krellor

I’ll give you some general advice and am happy to answer any follow up questions you might have.

Upfront, I recommend getting a laptop from a well known vendor running Windows. If you aren’t looking to go on a technology learning expedition, just need something that will work, and will have a warranty and a support line if things go wrong, you can’t beat a vendor. Dell is probably where I would look, but Microsoft surface, and Thinkpad’s are also good.

Going with Windows from a vendor supplied laptop will maximize the amount of support you have and the number of things that just work.

If you are looking for more of a technology project, I’d need to know more about what your tolerance is for fiddling with technology or your computer not working.

As for CAD, as others said, check the recommended software specs and match your computer to them. Make sure you give yourself plenty of fast storage like m.2.

For browsers, I use Firefox. I’d recommend Firefox as being a good balance between privacy and just working with plugin support. But chrome and other chromium based browsers like edge also just work.

Consider getting a Microsoft 365 personal or family account. For $100/year you get cloud storage, computer backups, and the local and online office suite, and it all integrates well into Windows.

If any of the above assumptions are wrong, I’m happy to update recommendations.

Finally, how do you learn to fish? It takes time to come up to speed on things, so slowly learning, finding neutral review sites like maybe Tom’s hardware, and doing your own testing.

Lots of people will give you opinionated advice, so don’t be afraid to be skeptical. Think about what’s important to you, whether that be just working, or privacy, or availability of support materials.

I don’t disagree that comment OP could have phrased it better and come across as less judgey. And I think that of someone like you left a well worded reply to the effect that it would be very fair feedback.

At the same time I feel like some of the comments she has gotten are living down to the less generous version of her statements. If that makes sense. It also sort of feels like people wallpapering over the underlying reason that many women look for social media participation, which is as a way to vet for safety reasons.

But I agree, it’s not good to typecast and overgeneralize, and a better suggestion to the post OP might be that some women look for social media accounts for safety reasons, if that is part of your social issues mentioned.

But I digress. Have a great day!

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I love that your post gave a probabilistic binning of someone who doesn’t have a traditional social media account, which was unironically confirmed by people replying with rustled jimmies.

Come on folks, it should be clear from context that she is saying that a single woman setting up dates is going to use what limited info they have to avoid stalkers, cheaters, red pillers, and anti social people. That this might filter out perfectly normal people along with the creeps is the cost of maintaining safety and not wasting time, which is pretty much par for the course in dating. There’s also a difference between exchanging info after a brief meeting, and actually knowing a person for an extended time and then dating. I doubt OP is saying that someone they studied with for three semesters would be excluded for lack of social media, because they have real life context and don’t need the proxy filters.

Also, getting real close in these replies to “but I’m a nice guy” and “I’m not like other girls.”

I thought I was taking crazy pills watching people tell the guy not to join social media, on a social media site!

I think the real question being asked is, should the OP make a social media account that is not anonymous or on one of the mainstream sites. Which I would say go for it if it helps with your IRL social life, just don’t post anything you wouldn’t say in person in public.

I highly recommend Stephen Tetlock’s book, super forecasting, who is the sponsor of the project you mention.

One method of forecasting that he identified as effective was using a spreadsheet to record events that might occur over the next 6-18 months along with an initial probability based on good judgement and the factors you quoted. Then, every day look for new information that adjusts the forecast up or down by some, usually small percent. Repeat, and the goal is you will trend towards a reasonable %. I omitted many details but that was the jist.

Now, that’s for forecasting on a short ish timeframe. There is a place for more open ended reasoning and imagination, but you have to be careful not to fall prey to your own biases.

This particular forecast of OPs feels like it is ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior without giving events that would address them, and forecasts something they care about doing better in the long-term, a source of bias to watch. I tend to agree with you that I think elements of this forecast are flawed.

I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.

The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118

While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.

I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.

I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.

I would echo the recommendation for counseling. However, is this a larger issue or unique to children? Do you find yourself getting disproportionately angry at other sources of annoyances? Answering that question might help you know whether there is a larger need to address.

Yup.

We do lots of things as a society because we’ve always done them that way, or it’s good enough, and not enough reason to go through the effort of changing everything including legal language, etc.

Happily, in this case I think ABV is about the best way we could have inherited, maybe only second to alcohol by weight in terms of consistency across temperature.

