I'll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn't have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he'd live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.

But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn't have much experience in and didn't want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.

I prepped for my brother's death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn't in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn't realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.

If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it's occupied my mind a lot.

TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn't be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can't be - they've never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.

So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...

Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.

My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.

Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.

I wouldn't say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I'm trying to volunteer and work in.

I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.

I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.

I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.

I'm not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.

Maybe not nobody but most...

The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I'm answering the question.

There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.

People don't understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It's so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.

I'm baffled that people just.. don't do this kind of thing. Don't learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy... Like.. Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.

So yeah, I don't think many people understand that.

I'm sure other people out there understand this, but like I'm such a sinkhole right now. I lost my job a few months ago, and I am trying so hard to get another one but its just not happening. I feel like I'm always hitting like 2nd or 3rd place in the lineup. The interviews go well, get call backs, then boom last minute they went with the other candidate. And everyone is telling me I'll be okay cause they say I'm smart and have skills.

But it doesn't matter, I'm broke, my medications running out, I'm tired, I have bills, everything hurts, I have no insurance, and I don't want to be a leech and already my boyfriend has picked up the rent and stuff, but like he has his own bills.

I just don't understand, why does shit have to keep happening, can't it just settle for like 5 minutes so u can catch up. I feel like I haven't been able to breath in years, and there is something that everyone else is in on that my autism doesn't let me understand, and I'm just.... idk anymore.

I'm bleh.

My PhD thesis

I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool

Converting a high resolution photo scanner into a large format digital camera

There's a lot that goes into it and I'm still fairly early in the process but it is possible and has been done before

I already have some lenses that will cover the whole scanner bed, it's mostly a question of power at this point

Cybersecurity, as a profession, is a fool’s errand.

Dedicated security staff exist solely to teach real engineers how to do their job, and the fact that such personnel exist is a catastrophic failure in computer science curriculum

I've been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can't seem to figure out what's causing it or how to treat it. I think it's called "rhomboid pain". I've seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven't tried any of that.

I've always had a bad posture but it's been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don't think it's that. I doubt it's weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn't make it better and lifting heavy doesn't make it worse. I don't think it's mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it's rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.

Well - it's still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it's because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let's see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.

I have a distant sibling that I've been building a relationship with over long distance. Saw them in-person and realized that they have quite a few toxic traits from one of our narcissistic parents. I don't know what to do now. I'm pretty traumatized from that parent and my sibling doesn't see any of it as a negative. I don't think I have the ability to open their eyes on it, either. I want the relationship I thought we had.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.

why doesn't Radiohead put out an entire album of songs like pulk/pull revolving doors? they had a really unique and cohesive idm sound going and kinda dropped it to the side

How it feels to never have had anyone in my life that I could just randomly call up and talk about happy and sad things with.

I miss the silence of empty rooms.

I developed tinnitus earlier this year, and now I'm never gonna be able to just sit somewhere quiet and far away from everyone else and be alone with my thoughts. This ringing will follow me everywhere, drowning out the distant sounds of cars disturbing puddles in distant streets on a rainy night, obscuring all the subtle little noises that danced on the edges of my perception. But most of all robbing me of any truly quiet moment for the rest of my life.

(and (lisp programming) (libre software))

I'm in love with an old friend. I'm married. I have two children.

It still feels right.

I replaced the back wheel bearing hub on my Celica, but yet I can still hear the droning noise. What gives?

There's a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn't a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.

ITT: things that plenty of people would understand

Why I can’t simply use an iPad as a Mac Mini monitor

My mental health

I don't think there's anything that nobody would understand when explained. But most people would not understand the drama that happens between creators in the minecraft modding community.

I want to give and be given forehead kisses

It's very common that in modern virtual worlds there's 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.

Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.

But there's so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.

Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren't in an original reality.

Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore's religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one's universe).

I've studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.

Which is pretty weird in an age where there's increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.

So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there's a tradition from antiquity centered around a document "the good news of the twin" that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we're already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.

Like, I guess I just don't think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it's much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.

But I don't know that there's anyone that's genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it's just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.

Kevin