nous

What? Microsoft have written and released and contributed to many open source projects - they created vscode for one. They are even one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel.

uptime of 840 days

This always makes me wince. I don't think high uptimes should be celebrated. Has your kernel ever been patched or the services running restarted? Just installing the updates is not enough to secure your system you need to be running that new code as well.

Also, I get very nervous about touching those systems. You have no clue what state it is in. I have seen far too many large uptime server have their power go some day and are never able to boot again or don't boot all the services back up as someone forgot to enable the service.

Nop, rather see them rebooted regularly at a non critical time so we know they will come back up. Or even better have a HA setup.

Given that I update daily, I feel that the quick connection to the server to test it’s bandwidth at boot is rather insignificant.

But it is not just a quick connection. Speed tests, in order to be accurate, need to download a reasonable amount from each server. This is why:

it takes quite a while to sort through 200 mirrors.

Have there been any credible studies that have looked at the reliability of the mirrors? The reliability would give one an idea on how often they should refresh their mirrors.

You dont need one. If a mirror becomes unreliable then you can run reflector again to fix the issue. There is no need to constantly run it. And you dont need to be on the absolute fastest mirror every day. You will never notice the difference between the fastest one yesterday and the fastest one today - assuming there are no major problems with it. And if there are that is when you run reflector again.

And reflector already comes with a weekly timer and service that is plenty often enough.

And other browsers can be configured to do the same. Though that is not ublock origin doing anything with the cookies and these settings can be enabled wtihout ublock (though you likely want ublock if you are enabling them).

I don't think it does anything with cookies directly. It just blocks connections to domains and removes elements from pages that match patterns you give it. Removing the cookies/privacy banners does just that - removes the banner. This SHOULD opt you out of tracking as the laws generally require explicit permission, so not clicking the accept button should be enough. But if the sites follow those laws or not is a completely different matter.

Third party tracking cookies are normally blocked by their domain - when a tracking pixel is on the screen it reaches out to a known tracking domain which logs this visit and drops a cookie for that domain on the page. By blocking that domain the tracking request is never made and thus no cookie is dropped and so there is nothing to track you. Most tracking is done like this so it is quite effective. But it wont stop a first party cookie from being dropped or tracking done through that or any other data you send.

Note that the laws don't require permission for all cookies. Ones that are essential to the sites function (like a cookie that carries login info) are typically allowed and cannot be opted out of (you can always delete cookies locally though, the laws just cover what sites can use). And not all sites will respect these laws or try to skirt around them so none of this is 100% perfect by any means.

You also don't celebrate when you are near to the finish line. The number of videos of athletes starting to celebrate near the finish line and then getting passed by the guy in second is just astonishing.

I don't see why this would help. More likely there are two different teams/people working on either side separately from each other. I bet the windows work involves a lot more work on Microsoft's or the chip manufacturer's side than valves.

Honestly I cannot tell. Nutrision studies are very hard to do and you often see contradictory studies released all the time. I don't think media should be reporting on these studies. Better to report on the meta analysis studies that take a much more holistic view on the subject.

analysed data spanning 36 years from over 200,000 adults enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

So they looked at some data and found that the more heme you ate the higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes. That sounds a lot like a correlation not causation. What was the rest of their diet like? Did the higher heme eaters also consume more in general? I could not find a non paywalled copy of the paper (though I did not look that hard tbh) so cannot tell how good the study was, but from what I read I would not put any stock into these results.

Like so many other dietary studies that make the headlines, they really don't paint the whole, or even a useful part of the picture.

Yeah, std can never break backwards compatibility. So any big thing that gets added needs to be sure it wont ever change. Something like tokio is far too large for that and already does not fit all use cases.

What I want to see is more support for interop between the different run times by providing standard interfaces for things between the various runtimes. For instance being able to spawn a task in for the runtime to take care of. You cannot do that without knowing which runtime you are using ATM. Which is highly anoying for developing libraries that need to do this. And that is only one of the many problems that could be solved in the std lib without needing to bring in the whole runtime - just create common interfaces we can use that can be implemented by each runtime,

You might want to check out the sovol V8 that came out not too long ago. It is based on the voran v2.4 but comes mostly prebuilt with mass manufactured parts to lower cost. But still holds true to the open nature of the voran. And is quite cheap for what it is at $579 for the base open frame model.

Only down side is it does not have an automatic filiment changer though I don't really care for that feature.

No, and IMO you should not. It causes extra stress on the mirrors. If everyone did it every day that would be a significant load for very little gain on the end users side. The mirrors speeds don't change that often to need to worry about always being on the absolute fastest.

Especially if you are updating the the background anyway, what does it matter if you end up on a slightly slower mirror for a bit?