In the US, and I suspect other countries, the agency that regulates alcohol is different than the one that regulates food. In the US alcohol is regulated by the ATF and food by the FDA. Since it is the FDA rules that require nutritional labels and ingredients and not the ATF, most brands don’t list much.

Additionally, alcohol recipes are often considered trade secrets and closely held which might be why rules haven’t been introduced in many places.

Here is an article that talks a little more about different breweries and if they keep their ingredients secret or not.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-wine/89281511/why-doesnt-alcohol-doesnt-feature-nutritional-information-on-labels

Like I said, because the percent doesn’t change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn’t change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it’s the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn’t been a motivation for people to change that.

I would guess about 4% heavier with sugar, which is just enough so that a can of Dr. Pepper sinks while a diet can of Dr. Pepper floats. I think I recall the specific gravity of most sugar flavored soda was around 1.04 but I would need to check sources.

I haven’t seen anyone really answer the why of it, which is that the industry developed using a floating glass tool called a hydrometer which measures the specific gravity, or density, of liquids.

When you boil the wort to prepare for fermentation, you end up with a sugary liquid that is denser than water or alcohol. Water has a specific gravity of one, and the specific gravity of the wort is increased by everything you dissolved into it. You would float a glass hydrometer in it and lets say you get a reading of 1.055.

After fermentation the yeast has converted much of the sugar to alcohol and decreased the specific gravity. You measure a second time, and multiply the difference by a constant factor to get ABV. let’s say after fermentation you got a reading of 1.015.

1.055 - 1.015 = 0.04
0.04 * 131.25 = 5.25% ABV

We label with ABV because that was how it was calculated, and remained the same regardless of the quantity served.

There is a similar process for distilling as well. Before these methods people didn’t know the exact amounts, which led to fun things like navy and admiral strength.

Edit: also the 131 figure really should vary based on temperature since it is derived from the ratios of the density of ethanol and water. The higher the ABV the more important it is to factor temperature, and distilling requires more sensitive measurements and tools. But for beer, using 131.25 is fine and has about 0.2% error up to around 10% ABV.

I guess “getting into Christmas” probably means something different to everyone. For me it’s about reliving good memories of friends and family. Some of my favorite memories are decorating cookies with my kids, mixing batches fudge, sipping eggnog and coffee over pie and ice cream, or dancing with my kids to Christmas music.

So for Christmas I play Christmas music, setup a tree, make cookies and fudge, and send the treats and little mementos to friends and family around the country. This year I sent Christmas muffins, fudge, drawings my daughter made, little $1 bottles of peppermint schnapps with Cocoa packets, and other things like Santa socks that I divied up from a cheap multipack. That was the presents I sent out to all our friends and family.

But if I didn’t have those memories or enjoy baking, I doubt I would do much for it. So I suppose, ask yourself what getting into Christmas means to you, or take the time to define what you want it to mean to you, and then do the thing. If it’s taking a little bit of extra time to show family you are thinking of them, then a little home assembled Cocoa kit and a card might do it. You don’t need to go crazy with decorations or buying presents to get into Christmas, unless that is what you want it to mean to you.

I have an Excel workbook with three worksheets. One worksheet calculates my paydays out over the next few years, and using Excel formulas a table of paydays per month is calculated. I get paid every two weeks, so some months are 3 pay checks and the rest are 2. If you get paid a fixed amount per month it’s easier.

The next sheet has tables for annual, monthly, and weekly expenses. The annual table has a column for month of the year. If I have a quarterly payment, I add it to the annual table four times, each with the correct month.

The final worksheet is a basic revenue less expenses table, one for each calendar year. It lists my income per month for each month, and then lists my monthly expenses, my annual expenses that hit that month, and weekly expenses calculated to reflect the partial weeks. All using formulas do it is easy to extend out to future years.

The worksheet also calculated how much I have left over, and what my savings target is (80% of unbudgeted funds). It’s important for the actual costs of each month to be accurate, because averages hide real world things, like in November I have a large amount of renewals including my annual car insurance payment. I will always spend more than I make in November, and knowing that means I’m not panicking with unexpected expenses.

What I’ve found is that there is an art to budgeting. For example, I budget $100/month for discretionary purchases, plus $20/week to take my kids out for cocoa. You want to be specific enough in the budget that you have fairly few purchases not directly accounted for, with a little bit of latitude that it doesn’t become a grind to track purchases.

