My future career as a welder. I'm currently in a paid apprenticeship and I'm stuck on the final qualification before graduation. Everything else was easy, but the copper-nickel to mild steel test keeps failing. I'm on my forth and final test attempt.
If I fail, there's a real possibility I'll be fired. It would be foolish of them to fire me as they've already invested a considerable amount of time, money, and training on me. But I don't know if they'll see reason, so I'm getting my resume ready for another job.
It shouldn't be hard to find another job, this current one has already given me four years of on-the-job apprentice training experience. I just don't want to leave this current job as I like it here.
I tried that and found myself pondering the cylinder whose height is its diameter. Half way, you might say, between orb and cube, but is neither. The orb would fit inside it and it would fit inside a cube of similar height three different ways.
Whether I'm really going to be able to give up my smartphone lol. I just bought a "dumb" phone and am embarking on a 30-day experiment where I use that as my daily driver.
When I tried that, it lasted me for almost a year and a half, when I got a second job that required MFA and I needed to be more online in general due to juggling two jobs. And it was amazing!
What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off. When I really needed to get a taxi or look up a way home when I overslept drunk on public transport and ended up who knows where, I could always just fire up hotspot, power on the smartphone and do stuff I needed. Cause when that happened first time, it was when I first realized how much dependent I am on smartphone and net access.
Thanks for reminding me, I just quit one of the jobs and I can afford to be more offline, so back to the dumb phone I go! Convincing my GF again that she has to text me instead of using discord will be hard, though
... Or explaining that I really cant look up the fact she wants, or call a taxi quickly...
I still have a python bot that forwarded discord messages to my own bare html website, so I can chat with her with the basic web browser of the dumb phone.
What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off
Literally my plan, lol. This one does hot spot, and I'm planning on keeping my old phone in my bag (rather than on my person) for when I need it.
I'll admit I'm "cheating" a bit with this experiment. Was able to find a flip phone that runs Android Go (stripped down version of Android) so I can have my MFA apps and such. Won't be installing much more than that, but at least it'll reduce the amount of times I have to break out the old rectangle to get an MFA push / code.
I think more people will be able to do it than folks think. I have faith in you, Admiral Patrick!
I haven't personally tried it, but I think the main thing smartphones offer is a way to get away from repetitive boredom of some activities, like riding in the subway or taking the bus.
There's still alternatives. You can bring a book or a Kindle and read a book.
I think we all got way too used to entertainment being a finger-flick away, but there's still entertainment to be had without a smartphone.
I'd like to see a resurgence of media-focused devices like iPods that are built for streaming music and TV and not much else, instead of it all crammed into one device.
How the world seems to be more and more fucked up every single day and how the vast majority of us simply don't seem to care. Climate change, corporations quickly becoming the new States, politicians who just lie and lie with no consequences, AI being viewed as the magical cure-all for all these problems when really it'll just make bad decisions easier to justify, and most of all, how people seem to view everyone else around them with more and more suspicion which eliminates even the faint hope we have of working together to solve some of these. Idk, take your pick, they all have the potential to be the death of us
I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.
The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren't like worse than they've ever been.
And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.
Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you've said & I am also disappointed that the world we've created isn't better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they're still objectively pretty bad.
I agree that things have been worse in the past, mostly. I'm gonna paraphrase a video from Unlearning Economics I saw a while ago (pretty sure he was quoting someone but I can't remember who):
Optimists look at the world and think, 'this is the best it gets'. Pessimists know that we can always do better
Lately my goto topic for bored/idle/trying to sleep thinking is how to remake the U.S. government. Obviously nothing I think of would ever actually happen, but I find it mildly interesting to ponder.
I'm fairly happy with how to "fix" the house of representatives. I'd break the country into thousands of small, around 50,000 person districts. Each district electing a representative and deputy rep with ballot access determined by signature collection (no political party primaries) and the winner needing over 50% of the vote (discourages first past the post voting systems.) These votes would be frequent. At least everey two years.
These districts would then be arranged into 500 super districts with the reps in each super district picking a congressional delegate from among themselves. These 500 would then make up the house of representatives. The members of the super district would have the power to recall and replace their congressional delegate at any time. The intent is to make the house much more responsive to the demands and interests of the people...
