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Happy B-Day, TJohn!
I'll jinx it by saying this, but I haven't had a bad gateway in a while.
Complaint: For reasons known only to Google, I can no longer access YT videos on my main PC. Research indicates it's part of a wider crackdown on ad blockers, but I added a browser to my system with the result that I could play ads all day long but the video would never actually load so that I could watch it. I don't understand.
I'm on Firefox and use VPN plus two ad blockers. No issues using YouTube here.
Thank you butterflyfish, miladyderyni_173d399f47, Richard Haseltine, and Torquinox!
I had a very happy birthday. My niece brought a chocolate chocolate chip bundt cake. So rich I could literally eat only a few bites. Way more sugar than a diabetic should eat, but hey, the docs want me to gain back some weight.
It's confirmed. You're a geek
Yep, even after examining the photo in close detail, I still don't know what the heck that is. It has something to do with artificial sweetners?
So in East Tennessee, artificial sweetners come in three colors; the pink stuff, the blue stuff, and my personal favorite - the yellow stuff.
The white stuff is sugar.
White is mine, or honey. I just limit my usage. I worked with an engineer who worked for one of those companies and got an earful of some ot the side effects and contents. Besides I can't stand the taste. But then I do not like any diet soft drink at all. Of course, I was thought to be hypoglycemic in 1982 and was taken off ALL simple sugars. Lost weight and felt better, and now I drink water, milk, coffee, tea with either milk/sugar (black) or honey (herbal). No alcohol. Yeah, I cheat a little. But I don't bake anymore either. My four-year-old hated it then, but he is now all about healthy eating as a middle-age man and parent.
So a fifth day of migraine but I also have to drive to the base to pickup meds for it and other refills. Hope tomorrow is better, a two hour MRI session in the late afternoon is on my calendar. And driving home in rush hour through Cherry Creek of Denver. My DAZ purchases will be tapering off, got the estimate of some dentist bills coming up over the next year close to $7,000.00 USD. Not covered by insurance but needed.
@garrett_3d vpn is worth a try.
I use a VPN, have done for the last seven years
Regarding sweeteners: Despite the controversy over AI data centers, the technology is still pretty amazing. The following is my query to "GoogleAI" about the image given above. And the fact that I could have asked the same question by voice, is even more amazing.
Query:
In the US, sweeteners come in a display as shown in the attached image. What is the common name of each of the four types, and what is the chemical name of the active ingredient?
Reply:
In the United States, foodservice sugar stations traditionally feature a universally color-coded system. This allows customers to instantly recognize different sweeteners by packet color. [1]
The common name and active ingredient for each of the four sections (ordered left to right) are:
Blue Packets
Common Brand Name: Equal
Chemical Name of Active Ingredient: Aspartame [1]
Yellow Packets
Common Brand Name: Splenda
Chemical Name of Active Ingredient: Sucralose [1]
White Packets
Common Name: Table sugar / Granulated sugar
Chemical Name of Active Ingredient: Sucrose [1]
Pink Packets
Common Brand Name: Sweet'N Low
Chemical Name of Active Ingredient: Saccharin (specifically formulated as calcium saccharin or sodium saccharin)
OK, so far, so good. Then I attached the image of the partially revealed name of the European brand sweetener and asked the same question and got the reply in the image below:
Thank you Mr. Data.
More on sweeteners: I started a new session with OpenAI (it forgets everything when you terminate a session) and asked about cyclamates sweeteners (long banned in the US). Here's the new session:
The attached image shows a typical sweetener display in the US. We've already discussed the four types of active ingredients in the various colors. You've additionally reported that cyclamates are not permitted in the US but may be in various parts of Europe. When were cyclamates disallowed in the US, and did they have a specific color for packets of cyclamates before being banned?
Still More on Sweeteners: And finally, I asked about "Stevia" products. Never heard of them.
The image below is the reply from GoogleAI.
Non-Complaint: Wheee..., free entertainment all day. The State(NY) has been re-surfacing the main road through town, all day today, from 8:00AM to now 3:15PM and it's almost done. Well, at least that part in front of my house. Not heavy repair, just icing(new, thin layer of asphalt or tar) on the already well maintained road. Traffic has been one-way through town all day. They're doing a couple of mile strip from the west and through town.
Side note: That white building with the square windows in the background is actually where I was born almost 78 years ago. Different building back then, but it was a little gas station & restaurant. It sat right next to the Erie Railroad track, which back then had a lot more daily traffic and longer trains. My first memory, was feeling my crib shake as the trains rattled past on old technology rails with gaps at the joints (clunka-clunka-clunka). Not the smooth, modern, monolithic, welded rails.
You need to catch up with all the ads you missed before you can watch the desired content.
(This is meant to be a joke, though I would not be wholly surprised if it turned out to be somewhat true)
Could be true!
I'm willing to give it a try! Thanks for the suggestion.
I watch YouTube 90% of the time. I never get an ad because I solved the YT ad problem. I pay the $15.99 every month.
It and Amazon Prime($139/yr=$11.54/mo) are my only streaming subscriptions. And I get free shipping from Amazon in the bargain. All my bulk food buys, electronics, books, clothes, come from Amazon. I easily come out ahead financially despite paying for Amazon Prime AND the YT subscription by the shipping savings. Sometimes it's just worth doing the math.
Same thing with my drugstore prescriptions. I pay the store chain (CVS) $50 every year. That entitles me to free mail delivery and even same-day hand delivery of my prescriptions, AND they give me a $10 coupon every month (use it or lose it). Good deal, free prescription shipping, and $120 of no-question discounts in the store. No complaints about that.
Sometimes it's just worth doing the math. Yeah, it's a game, but simpler than the discount games DAZ plays.
Note: I watch YT 90% of the time, because where else can you see the entire spectrum of human behavior from the most unbelievably stupid people, to the most fascinating advances in science and technology.
Thank you 3DIO! Very sweet of you.
I use Stevia in the Raw. I have a huge sweet tooth, as they say. I use it in my hot tea, and my iced tea. No complaints.
So...the pink stuff?
I know some folks sleep in the Raw, so I say "to each their own."
At one point I was using 9 teaspoons of "sugar" in my daily 16oz coffee, yeah I know, it was at lot of sugar. So then I switched to Stevia, because it was sweeter I could use less, but then it started causing me stomach issues. So I gave up sweetener entirely for a few months, just went to black coffee. But I just couldn't enjoy coffee without a little sweetness. So I went back to the white stuff, luckily since I gave up sweetener entirely for a while, I no longer need 9 teaspoons of sugar. I only needed 3 teaspoons for a 16 oz coffee. Well, the trouble with that is that in the USA the label "sugar" can be applied to sugar derived from beets or from sugar cane. And 95% of US sugar beets are "Roundup Ready" herbicide-tolerant GMO varieties, while no commercial GMO sugarcane exists. Interesting. So I started having GERD again. Well, I switched to "cane sugar", kind of as a last ditch effort, just to see if it would make a difference to my gut health. And now I have no more gut or GERD issues! The hoops we have to jump through so we don't destroy our gut health in the US is ridiculous. (Granted, this is not medical advice: A.I. says there is no difference between GMO Roundup Ready beet sugar and cane sugar, so maybe it's all in my head, or maybe it only effects a small subset of people with pre-exisitng conditions, I've always had a "sensitive" stomach/gut. So take what I say with a grain of salt, or perhaps sugar.)
Sugar, the most symptomless addictive drug of all.
Ain't that the truth.
In case you didn't know, that subscription probably gives you acces to YouTube Music, which is a streaming music service with its own app and everything.
Only in the carts that needed it. It's really the only way that makes sense in that kind of architecture, since the cartridge slot connects directly to the main system bus. Remember that game consoles in the pre-XBox era were meant to be self-contained appliances, not modular and expandable like PCs, and they didn't have anything like a BIOS so even if you slapped a bunch of extra RAM in it somehow, games that weren't specifically written to take advantage of it wouldn't use it. If you had a game that needed features the base hardware didn't provide, you stuck whatever extra chips you needed in the cart and charged a little extra. This actually wasn't as common on the SNES (known add-ins included the Super FX chip and a couple of DSPs mostly used to decompress data on the fly) as on the NES, where all but the earliest games had "mapper" chips at least for bank-switching (so games could exceed the size allocated to ROM in the address space) and sometimes other features like scanline interrupts.
OTOH the design of the interface with the SNES sound hardware is absolutely batshit bonkers and I have no idea what they were thinking.
The ads I get on YT are shorter by far than most cable TV stations (including BBC America and PBS stations - here's a clue for those stations...spots that advertise other programs or brought to you by whomever 10 second things are advertising! And 3 to 4 weeks of PBS unrelenting "fund raising" where they show the same old concerts and comedy shows with such frequent interruptions that I can just avoid the whole thing until it finally and mercifully returns to Nature documentaries and Britcoms and British Mystery programs and newer concerts.
We are paying for basic cable so some of that filters to the stations as well.) so I sit through the short ones on YT with my finger ready to hit that skip button, and I'm fine with that. Most of the time. 
