How long after someone giving you their number is considered too long to contact them?

This person gave me their number weeks ago, and I was thinking of asking them out to coffee, but I’m not sure if that might be considered rude due to the time lapse. I don’t think it would be, but what do I know — I haven’t had anything to do with the dating scene in many, many years…

So, I’m not really looking for advice, but rather perspective. What do other people consider normal in these sorts of situations?

Heya! So I've got a new fridge, a GE GTS22KGNRWW 21.9ft³. Skipping over the fridge water line bursting and causing thousands of dollars of damage followed by the fridge crapping out, we're just trying to make sure the fridge is OK before the warranty expires and because we have a baby in the house.

The ambient air was still above 41°F a few hours after we got it, so I cranked it to full blast and put a glass of water in to have a better testing point. The ambient air has been fluctuating between like 39-44° F and the water glass measured between like 39.0°-41.0° F after about 24 hours with occasional use. I know I'm worrying because the last fridge just crapped out and spoiled a ton of food, and I know opening the door always causes it to drop (which I'm obviously doing to test it), but it seems kind of high to me for a brand new fridge if 41 is really the upper limit. Is this an acceptable range, or should we ask for someone to come out and look at it?

I've been recently thinking about the impact of fictional characters from tv shows/movies can have on our lives. Have you ever felt influenced by a particular character or show?

For me, the show Mr. Robot coincided with my decision to pivot to cybersecurity. There were a lot of other factors that made me switch, but it was undeniable that the show (and the main character, Elliot) played a sizable role. It's been a decade since it first aired, and I’m still grateful for that change I made.

Curious to know if anyone else have a similar experience?

I didn't know where to categorize this. It's not current, kinda politics, kinda tech, kinda a lot of things, but mostly I guess, I was just freaked out and wanted to share/discuss.

I read about this guy 40-50 years ago in The Readers Digest, have never heard anything about him since then, until the other day, a forum chat reminded me and I went rabbit-holing...

John Aristotle Phillips did an independent research project for his Physics degree at Princeton, on how to build a simple nuclear explosive device, including explicit instructions on how and why and etc. His larger goal was to help stop nuclear material proliferation by showing that there were no "secrets" left, no tech hurdles for anyone with a brain, except that of actually acquiring weapons-grade material.

His advisor was no less than Freeman Dyson, who gave him an 'A' and then immediately pulled the paper out of circulation. A couple months later, the Pakistani govt called Phillips, asking to buy a copy of his paper.

So, that's the background. It was his claim to fame back in the '70s.

From there, he went into politics, and etc etc, long story short, he's a top data broker. For decades now, he has been the CEO of one of the biggest US data trawling corporations, holding detailed personal info on at least 175M Americans (as of 2007 - doubtless, it's more today), which they use to help get politicians elected.

"Aristotle has served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan, and consults for several top political action committees."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips#Aristotle,_Inc.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who's devoted his life to gathering info about other people, there doesn't seem to be all that much out there about him or his company.

So, my gut tells me he has become "a bad guy", just my automatic reaction to anyone who deals in this field ... But, IDK, bigger picture is just, I don't know how to process this info. Maybe there's nothing to process, it is what it is.

IDK. Just looking for other people's perspectives, I guess.

I see that in the headline from time to time. Not really sure how prevalent it is and it's pretty disappointing news.

but I also can't help but think:

1. the news articles are probably overblowing it and it's not probably not as prevalent as it's being portrayed
2. that any tech company doing that is shooting themselves in the foot. in total, I was an intern at various companies for a little under 3 years. I don't doubt that the work I did for the majority of the my co-ops were all things that could have been done by a chatBot. writing unit tests and small scripts and etc. but they were invaluable to me (1) understanding what is expected of me in a professional environment and (2) gave me a basic idea of how to code in a professional environment (2) gave me alot of perspective on what technologies and tools I should spend spare time learning cause my university very much focused on dinosaur-era languages, for the classes that did teach any coding related skills. same for the friends I went to uni with. So all I think is maybe in the short term, they are saving money on not hiring interns/co-ops/junior devs to do work that can be done by a bot but I feel like in the long terms that will reduce the number of intermediate/senior devs on the market which means they'll be in higher demand and cost more money.

I have trouble setting a time to sleep and following through on it, and it's made my life needlessly worse. I find it especially difficult when I've had a really productive or busy day. I've tried setting a schedule on my phone that turns off certain apps past a certain time, but I keep manually turning it off. Any tips?

I don't have a pulse on this like I used to, but are there still big new arcade games being developed and made?

If I went to an arcade, could I play new stuff from the past few years, or is it going to be primarily old cabinets that have been maintained?

How many arcades are still out there anyway? Have they been able to survive against the widespread proliferation of consoles, phone gaming, home VR, etc.?

I'm curious as to whether arcade gaming is still alive or if it's a dead or dying art.