This morning, I think I finally cracked the senate. I thought about killing it off entirely, but recognizing the states as political entities with a state level influence in national policy is a foundational concept in the U.S.... Instead, I'd just weaken it considerably. Cut the number of senators in half. One per state. Similar to the super districts, each state legislature would elect a senator to represent their state in the senate and have the power to recall and replace that senator at any time. All the special roles of the senate (confirming judges, etc.) would move to the house. The vice president would no longer be involved in the senate. Instead it would provide an advisory and support role to the house.
Bills in the house would need to pass by 2/3 to be enacted. Or pass both the house and senate by more than 50% each. With the senate acting as sort of an inverted veto. (No presidential vetos in this new system...) This is very similar to now, but not quite. Bills that pass thesenate first, would be on a fast track through the house and have momentum (giving the senate a bit of influence that I might need to remove...) Bills that pass the house by 2/3 simply become law without senate approval while ones that just fall short move on and still have life.
Now I'm trying to figure out the presidency. I'm thinking that role needs to be broken up. The person who runs the day to day operations of the country, probably should not be picked in a horribly managed popularity contest. And that person is probably not the ideal person to also run the military or represent the country globally. Also, changing out the executives every four years makes it very hard to commit to and complete long, national projects.
Then there is the judicial system. I'm thinking any Supreme court decision should not take effect until first considered by congress. Congress would then have the opportunity to change the law to address any concerns by the justices and return the case back to the court.
My mortality! Hit 45 this year and it kinda feels like it's all downhill from here.
Health is ok but that seems tenuous as I'm pretty out of shape so I feel like I'm not "set up" yet to be a healthy older person. When something does go wrong I'm not sure if I should worry about getting it treated or just live with it.
It seems futile to learn new skills and such since I'm not sure about the payoff (ROI).
Family/kids/job/money are all pretty great so I don't have anything to complain about, but I'm still kind of feeling like I'm about to crest the hill of life and want to ensure I'm making the best of it and prepared for my eventual demise.
I don't want to die! I really like being alive and kind of wish I had immortality (with a safety kill switch of course so I don't have to endure the heat-death of the universe or get stuck inside a star somewhere lol)
I'm turning 45 as well. It's actually a perfect time to learn something new. My interests have changed in 25 years. I no longer climb mountains, bike 200 miles a weekend or so anything too destructive. I've taken up woodworking and just got a kiln to learn pottery. I hope in another 20 years I will be a master of both and they will keep my mind healthy.
There's a bunch of really badass people doing interesting things and discovering new things well into their 70s. The grandfather of a friend of mine picked up orientation running in his 80s - he's now the national champion of his age group.
I think more than age, what one has to overcome is the reluctancy to try new things. I think this is natural to humans at any age; the difference is that when we're young we're forced to try new things as few things are now new. The more experienced we get the easier it is to fall into old habits, and he who's not busy being born is busy dying, as Dylan said.
How do I catch more trout? Should I switch to an ultralight fast action rod from my medium-light medium action rod? Do I need more braided line or should I just wait until I run out of this spool?
Should I be targeting bigger fish? How can I be sure they are there and what do I use to target them?
Do I care about catching fish, really, or do I just enjoy being out in nature, away from the office, and playing in the water?
Whether or not I should trade in my drum kit into an E drum kit. Idk... Midi interfacing would be great. Plus the amount of different kits I could build or use just by downloading. Is it worth it?
Do it. Dad used to have essentially a replica of Neil Pearts setup, while cool as he'll to look at, it's a pain in the ass to maintain and it annoys the shit out of anyone nearby.
Once he made the switch 10 years ago to a Roland mesh E Kit, the entire houses demeanor relaxed. Plus it doesn't take up an entire room, and you can swap sounds on the fly.
Real kits are nice for live or jamming out sometimes, but you'll get infinite more use out of the Ekit
I've been trying to decide the best "lazy" way to make homemade dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Typically, you would have a mold and put a bit of melted chocolate in the bottom of each mold and then use a brush to paint chocolate up the sides and then put it in the fridge to solidify and then put the peanut butter fudge in each one and then dump more chocolate on top and then wait for that to solidify and then pop them all out. But.... I think I can maybe just dip each one in chocolate and let it solidify in the mold? Less steps means I can make more cups and then I can have a large supply to last me longer. But maybe then there won't be enough chocolate on the PB cup? Maybe I don't need that many PB cups in my life? But the ones I buy right now are super expensive and this would save me some money 🤷
How different it is to self motivate and the way the environment in front of you chains together to determine what you do. I feel like the way people are trained to live by school and financial obligations is very limited and probably few people are really in control of their own lives in any meaningful way.
