We also have the freedom to self govern. Laws are on the books to prevent firework usage in my state, it is simply ignored one night a year because it turns out mass lawbreaking is hard to handle. I don’t have the right to conduct a parade in the middle of whichever street I want whenever I want. I participate in the social contract of sacrificing absolute freedom for mutual gain because I live in a country and am not a sovereign citizen claiming complete supremacy over all others. My taxes pay for a small and well moderated fireworks show at a designated location conducted by a local government for which I had a hand in voting for. My freedom is louder, collective, voted for, and more sensible. Not all freedom must be focused soley on the individual.

I can’t think of other art forms that blow off the hands of so many people, wake up my daughter in terror at 11PM, and make both dogs and veterans suffer for an extended period of time. I’m fine with the large group spectacle that is planned and controlled. What I can’t stand is the widespread uncontrollable nonsense of just anyone buying them and setting them off at any hour on the 4th. Law enforcement can do absolutely nothing about it. I’m just gonna have to deal with it. I’m just surprised we haven’t collectively shifted to something less harmful.

Reactor is full of water so it’s not an issue

A whole bunch of welds in nuclear reactors are visually inspected using cameras duct taped onto the end of incredibly long poles which also get duct taped together. This would be the inside of BWR plants near the fuel and jet pumps. There is also an “art” to moving the cameras and poles around to get the shots you need. And if you get stuck the talented people know how to get you unstuck. There are also cameras just duct taped to ropes that the camera handler “swims” to certain spots.

Don’t get me wrong, we have cool ultrasonic inspecting robots as well, but I was absolutely blown away by what visual inspection looked like in practice.

PS: The high dose fields make the camera look like it is being blasted with colorful confetti because of the high energy particles bombarding the camera module.

Think of the profits corporations will be able to make curing the impacts of this!

While the blink html element is no longer supported you could probably sprinkle some JS to toggle the visibility state on the marquee element to really bring back the same feel. It’s just not the 90s without blink. Also, there needs to be a page that is just a bunch of links aligned using low res images and tables.

I mean, graded on a wide curve of history right now isn’t complete shit. WW1 saw entire generations of young men slaughtered uselessly at the hands of unelected kings. It was so horrific we actually still try not to use chemical warfare. Absolutely brutal combat with casualties that have hardly been seen since. Absolutely nightmare conditions. We baulk at the deaths of 25,000 over a few months of conflict where WW1 regularly saw those numbers in as little as a day. I do not want to minimize the absolutely brutal conflicts going on now. A newly orphaned child is not comforted by history, but your question seeks context and what else is history for but to contextualize the present?

To me, history shows we have not even begun to experience the the depths of the horror people are capable of. At least in the states decenting voices are not carted away into slavery camps, actively trying to wipe out whole populations with starvation at least has some voices calling out the brutality, I do not see people trying to sell their children to survive like in the depression. These are not far away times where these things happened on a scale they do not now.

Long story short, history has shown the measure of brutality and uncaring to be significantly worse at times. Raw and unquestioned genocide, slavery, persecution, war, child beating, women opressing, and all manner of the lowest acts of evil are the norm of humanity, not the relative peace we have known over the last 80 years. This fact does not make life suck less, but can at least act as a measure for how horrid is has been.

I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.

Had really good experience with this option. Namecheap seems quite reasonable. Also, self hosting on other’s domain can cause a lot of issues as you try creating enough paths for everything. I have found subdomain routing to work much better as a lot of applications get sad when their host url is something like blarg.com/gitea or something.

It’s not even about trust. It’s that I am confident I will have no clue who is a real life human being anymore soon. Autogenerated images, video, and text is practically in its infancy but already exists in the uncanny valley of being impossible to determine which is real and which is not. Imagine 5 years from now when perfectly lifelike high res video of practically anything you can imagine can be generated on the fly. Essentially the only thing I will have any certainty on is what I can witness in person. Or, if I have a circle of trust I can choose to believe content published by certain organizations or groups.

It may actually push us away from tech and back to the community, which could be good assuming we survive the transition.

Good luck watermarking plaintext and locally run models. There is no good option. If you want certainty that you are dealing with a human you lose privacy. If you want privacy you cannot know where the plain text came from unless you sign each file cryptographically. Then you only know it came from a certain source, but there is no guarantee how that source made the text. Welcome to the new world.

You can either count blessings or curses. Both you can probably count endlessly if looked at hard enough. I cannot deny that threats loom over my life such as climate change, totalitarian thinking, gun violence, and a whole host of other ills that I feel completely incapable of impacting. Consider me the boiled frog. I cannot live my life in constant anxiety and fear. I have good things, good things happen to me, today I can breathe, today I can walk. I woke up in my own bed with a healthy body. Tomorrow I am unlikely to be blown up by an artillery shell or to executed by some brown shirt goon of an evil regime.

I can hold both the evils of the world and the good of it in my mind at once. I agree one must not grow complacent at the things that go on. But I also must not become paralyzed by the overwhelming number of things going wrong. At least that is me.

I find great comfort in history personally. Dan Carlin (a favorite podcaster of mine) always says we must grade history on a curve. Sure, to us it looks like everything is falling apart and existence is pointless. But by very real measures things are better than they have ever been. My favorite is violence against children has been normalized as being bad.

Within living memory it has gone from being completely socially acceptable to beat children as being the preferred method of parenting to people getting thrown in jail for that behavior. What does it mean that previous to 100 years ago all of society could have been considered battered children? We are extremely aware of the negative effects of violence against children and for the very first time we are seeing a generation raised in an environment that kind of behavior has carrots and sticks motivating parents to behave properly. Of course all manner of horrid things still happen, but I call it progress that it have become widely condemnable to beat a child with a stick or take them to public hangings. It’s a small victory, but it gives me hope for the future. That we may yet still build a better human being capable of taking on the heroic task of fixing this world.

Further, history has shown to me low points that I am glad to have missed. I never knew how ghastly WWI was. I am currently in a warm bed and not in a trench filled with mud, flys, dead body parts, with shells exploding constantly, seconds away from needing to charge out into near certain death. But my great grandfather knew that feeling. He watched as whole generations of young men were gassed to death and blown up uselessly. The numbers who die in war are less now. Still tragic, but less. Again, we must grade on a curve.

Death, despair, and hopelessness may be in 8K live streamed constantly now, but I assure you the analog version was something to behold. Not saying the horror of the past makes living any easier now. It is not to minimize your own pain. I just find hope that others managed to break the back of an unshakable world and hope for a better one while surviving a suffering I have not yet known. I am made of the same stuff. That gives me strength.

Ghostwriter and syncthing. Ghostwriter really has a good focus mode that really gets me in the right spot for writing. I use Markor if I am on Android and syncthing still works there as well.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to “normal” online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

Could also use scoop, but people get a little nervous running random powershell scripts off the internet. I have no fear of it. Scoop is also excellent for people with a little more tech savvy.

I prefer to leave edge never clicked by using winget. It comes default on Win 11 (Most likely new install, not an advertisement for that dumpster fire). For windows 10 you can use the Microsoft Store to install AppInstaller which will get you winget. Winget is a MS product.

I mainly like doing this because Edge does a bunch of setup when clicked for the first time. This avoids all that.

winget install --id=Google.Chrome -e

Or you can ever do slightly prevent the backslide in marketshare for Firefox.

winget install --id=Mozilla.Firefox -e

Just run powershell or windows terminal and use those commands and you can leave edge where it belongs.

More info here. https://winstall.app/apps/Mozilla.Firefox https://phoenixnap.com/kb/install-winget

Ubuntu should be fine especially given GNOME clearly borrows some visual concepts from OSX. I prefer Linux Mint myself, but that uses Ubuntu as a base so I’m not exactly blazing a brave trail. Most games I have work. Unless some anti-cheat is involved that the dev does not support Linux with you will most likely be OK. Baulder Gate 3 works excellent and that has sucked up most of my time. Join the ranks. Pump up the valve hardware survey Linux numbers. Make the business people in control of the devs care about linux support somewhat. Free yourself form the whims of Microsoft.

I’m an OS enthusiast apparently. I somehow enjoy blowing my OS up, getting irrationally irritated at how something behaves and trying something different. I would rather walk through a pile of Arch documentation than rely on Microsoft’s word that they won’t dick over the whole damn market. My efforts yield one more count towards a market share relevant enough for developers to care about. Gaming on windows feels like I am betraying all the sass I have given MS and if I truly believe this stuff I gotta at least try to use it for what reasonably works.

I was a tutor in college and have been working for over a decade at this point in professional settings. I would gladly substitute aptitude with a proper attitude most days. Showing up to work, presenting more potential solutions than just problem identifying, and a willingness to learn will get you further than aptitude. Nobody has aptitude in Autodesk 2023. Nobody has aptitude in ultrasonic non destructive weld testing. You need to learn, be willing to learn, and be willing to try. It does not hurt to be able to communicate strongly either.

What you are strong in can also just be what you are not weak at. Finding all the things you struggle with is just as useful. Don’t expect to find “The thing” you are just gifted at. Far better to be resilient and accept failure as it comes and learn. Natural talent is only a small part of the equation unless you are in sales.