If you’re working on a budget like I was when starting out on my own, I recommend your first purchase to be a bed frame. You can use Ceaigslist / FB marketplace to find some really cheap used options. From there, you can start buying (used) furniture that matches the bed frame. Personally, I needed a nightstand immediately after the bed frame because I wanted to put my glasses somewhere.

I kept a few recipes from a subscription I was gifted. Honestly, replacing the missing ingredients has been more fun than cooking the boxed meals.

Well shit. That makes a lot of sense.

No no, they listen. How do you think the “Hey Google” feature works? It has to listen for the key phrase. Might as well just listen to everything else.

I spent some time with a friend and his mother and spoke in Spanish for about two hours while YouTube was playing music. I had Spanish ads for 2 weeks after that.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in that statement, especially in the case of rare disease. It’s really difficult to convince a company to spend billions to develop a treatment that will only cure 1 in 100,000 people without letting them charge an arm and a leg, and giving them a very long exclusivity deal so they can continue to charge high prices. So much of that cost to develop is due to the dozens of other failed drugs and formulations they tried on their way to success.

I don’t have a solution for the problem, and I’m always a little suspicious of anyone who claims it’s easy to solve. I think the UK has a decent idea, the NHS basically decides if the cost of a drug will be covered by insurance by comparing the expected benefit and the current cost. If the ratio is too skewed, they refuse to cover the medication. In theory, this should be an incentive for a company to charge less. In practice, it leads to some companies choosing not to market in the UK.

Here’s a bit of hope for you, scientists have figured out how to trick the body into producing any protein or antibody they want, through technology like gene therapy and mRNA vaccines. We’re about to cure a lot of diseases that used to be 100% fatal. Diseases that kill kids and adults alike.

Most things seem to be getting worse these days, but at least we’re making progress in other areas.

Unironically, I had to delete this game from my phone because I wasn’t getting work done. This game slaps.

In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

Don’t stay in school, kids.

I’m not sure I agree here - I think the resin printer might not be a good entry point, but I’m curious to hear what others think. I’ve heard resin printers require special ventilation and the photo-resin is carcinogenic. Once dialed in, an FDM can do pretty great for detailed parts. Especially with a smaller nozzle. So I’m not convinced jumping straight into a resin printer is wise.

I used my Ender 3 for a few years making miniatures, and they came out pretty great. Of course, then I tried switching to a larger nozzle and I still haven’t managed to get it running… but that’s my fault.

Honestly, I started with an Ender 3 for less than $200 and it’s just fine. You’ll have to calibrate and fight with it for a bit, but once you get it running it’s just fine.