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So my only experience with crypto is buying a little bitcoin after big crashes, ignoring it for 5 years and selling it when theres hype in mainstream media. Happens reliably enough and i made a little change. Also did some fruitless blockchain work when it was a corporate craze in 2017 but overall, don't care for the tech much.

Anyway, I've been looking into some things for work and a lot of roads lead to cryoto. I'm decent at picking apart a reasonable technical system and can call on people who understand legal, financial, logistical or company structures. But the crypto space is a weid mess. It feels like kids playing a pretend game of being a central bank.

There's official documents and company filings with full corporate structures, but everything is just a bit too juvenile. Like you'll see a Senior Auditor with 10 years experience at KPMG, next to the head of marketing: YoloSwagger with an animated One Piece profile pic. There's also these ambitious White Papers attached to code base that seems like the same boilerplate example but with stupid variable names.

A bulk of the info i need is the diction and syntax. Don't know if its because I'm old because I don't get it. I see a lot of start-up and investment language thrown around. And it's mixed with a plenty of meme terms and some utter nonsense. I can't get a straight answer on the meaning of Utility even though its thrown around like a core metric. And don't get me started on Wallets because that definition seems to change mid sentence.

The other thing I need to understand is the technicalities involved and accessing the right info. Before my searches were polluted with the meme coin story today, there's not a lot of good info. Most of what I found was exchanges telling you to not worry about it and give them money, or crypto bros telling you not to worry about it and give them money for their course.

I understand transactions and how everything is just a pump-and-dump to get at whatever liquidity was raised. All the evidence for fraud is obvious in hindsight. There must be ways to track those trends before it happens and find consistent factors. At the same tine how the hell can people just start a coin and other people throw small fortunes at it for a laugh.

I'd be grateful for any good primer unpacking things. It really looks like the normal education is to jump in with you life savings and sink or swim.

This Lifehacker article recommending Ente Auth reminded me that I am looking to migrate off Authy to something else.

I thought I would see what Tilderinos are using:

• What do you use, and do you like it?
• How do you deal with syncing?
• Do you only generate codes on your phone, or do you use a desktop app too?
• What questions should I be asking that I didn't ask?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I'm interested to know what are some series you think are worth reading all the way through -- especially if someone is less likely to start them because of how long they are in the first place.

I'm going to leave series length completely up to interpretation and not set a specific minimum number of books/pages/words. If you think it's long but worth a read all the way through, then it's worth sharing here!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

So I get the theory of what they are supposed to do. inform and educate folks on what to do and what not to do.

But my viewpoint on their effectiveness has changed since I learnt about Daryl Davis and Nonviolent Communication, my general appreciation for comedy which touches taboo topic as well as watching a DEI meeting that my workplace had before I started working there.

So my understanding of DEI is that it's aim is broadly to help individuals who may not be aware of the nature of the societal and systemic issue that give people of marginalized society a disadvantage so that we can help prop them up better and therefore put them on an equal footing with the rest of society.

And this is a good idea in theory but I have become more convinced overtime that in reality, it's just not appropriate for the workplace unless it undergoes a major reform because of a general uncomfortableness I have noticed.

When I was watching the DEI meeting that my company had had, the DEI advocate they brought in was talking about the issues faced by racialized individuals (she was at the time specifically referring to black people), and some people shared opinions and one white woman shared her perspective that having grown up in a poor household and being ridiculed for that most of her life as she was growing up, that she thinks that society places too much emphasis on helping out racial minorities when its actually people's socioeconomic status that is an indicator of how disadvantaged they are.

And the DEI advocate just did her best to dismiss that opinion and quickly get back to her slides.

And as I was watching this, I got really disappointed. If there is one person who should be trained in how to have those sorts of uncomfortable conversations about how best to tackle handle the issues of racial discrimination vs being unable to provide for yourself in a capitalist society, I really would have expected the DEI advocate to be perfect for such a discussion.

Instead she just stuck to her slides.

She was unable to engage with someone who had a different perspective in a respectful way.

and it got me thinking, let's say I was a bigot or a misogynist. I did think my black colleagues were just diversity hire or that I have a bias against women. I doubt I will be convinced by the cookie cutter slides they present at the DEI meetings why I am wrong and I know that if I voice my opinion, I will be shunned and shamed which leads to me just ignoring the DEI information and not taking anything in and therefore the DEI meetings are just a waste of time.

So what's the point?

I get the argument that if they allow those kinds of uncomfortable discussions at work, it can create tension and can cause a hostile work environment but then, all the company is doing with DEI is pretending to be solving the issue when in fact its just masking the issue and the people who disagree are just gonna continue disagreeing and maybe even double down more cause they're being actively told they are backwards rather than someone having a conversation with them.

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/8

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

I started eating spicy food (mainly the 2x spicy chicken flavored instant noodles) and very spicy pho ever week.

this all culminated in me having done the hot ones like 3-4 times now and it's been fun. More or less, I can take the heat and its becoming enjoyable.

The one issue that still remains though is when the spicy food hits my digestive tract. sometimes it doesn't bother me at all, but more commonly it can cause serious discomfort and pain for about half an hour before I can finally hit the bathroom. The only thing I have found that remedies it is drinking vegan milk as it passes my digestive tract.

problem is I don't know what to do about it. apparently my stomach is more sensitive then my mouth to spicy food but I don't really know how to make my stomach less sensitive. I'd have though after a year it would get used to spicy and it's doing better than at the beginning I guess but still not without occasional pains.

These past few days I went through the rabbit hole of people complaining about the Cybertruck, main the subreddit /r/cyberstuck. From my standpoint it really seems like this car has no redeeming qualities and is basically that car Homer Simpson designed once. That said, internet forums are not known for their restraint. This is just a curiosity, I couldn't buy this car even if I wanted to. Objectively speaking, is the Cybertruck a complete failure?