I had a few pretty rough years in there… I wasn’t suffering or anything like that, I was just… Going in the wrong direction. Took me a while to get back on track.
I’d “suffer” through school again happily if I could take some opportunities that once passed me by. I was at a good age when Bitcoin hit the scene. I thought it was not very interesting and probably wouldn’t amount to much… At a time where you could get several a day with little more than the computing power of an era appropriate smartphone.
$10M now vs mining as many Bitcoin as you could back then, and then cashing out when it peaked in 2021… Just that simple change and the 10M seems like nothing.
I also made some strategic errors in my youth, dropping out of school and going to work full time at a dead end retail job, and working there for years before deciding to go and finish my education. I had saved nothing from my time working and put myself pretty deep into debt by the end of it.
By the time I graduated, I was pushing 30, I was something like six figures in debt, and I had no job prospects. I ended up working at a call center.
So yeah, I’ll suffer through grade school and high school again if it means I can do it right. I wouldn’t excel so much that I stood out… Maybe just enough to skip a grade, get started on college just a little bit sooner. Invest any money I had into Apple or something, right before the big iPhone explosion. I would still be financially set for life, knowing what I know.
This is kind of my family. My brother and I have not fathered any children, he’s a step dad, with no intention to have any of his own, I’m happily in a childfree relationship.
The only (sort of) exception is that my eldest brother (of three), had four kids… All girls.
So our biological lineage will continue, but our family name ends here, since once my niece’s get married, our family name will be dead.
The closest continuance of our family name is through my one male cousin on my dad’s side. I don’t keep in touch with him enough to know if he has kids or he’s planning to have kids, or to even be informed as to whether or not those children would be boys or girls, etc.
After that, you would have to go back about 3 generations to find someone of the same lineage that’s actually continuing the family name. Second or third cousins… I believe. I’m unaware if my grandfather had any siblings, or cousins… So that part of my family tree is a complete unknown.
For my brother, he wasn’t in a stable relationship long enough to get married and have kids (though, he’s on his second marriage, the first did not last very long… It’s a long story as to why)… And since his second wife (his current wife) already had children from a previous marriage, he has no interest. For me, I never cared either way, and stuck to the philosophy of “I’ll let my wife decide”. My current, and longest, relationship, under which we’ve been together for nearly a decade now, is with a beautiful woman who has been very childfree for a long time, and I support her in that. I also wouldn’t be able to financially support children, which is why I kept waiting for marriage before kids. I at least wanted the illusion that someone was going to stick around before making that commitment.
My oldest brother got married pretty young and to his credit, they’re still together. I’m mostly estranged from him, but I’m aware of some of the details of his life. His children are at the age where they can start having kids of their own now (which should give some indication of how old I am… I’m “great uncle” age). I don’t have any pressure to have kids at this point because my SO doesn’t want them, my breeder brother is estranged, my father is dead, and I’m estranged from my mom. The only time I even hear about kids is either from my sister-in-law taking about her (now post-teen) children, and from my SO’s family, who we see online only a few times a year at most.
This is the entire motivation I had to buy what I did when I became a homeowner. I don’t want a random assortment of batteries and chargers strewn around the place, especially when a replacement battery pack can run upwards of $300-500 depending on its capacity.
I chose Dewalt, but mainly because I had a pretty capable little DeWalt 12v cordless drill for a long time and I was very happy with it and the durability it had… I purchased a pack of tools, and switched to the 20v “Max” (or whatever variant is local), which is also compatible with the flexvolt, which is good because we added a few garden tools (string trimmer, hedge trimmer, and later a lawnmower). All of the tools we have use the 20v batteries. As luck would have it, DeWalt also released a snow blower in the last few months, which we promptly purchased, since where we live we get quite a bit of snow, and nobody wants to shovel. The only catch is that it uses the 60v flexvolt batteries; the flexvolt batteries can work at 20v, so those batteries can be used on any other tool, however, since the blower is 60v, only those flexvolt batteries can be used with it. It’s the only tool that requires the higher voltage.
There’s a lot of yellow tools. I don’t fault anyone for using a different brand; this is just what I am using.
Yep, then all the specialty application that are made, especially for peripherals like scanners… Forget about it.
You might be able to get it to function at a basic level, but all the settings and customizable features are not going to exist, and you will also be up a creek workout a paddle if you need support, as you’ve correctly noted.
Linux is a wonderful operating system, and it does what it does very well. The fact is, all the business desktop application software companies stick to Windows because that’s what most people have, and most stay with Windows because business app developers don’t support anything else. The only time I’ve known of any users who had something different, it was almost always a Mac, and they always had parallels or some similar windows virtualization software installed because even their mac isn’t supported.
It still caused issues, but it mostly worked at least.
He also made the Oculus lineup so cheap by subsidizing the costs with selling your data, that many VR startups couldn’t compete. Now there’s only a handful of groups still making any VR gear. Immediately after that he killed all PC based VR, though you can still do it with an add-on cable or wirelessly (which sucks on most WiFi), as an afterthought.
This just locked everyone into the Oculus ecosystem and Facebook by extension, bricking more than a few headsets in the process. Now you either have to pay thousands to boutique VR outfits, or buy an Oculus and sell your soul to Zuckerberg for a cut rate product.
I hold Mark solely responsible for killing VR as a consumer product.
I like this one. I’ve been hoping for some host-your -own AI models that I can dump into a system with a bucket of TPUs and a decent GPU for processing and get my own version of something like chat GPT at home then train it on the entire collective works of documentation and help articles about the software I usually do support for so it can act as a defacto repository of “natural language” chat/search for troubleshooting.