It's great! You're also supporting the local scene which is massively important.

Gigs. Either just buying tickets to random local venues. Our go see your favourite artists live, but make sure you get there early enough to see the openers.

I've discovered so many amazing bands because they opened for bands I already knew I liked.

If you can't physically get to gigs then you can even just look up who your favourite artists are touring with, that will give you a pretty good sense of them being similar.

Community.

They're all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.

Protein is protein right? I'm sure any half decent chef could figure out how to make insects tasty with a little trial and error.

Well the problem is that "bug" is not a scientific term right? Or even if it is, colloquially I think it could easily refer to either insects specifically or arthropods more generally.

Certainly a lot of people refer to spiders as bugs despite them not being insects.

There is probably little practical help you can give, but don't underestimate the importance and impact of social and emotional support.

When someone is in such a shitty situation, just knowing that there are people who care makes a huge difference. So just be a good friend. Listen and empathise when they need to talk about shit. Give them a laugh when they need cheering up or distraction from the bullshit.

I'll never forget dialling into a work meeting with the corporate infosec team who we needed some guidance from.

Their rep shows up and it's a fem-presenting person with pink cat-ear headphones.

I'm like oh fuck they sent the big guns, this is exactly who we needed to talk to. And I was right, we got exactly what we needed.

There's more to it than that. Firstly, at a theoretical level you dealing with the concepts of entropy and information density. A given file has a certain level of information in it. Compressing it is sort of like distilling the file down to its purest form. Once you reached that point, there's nothing left to "boil away" without losing information.

Secondly, from a more practical point of view, compression algorithms are designed to work nicely with "normal" real world data. For example as a programmer you might notice that your data often contains repeated digits. So say you have this data: "11188885555555". That's easy to compress by describing the runs. There are three 1s, four 8s, and seven 5s. So we can compress it to this: "314875". This is called "Run Length Encoding" and it just compressed our data by more than half!

But look what happens if we try to apply the same compression to our already compressed data. There are no repeated digits, there's just one 3, then one 1, and so on: "131114181715". It doubled the size of our data, almost back to the original size.

This is a contrived example but it illustrates the point. If you apply an algorithm to data that it wasn't designed for, it will perform badly.

Emacs or vim?

What about the public service? I don't know about where you live, but in my country the public service doesn't care what degree you have, just that you have one. Look into the graduate programs of your local/state/federal governments.

Beefy

There's also one called "Personal blocklist" which is very handy.

And last just as long.

The engineering department at my uni had a tensile strength testing machine which says "Made in the GDR" on it, a country that hasn't existed for 40+ years.

Have you tried SwiftKey? I find it to be a waaaay better keyboard than the stock one, and it does support having a number row.

In general it is often true that a motor and a generator are two sides of the same coin.

If you put a current through a wire you can make a magnet move which can be used to spin a motor. And symmetrically, if you spin a wire and make its magnet move near a wire you can induce a current in the wire.

Depends on the exact wiring and stuff but yeah sometimes you can damage a motorised device by manually spinning the thing without turning it on.

Well said. I'm married to a clinical psychologist and she's the most emotionally intelligent person I know. It's the best. She's the best.

Yep that's github copilot suggesting what it thinks the code should be based on its training data.

100%. At that point your life is over already. Dose me up on morphine and let me sail away into the void peacefully.

It definitely helps. You can sometimes logic yourself out of a spiral by acknowledging the emotion and why it's there, while simultaneously rejecting the need for feeling it right now.

It's like "hey cool thanks brain I get that you want me to make sure that the bad thing doesn't happen again so you're looping that memory and the feeling that came with it. But actually that's not helpful, that situation actually (wasn't dangerous) / (won't happen again) / (isn't something I can solve right now), so let's move on."

With practice, brain usually says "ok no worries", and you can move on. It's not really that simple but that's the idea.

At 10 he's alllllmost at that age where anything a grown-up relative buys for him is gonna be cringe and not the right brand/style/whatever. You can't go wrong with a voucher so he can get exactly what he wants. Maybe a voucher for a skate shop? You could even take him there and help him get something so it's still an uncle/aunt purchase.