tal

"I am also having my office produce an 'I did that' sticker for myself by way of totally driving the point home, in case anyone has any doubts."

I do kind of wonder if it's possible to hybridize each with some intermediate relative, and then hybridize the result. Not sure if that's how things work.

Tomatoes are Solanum lycopersicum. Potatoes (the type you eat) are Solanum tuberosum.

According to this, modern tomatoes were probably the result of hybridization between a wild tomato ancestor and a wild potato plant that doesn't grow tubers:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-potato-may-have-evolved-from-a-tomato-ancestor-nine-million-years-ago-genetic-study-suggests-180987091/

And potatoes and tomatoes are each other’s closest living relatives.

Zhang and his team found that wild tomato plants bred with a potato-like plant called Etuberosum around nine million years ago. Alone, neither plant had the genes to make tubers—but together, they could grow the feature. That’s because the gene that switches on tuber growth, called SP6A, comes from tomatoes, while the gene controls the growth of the underground stems that turn into tubers, called IT1, comes from Etuberosum.

That fateful hybridization, the authors suggest, occurred in the Andes mountains. At the time the plants developed the ability to make tubers, the Andes mountains were rapidly rising. The tubers allowed the potato to survive in this unforgiving habitat—and spread across the world. Tubers enable plants to reproduce without pollinators or seeds, making them adaptable.

Genetic family tree with all three species:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Geographical-distribution-and-phylogeny-of-the-Solanum-genus-a-Five-hundred-phylogenetic_fig1_361181892

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ca1edae2-11a4-468f-b501-9bceb1338b8f.png

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It looks like Solanum etuberosum (well, modern forms of it) is still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_etuberosum

Solanum etuberosum is a species of wild potato in the family Solanaceae, endemic to central Chile.

So I wonder if maybe it'd be possible to grow a fertile Solanum etuberosum x Solanum tuberosum hybrid and cross it with a fertile Solanum etuberosum x Solanum lycopersicum hybrid.

You can apparently produce a graft of one onto the other, and there's apparently another technique to create a combined plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomato

The pomato (a portmanteau of potato and tomato), also known as a tomtato, is a hybrid plant that is able to grow both tomatoes and potatoes. The most common method of creating a pomato is grafting together a tomato plant and a potato plant, both of which are members of the Solanum genus in the Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Another method is somatically fusing the two plants together.[1] Cherry tomatoes grow on the vine, while white potatoes grow in the soil from the same plant.[2]

The concept of grafting related potatoes and tomatoes so that both are produced on the same plant dates back to at least 1833.[3]

As with all grafts, this plant will not occur in nature and cannot be grown from seed, because the two parts of the plant remain genetically separate, and only rely on each other for nourishment and growth.

The somatic fusion of potato and tomato cells is also possible, though this plant cannot produce fertile seeds. The first such somatic hybrid was bred in 1978.[1][7]

I've never heard of somatic fusion before now.

Grafted pomato plants were launched in the United Kingdom in September 2013 by the horticultural mail-order company Thompson & Morgan, who sold pre-grafted plants branded as the "TomTato". The Incredible Edible nursery in New Zealand announced a "DoubleUP Potato Tom" in the same month.

then why not write modern software like how that was written?

Well, three reasons that come to mind:

First, because it takes more developer time to write efficient software, so some of what developers have done is used new hardware not to get better performance, but cheaper software. If you want really extreme examples, read about the kind of insanity that went into trying to make video games in the first three generations of video game consoles or so, on extremely limited hardware. I'd say that in most cases, this is the dominant factor.

Second, because to a limited degree, the hardware has changed. For example, I was just talking with someone complaining that Counter-Strike 2 didn't perform well on his system. Most systems today have many CPU cores, and heavyweight video games and some other CPU-intensive software will typically seek to take advantage of those. CS2 apparently only makes much use of one or two cores. Go back to 2005, and the ability to saturate more cores was much less useful.

Third, in some cases, functionality is present that you might not immediately appreciate. For example, when I get a higher-resolution display in 2025, text typically doesn't become tiny

instead, it becomes sharper. In 2005, most of it was rendered to pixel dimensions. Go back earlier, and most text wasn't antialiased, and go back further and fonts seen on the screen were mostly just bitmap fonts, not vector. Those jumps generally made text rendering more-compute-expensive, but also made it look nicer. And that's for something as simple as just drawing "hello world" on the screen.

He might be (if he is, we'll have had five impeachments in the history of the United States Presidency, and Trump will be three of them) but I seriously doubt that it will happen before the midterm elections, when the Democrats have a good chance of taking control of the House. She could have just announced that she wasn't running in those.

