Found this gem posted by the technology connections guy.

Like, best text editor? Helix, Neovim, vim, emacs? All of the above, because why not? Currently leaning helix, becuase there's less setup involved with plugins and what not, but I'm not a serious programmer or anything.

Any reason to use an alternative to bash?

Any cool games? Best terminal file manager? Tmux or Zelij? Etc.

Useful aliases you use?

I'm currently messing around with NixOS, and was trying to build up a replacement for my current debian media server, and (eventually, hopefully, ) as a replacement to my current windows install.

I like debian a lot, but after installing it on both my laptop and server there was a lot of program drift between the two, when I wanted them to basically be identical, and then I found nix, and thought "this looks neat" and the idea of being able to reproduce everything on each install, with the same config format, appealed to me. I am currently playing around with it in a vm until the config is to my liking.

Seeing as the .nix config files are so portable I started working on a "module" for terminal apps to get about as close to a fully functional system as you can get with only a command line or terminal session, just to see what I could do.

So far I have quite a list, and looked over quite a few top 10 lists for this stuff, but was wondering if there was anything else out there I'm overlooking?

Pic is of my current bash prompt with starship, which was incredibly easy to get working and tweak thanks to home-manager modules. If anyone else is running starship and has a cool config they want to share, please do.

US millennial women saw their well-being decline, a first in modern times, per non-profit PRB.

Homicide, maternal mortality, and suicide rates have all increased for women aged 25 to 34.

The sudden reversal in progress for young women's safety comes despite an improved economic status.

Contributing factors to the overall rise included the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased domestic violence rates, and a recent leap in gun violence incidents, the report also said.

Homicide is now also the leading cause of death for pregnant and postnatal women, more so than typical maternal mortality causes, the report noted.

It's always been assumed that how much virus you are exposed to mattered, and now we have evidence.

We really should be doing what we can to filter indoor air, mask in common public areas, and generally try to lower our exposure to this virus even if vaccinated. We should be encouraging people to make a CR box, or buy a good hepa filter, and run it if a houshold member is sick. It's infectious as hell, but you aren't guaranteed to get infected if you take measures to reduce the amount of virus you are exposed to.

But instead of having a comprehensive plan to do any of this, our leaders have decided to just infect people as much as possible to build "immunity", or cull the herd, or whatever the fuck is most profitable for shareholders.

Question being asked: What is the risk of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 after developing immunity following a vaccine, prior infection, or both if exposure to the virus is very high, moderate, or low? They did not study the severity of symptoms. (2/)

How? The authors used the existing database of the Connecticut Department of Correction, where infection data based on high frequency of testing for SARS-CoV-2 on ~9300 residents across 13 facilities were available. (3/)

What did they find? Prior infection, vaccination, or both provided significant protection against infection when the exposure was moderate (index case was within their cellblock) or low (no exposure was documented in cellblock co-residents) against Delta or Omicron. (4/)

However, when the viral exposure was intense (with infected cellmate - exposure is 24/7), none of these groups had enough immunity to protect against infection with Delta or Omicron virus. (5/)

The Washington Post is officially concerned about the new variant that just dropped. No paywall on the article.

But BA.2.86 stands out in the omicron family tree because of how much it has morphed. It has more than 30 mutations on its spike protein, the part of the virus that pierces through the cell and that vaccines train the body to fend off. Experts believe the antibodies forged through battles with earlier variants will have a difficult time recognizing this new foe.

“This is a radical change of the virus like what happened with omicron, which caught a lot of people defenseless,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “Even if they had a vaccine or prior infection, it could still get into them and infect them again or for the first time. We are facing that again.”

The biggest unknown is whether the BA.2.86 will be transmissible enough to cause a surge. A variant adept at evading immunity would not take off in a population if it does not spread efficiently and multiply.

“It is still a possibility we either see this variant spread very widely as happened with the original omicron,” said Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist who monitors coronavirus variants at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, “or it doesn’t end up spreading very widely and we continue to have these XBB variants.”

This one might fizzle out, or it might not. That we are finding it in multple countries already is a bad sign, but the important thing is that we do nothing.