How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don't even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.
We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I've encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.
How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it's so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn't there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you "step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>."
I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I'm obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I've done is shit or useless :D
What is mourning the loss of a loved one like for people who have untreated ADHD?
I ponder this because I believe I suffer from adult ADHD, and I’m mourning the death of a very dear friend of mine, and it is boiling me apart from the inside.
Is this “typical” mourning, or is my ADHD somehow multiplying the symptoms of grief?
I'm sorry for your loss. I can sympathize with you because I lost one of my best friends years ago.
From the years of counseling I've participated in, I've learned that people experience grief in different ways. There really isn't a better or right sequence to experience the loss of someone. You'll go through it as you see the need to or feel.
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance are the most common. Again, these don't have to happen in this sequence. You might experience that you jump around as time goes on, and that's perfectly normal.
Now talking about how your possible untreated ADHD symptoms might be negatively affecting you. I have been officially diagnosed with ADHD and have experienced the loss of a best friend to suicide. One of the perks of having a ADHD brain, is that you can think about a large number of things in a given moment. But this can make you feel totally stuck and overwhelmed if you're going through grief. The best things to do I found during my experience and some advice from trusted people, was to allow for myself to spend time to process what had happened. It's important to reach out to others to talk about how you feel or how you're doing. Remember that you're not alone in experiencing grief of the death of a friend. Reach out to someone that you can trust that is going through the same event as you. This can help you feel like you're not alone in your experience of grief, struggle(s), loneliness, etc.
It helped me very much to talk to a counselor that I knew and could feel comfortable sharing these deeper feelings and events with. If you can't find a counselor, seek out someone close to you that would be willing and able to listen, support you and suggest options to help you through the process of going through grief.
Feel free to message me if you have a need to talk. I don't mind talking about the harder things in life most often. And last but not least... This Too Shall Pass.
Thank you for the kind words and advice. I’ve been muddling through the stages of grief - as you say - bouncing around in no particular order - and I’ve been giving myself time to process, and I’ve reached out to the family of my deceased friend, I’ve been helping them deal with the practical sides of the loss; packing up their house, dealing with their pets, helping their kids with the loss of their mom, and also just supporting and caring and talking.
I’ve always struggled at my job to stay on task - I tend to drift off and get easily distracted, and I’ve always been able to angle that to a benefit- I’ll rapidly jump from task to task, produce results quickly on multiple things. But now this new distraction is my overwhelming sense of loss. I can’t schedule grief, and it bursts into my mind (already churning away on five different projects), and I have to try to suppress it, or step back from my desk and talk myself through it.
But it never seems to ebb completely. Always there, and any single little trigger - seeing anything that reminds me of my friend - puts me back into the misery spiral. I’m sure it’ll pass in time, and since she died (just over a month ago) I did notice things began to get a little less difficult. But then her parents asked me to take her phone and go through it and clean out any photos / references/ etc about what killed her (bad boyfriend, drug overdose) - and that process just re-opened the wound. I feel like I’m going through it all right from the moment it happened. And I find myself starting over on the grief cycle. The inability to shut it out of my mind.
Start with a checklist. Add things like, the kind of weather you would like to experience most of the year, are you more of a coastline kina person or more inland person, does it matter to you that you're near outdoor activates year round or not at all, do you desire to live in a city or a town, what hobbies are you wanting to participate in where you live next, etc, etc.
i have a list I've been considering, but you're right that I should write everything down.
i have a lot of contradictions - love theater, live music, and cultural diversity, don't like congested cities. i like warm beaches and snorkeling and generally prefer rainy and cloudy cold weather and need some mountains kind of contradictions. the list is long, but it's a good excuse to live in different places until one clicks.
How much to put away for retirement. When will my wife and I get to retire? Is it worth a little pain now while we're in our 30s and 40s and parents of a baby? Or will I be denying us experiences while we're... well, not YOUNG, but at least moderately able bodied?
Buying individual stocks is a fools game for non-UHNI (poor) people. Keep your more-or-less passive funds investments, like low-fee mutual funds and index funds.
If you want more retirement money, it's far better to spend the time to in yourself (skill upgrading/job upgrading) than it is to worry about trying to bet on individual investments. If you're putting away 10% of your income per year into your retirement savings, you can double your retirement savings by increasing your job salary by 10% and then just putting all of the extra away too. Getting a 10% increase in your salary is a lot easier than picking a stock or stocks that will going to go up twice as much as the overall market.