I was gonna say that he might simply not have been around when Red Alert 2 came out, but

https://www.whitepages.com/name/Samuel-Sott-Axon/Los-Angeles-CA/Pl8a1drMk8b

40s Age Range

So he's gotta be born no later than 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert_2

Release: NA: October 25, 2000

So he couldn't have been younger than 15 at the game's release (and could have been as old as 25).

That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won't have been born when it was released. Can't just assume any more.

If one takes her justification at face value, it seems odd. Even if she wanted to avoid the primary, she could simply announce that she's not running in the next election. She didn't need to resign to do that.

Still crazy as a shithouse rat and a true beliver of terrible and stupid things.

My understanding from reading past analysis of things she said is that it's safe to say that she hasn't actually believed everything she's said, but saw it as politically-useful to take those positions.

Which I think is something of a sad statement about the voters in her congressional district (in northwestern Georgia, as I recall). But I don't think that it's necessarily that she personally is uniquely crazy.

EDIT: Yeah, Georgia's 14th district, and it's up in the northwest corner of Georgia. I was originally looking it up because I was commenting on the fact that Georgia has had some of the craziest Republican and Democratic House Representatives that have wound up getting national press time and I was curious how far apart their districts were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_14th_congressional_district

It looks like her predecessor, Tom Graves, also resigned and left the seat vacant for some time, rather than just announcing that he wouldn't run in the next election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).[1]

Such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda.[2] The traditional example is the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Without further clarification, an answer of either yes or no suggests the respondent has beaten their wife at some time in the past. Thus, these facts are presupposed by the question, and in this case an entrapment, because it narrows the respondent to a single answer, and the fallacy of many questions has been committed.

I think that all sensible people know that the Nacho Cheese Doritos are more addictive than the Cool Ranch Doritos.

have a gtx 6700 gpu which should be plenty overkill for cs2. But ive heard cs2 is processor heavy.

I don't know which game you're playing, not sure what CS2 is, as some other folks mention. However, if you install mangohud and run it via mangohud <gamename>

if this is Steam, in the game's Launch Options, that'll be "mangohud %command%"

it'll show you CPU and GPU load in an overlay on top of your game.

EDIT: Example:

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EDIT2: Note that by default, it shows "composite CPU load", same as top does by default. So, say you have a 32-core CPU and a game uses only a single thread, then it'll only show it running at 3%, even if the game is bottlenecked on the single core that it's using. MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud <gamename> will show all CPU cores independently (along with some other data). E.g.:

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It sounds like you're using Counter-Strike 2 from other comments, and that CS2 only really uses 1-2 cores:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/730/discussions/0/594026537713459453/

CS2 still heavily loads only 1–2 CPU threads, even on modern CPUs with multiple high-performance cores. Other cores remain mostly idle while one thread runs at 100%.

I mean, they did make a lot of money, but they also had an extremely high valuation.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/pe-ratio

NVIDIA PE ratio as of November 20, 2025 is 48.45.

Something like 20 is typical for a mature company. Tech companies have, in the past, often had higher ratios, but that's based on their expectation to grow a lot rapidly, and expecting NVidia to dramatically grow from their current

already very high

valuation is asking a lot.

If NVidia were a small tech company that was doing well and clearly had a lot of market to expand into rapidly, that would be one thing.

I think that in general, the market has been pretty good to NVidia. Their share price is up 31.22% since the start of the year. 1,247% over the past five years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurus_KEPD_350

Germany apparently has 600 Taurus air-launched cruise missiles.

They apparently have a next-gen longer-range variant coming out in 2029, and are ordering 600 of those.

If I had to make a guess, the second batch

exactly the same size

presumably is to replace the first, which means that they're presumably not gonna need (all?) the first batch in four years.

Ukraine apparently also requested some.

In May 2023, the German Federal Ministry of Defence said that Ukraine had requested the missile during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.[16] In interviews in June and July 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said that Germany would not supply Ukraine with long-range missiles.[17][18][19] In January 2024, the German Bundestag voted against the supply of the Taurus missile to Ukraine.[20] In February 2024, the German Bundestag and Chancellor Olaf Scholz again expressly refused Ukraine's request while agreeing to deliver longer range weapons.[21][22] In May 2025 newly elected chancellor Friedrich Merz made more ambiguous statements regarding Taurus, that their delivery to Ukraine was within the 'realm of possibility' and that the discussion about their delivery to Ukraine would not be public.[23][24]