The CDC has been winding down surveillance of covid this year and saying "we have the tools" and to not be alarmed by this, it's to be expected and all part of the plan, etc, but this new variant was spotted by people volunteering their time and positing their findings on twitter, not the CDC.

His advice: Get the vaccine, wear an n95 indoors, and avoid public indoor spaces.

“I find it very distressing that we, as a society, aren’t willing to talk openly about COVID,” Dr. Dick Zoutman declared.

“The media are almost completely silent, and it’s really perplexing,” Zoutman said of the disappearance of COVID-19 from the headlines in the fourth year of the pandemic. “We are missing a huge opportunity to protect our loved ones, our children, our elderly, our vulnerable … by taking simple interventions.”

Although the mortality rate for COVID-19 has declined thanks to mass vaccinations, the infectious disease specialist stated that long COVID threatens the health of the general population.

“We don’t understand all the implications of long COVID,” he said of the lingering symptoms that may develop after the acute phase of the illness. “Basically, this virus gets into your body and it doesn’t leave. …And it invades the lining of the blood vessels and every organ of your body,” he explained.

“Long COVID syndrome occurs in at least 10 per cent of every infectious episode and may be as much as 30 per cent. Stop and think about that: if you get COVID twice a year, that’s a 20-60 per cent chance that you’re going to get long COVID. And the next year, it’s now 40-120 per cent. Almost certainly … you’re guaranteed statistically to acquire some form of long COVID.”

"You can't wear a mask forever" coughs in your face "I'm following CDC recommendations and washing my hands."

Less than two weeks into the school year, a Kentucky school district has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the week after nearly a fifth of its students came down with Covid, strep throat, the flu and other illnesses.

The Lee County School District, which has just under 900 students, began classes Aug. 9 but noticed attendance drop to about 82% on Friday, Superintendent Earl Ray Schuler said.

By Monday, the rate dipped to 81%, and 14 staff members called in sick, Schuler said.

It's immunity debt from those strict never-ending kentucky lockdowns, right? Or maybe they all forgot how to wash their hands?

Three years into the global COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated four million Americans report that long COVID is severely impacting their daily lives. Scientists are still trying to better understand the condition that brings with it severe brain fog, blood clots, and a whole host of awful medical conditions that don’t go away. Now, a study published August 21 in the journal Nature Medicine found fallout from COVID-19 can persist even two years after infection.

Biden is cleverly increasing regular workers bargaining power by letting covid disable millions!

The team also tallied the risks for over 80 different complications that are associated with long COVID and turned it into a health metric called a disability adjusted life year (DALY). Each DALY stands for one year of typically healthy life lost to illness. The team found that long COVID created over 80 DALYs, for every 1,000 people who weren’t hospitalized due to their initial infection.

Based on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease study, long COVID creates a higher burden of disability per every 1,000 Americans than cancer (roughly 50 DALYs) or heart disease (about 52 DALYs).

“Our findings highlight the substantial cumulative burden of health loss due to long COVID and emphasize the ongoing need for health care for those faced with long COVID,” said Al-Aly. “It appears that the effects of long COVID for many will not only impact such patients and their quality of life, but potentially will contribute to a decline in life expectancy and also may impact labor participation, economic productivity, and societal well-being.”

Oh wait, some good news:

The team noted one encouraging note that the risks of death or hospitalization to those who were not sent to the hospital—the majority of people infected with the virus— declined and became insignificant at six and 19 months.

I'm glad covid is over and we don't have to worry about reinfections!

Decreasing the risk of long COVID should be a focus of public health policy, according Al-Aly. “Reducing the risk of infection and transmission with updated vaccines — including vaccines that block transmission — may be a critical strategy to reduce the risk of long-term health problems,” he said. “We also need an urgent, coordinated approach that matches the scale and gravity of long COVID to find treatments as soon as possible.”

I'm sure our new leadership at the CDC will get right on it!

:sicko-hexbear:

I was watching forum member Yugopniks latest video and noticed he used some Eugene_V_Dabs clips in this, and then made a post here looking to get in touch with them because he seems to be flush with deprogram cash and looking for a video editor.

:xi-clap: