I personally don't believe life has any meaning, other than the one you choose for your own life. It's rather terrifying and freeing at the same time. If there is no meaning, and if there is nothing else, no higher power, then this is it. You get the time you get, running around as self aware stardust, and then it ends. Everything that is "you" flips off one day and there is nothing but oblivion as the stardust you were slow seeps away. But, that also means that you don't have to live up to anyone else's idea of what your life should be. You can make your own path, your own meaning, and fuck the people in funny hats who try to tell you otherwise. You are you and no one else gets to define what that is.
I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?
If this is all there is, if oblivion is on the other side of the door, I'll scrabble for every day existing that I can get, thank you very much. Sure, I have my own beliefs and things I would willingly accept oblivion for. But, if those aren't on the table, I'm gonna keep on existing as long as I can. It's one of the few things I'm pretty good at.
This is basically me every night. Unless I go to bed at 3am, I usually toss and turn for an hour or more. So, I listen to audiobooks. Nothing heavy, usually just sci-fi or fantasy. Basically cotton-candy for the mind. Unless I have a good lecture going, the Great Courses stuff is soothing. But, that usually distracts me enough that I finally fall asleep. I use a single ear bud in my right ear and set a sleep timer so that the book shuts off after a reasonable time. That usually gets me close enough to sleeping that I can finally get the rest of the way.
The only downside to this plan, is when you get a really good book, with a good reader and you start getting towards the end of the book. The temptation to go just one more chapter is hard to resist.
Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we've put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it's parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.
As for performance, it moves well enough. It's a mini-van, so you're not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I'll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I've been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I'd also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.
We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I'd take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.
So ya, we've been happy with it and I'd give it a recommendation.
One issue you have glossed over is the closed ecosystem of Bambu Labs. Maybe this won't come back to bite owners in the future, but it's a risk you take on when you buy a Bambu printer. There were recent concerns that they are moving in this direction. And that you may end up with a very expensive paperweight, if you don't pay a subscription fee. Most of the other systems are far more open, and don't put you behind that eight ball. That may not be a risk you care about, but it's one of the reasons Bambu wasn't even in the running when I bought a new printer recently. I've seen too much enshitification of good products to want to run that risk.
Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying "you will accept the USD, or else". That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.
So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn't. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.
Did folks not learn this from the response to Hurricane Katrina ? The people of New Orleans were basically left to rot while the State of Louisiana and Federal Government were standing around holding their dicks. When they finally did respond, it was about as bungled as it could be.
Whatever area you live in, figure out what disasters are possible/likely and plan to deal with the fallout from one of those, with zero help for a two weeks or more.
I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I'm taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:
Drive
Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
Cost:
4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
Parking: $11
Total: $32/day
Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)
Distance: N/A
Time:
Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
VRE (Fredericksburg to L'Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
WMATA (L'Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
Cost:
Drive: we'll just ignore this, it's close enough to zero.
VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
Total: $54.02/day
So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we're driving this year.
I really want to be able to take transit, but it's basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the "high speed" Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?
Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn't have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn't cost effective and wasn't really time efficient either.
Sadly, there are probably a lot of developers who are burning the candle at both ends to push this out the door, on an unrealistic schedule. And who will then burn the candle in the middle as well when the release is a buggy mess. Only to finally be tossed aside like so much trash when the game fails to realize these unrealistic expectations. And all of that will squarely be the fault of management, who will wipe away crocodile tears with the profits this game will generate. Just not the profit they unrealistically promised investors; so you know, the game was actually a failure. Fuck EA's management, the world would probably be a better place if the C-Level suite and board room got emptied out by some disaster.
Mistlands - Not because "whaaa, Mistalnds hard", but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.
The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you're hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you're still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you're in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you're forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.
I'll also throw a bit of shade at "Refined Eitr" as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you've been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that's nice.
And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. "What about trade? Vikings were well know traders", you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you've been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.
Right let's get our Eitr Refinery built...and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I'll build some stairs and...why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It's really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It's needlessly annoying and doesn't really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, "players like hard things, right?"
The initial access seems to include an Apache CVE from 2019 and a WordPress plugin CVE from 2017. Honestly, UCSD should write a "thank you" letter to Androxgh0st for highlighting their poor patch management, and only using it for C2 in the process. Rather than as a beachhead into the network for a full-blown ransomware attack.
If your patch management is this bad, you shouldn't be allowed to put stuff on the internet.
It's less fun than the first guess I came up with based on the name "deep in", and it's really just a Chinese Linux Distro with a bunch of re-packaged and/or proprietary applications. Which, one would expect, to be completely balls "deep in" your private information.
First question which popped into my mind was, "Will they force Defender out as well?"
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it's position to stifle competition? Again.
Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage
The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.
There's plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It's just conveniently called "contracting", so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn't find anything was that they weren't looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won't say that some of those agencies aren't a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).
Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.
The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of "allow by default" domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.
Why do you believe life has meaning?
I personally don't believe life has any meaning, other than the one you choose for your own life. It's rather terrifying and freeing at the same time. If there is no meaning, and if there is nothing else, no higher power, then this is it. You get the time you get, running around as self aware stardust, and then it ends. Everything that is "you" flips off one day and there is nothing but oblivion as the stardust you were slow seeps away. But, that also means that you don't have to live up to anyone else's idea of what your life should be. You can make your own path, your own meaning, and fuck the people in funny hats who try to tell you otherwise. You are you and no one else gets to define what that is.
If this is all there is, if oblivion is on the other side of the door, I'll scrabble for every day existing that I can get, thank you very much. Sure, I have my own beliefs and things I would willingly accept oblivion for. But, if those aren't on the table, I'm gonna keep on existing as long as I can. It's one of the few things I'm pretty good at.