom you also have to file down the bluetooth transceiver so that you can get at the battery within) at the risk of no longer being able to trust the readings.

There's one company that's experimenting with an implantable CGM that will supposedly have a 6 month lifespan, with a bluetooth powered patch that you apply on the skin overlying the implant.

Just make sure you cut a small circle from the tape overlying the breather hole of the sensor - that hole serves to let moisture buildup from underneath the sensor escape.