Over the course of the month any purchase that exceeds the budgeted amount or that doesn’t fit a budget category gets tracked on a separate sheet so I can see if I need to rebudget or if there was just a one time thing. Generally speaking, if it is too much work to track your individual purchases, you might be making too many small or impulse purchases that add up.

I also use Excel for my shopping lists to stay focused when I go to the store, and the mobile app easily lets me strike through items as I get them.

That’s a good takeaway. AWS is the ultimate Swiss army knife, but it is easy to misconfigure. Personally, when you are first learning AWS, I wouldn’t put more data in then you are willing to pay for on the most expensive tier. AWS also gives you options to set price alerts, so if you do start playing with it, spend the time to set cost alerts so you know when something is going awry.

Have a great day!

So you just asked the most confusing thing about AWS service names due to how names changed over time.

Before S3 had an archival tier, there existed a separate service that AWS named AWS Glacier Storage, and then renamed to AWS S3 Glacier.

Around 2012 AWS started adding tiers to S3 which made the standalone service redundant. I received you look at S3 proper unless you have something like a Synology that can directly integrate with the older job based API used by the original glacier service.

So, let’s say I have a 1TB archival file, single tarball, and I upload it to a brand new S3 bucket, without version, special features, etc, except it has a life cycle policy to move objects from S3 standard to S3 Glacier instant access after 0 days. So effectively, I upload the file and it moves to Glacier class storage.

The S3 standard is ~$24/tb/month, and lets say worst case scenario our data sits on standard for one whole day before moving.

$0.77+$0.005 (API cost of the put)

Then there is the lifecycle charge to move the data from standard to glacier, with one request per object each way. Since we only have one object the cost is

$0.004 out of standard
$0.02 into glacier

The cost of glacier instant tier is $4.1/tb/month. Since we would be there all but one day, the cost on the first bill would be:

$3.95

The second month onwards you would pay just the $4.1/month unless you are constantly adding or removing.

Let’s say six months later you download your 1tb archive file. That would incur a cost of up to $30.

Now I know that seems complicated and expensive. It is, because it is providing services to me in my former role as director of engineering, with complex needs and budgets to pay for stuff. It doesn’t make sense as a large-scale backup of personal data, unless you also want to leverage other AWS services, or you are truly just dumping the data away and will likely never need to retrieve it.

S3 is great for complying with HIPAA, feeding data into a cdn, and generally dumping data around in performant way. I’ve literally dropped a petabyte off data into S3 and it just took it and did its thing.

In my personal AWS account I use S3 as a place to dump cache contents built by lambda functions and served up by API gateway. Doing stuff like that is super cheap. I also use private git repos (code commit), private container registry (ecr), and container host (ECS), and it is nice have all of that stuff just click together.

For backing up my personal computer, I use iDrive personal and OneDrive, where I don’t have to worry about the cost per object, etc. iDrive (not an Apple service) let’s you backup multiple devices to their platform and keeps them versioned.

Anyway, happy to help answer questions. Have a great day.

My advice is a little different than others. I recently got my in-laws outfitted with smartphones and a new nuc. My father in-law has Parkinson’s, slow onset, but it means he is clumsy. It’s not likely that his phone will survive shaky hands for 8 years. What I did was buy refurbished OnePlus phones, install a simple launcher, install Bitdefender, and then add a lock app that let’s me add a pin to the system settings app and the play store.

They can’t install anything out change things. They can browse, play games I preload, take pictures, etc, but I don’t have to worry about them installing things they shouldn’t. If one of the phone dies I’ll just get the latest affordable refurbished of the same line and configure it the same way.

I had originally tried without locking the phone down as much but my father in law could not stop installing spammy weather apps and clicking ads on games and following there instructions.

I also created new Google accounts for them that I manage, so they can’t get stuff stolen with bad account management practice.

If you are in the US, I’ve also found mint to be a good deal for cell service.

Thanks for posting. I just deployed to my container host in AWS ECS and it’s working well in my testing. Very easy deployment with docker.

It’s complicated. I gave the most expensive pricing, which is their fastest tier and includes stripping across three availability zones and guarantees 11 nines of data durability. Additionally, the easy integration with all other AWS services and the feature richness of S3 buckets makes it hard to do a fair apple to apple comparison unless you really have well defined needs. So I gave the highest price to keep it simple, and for someone who says they just have a few GB, any cost should be trivial.