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What do you want for Christmas?
It can be anything: possible/impossible, material/immaterial.
I want the Ergodox EZ programmable keyboard. In my estimations, taking into account currency exchange, shipping and import taxes, it would cost R$ 2323.2 (2323.2 Brazilian Reais) to bring one home. That's 232% of our minimum wage.
So I bought some cheap games on the PSN and a 15 dollars vertical mouse instead.
Be healthy.
The ability to appreciate the things I do have more is probably the most correct answer I could give.
A variety of adhesives. I need E6000 or maybe industrial grade RTV silicone to fix hole in my shoe. I desperately need thermal epoxy to adhere the heatsink back onto my electric moped's motor controller, as well as mounting a heatsink to a raspberry pi. I also kinda wish I had a bunch of two-part epoxy and some fiberglass or carbon fibre to reenforce the farings on my moped. It's this cheap, thin ABS which just completely shatters if you so much as bump it at low temperatures. Hell, if I had enough I might even try making a vacuum forming rig and replace those farings entirely with carbon fibre, but that's getting a bit crazy. Oh, and also while I'm doing structural stuff on my bike, some Devcon plastic welder or similar to glue some nuts in place to replace the stupid clippy "fold nuts" that a lot of the plastic parts of my bike use.
Actually scratch all that, I really just want a whole new bike.
Better mental health.
2019 has been my own personal hell—and those mental demons don’t help. I‘ve been really fucked up by it, and I can only hope 2020 is better. Somehow.
A few years ago, I tried to take my own life for a bunch of different reasons. It didn’t work, obviously. There have been, and still are times, where 2019 has come pretty close to putting me back into that spiral again.
Hang in there man, I'm glad you're still here.
It gets better. Sheer white-knuckled perseverance, and some good medical care, will see you through the darkness to easier times.
A less f*cked-up climate. It was -12°C (10°F) here a week ago, with 25 cm of snow on the ground.
On Christmas Day, it's going to be 8°C (46°F). That's about 10°C warmer than average. The snow is completely gone, and everything is flooded.
Update edit: I was walking around outside in shirtsleeves today. We're now due to break the historical record (dating back to the 1880's) for highest nightly low temperature this week - seasonal average nightly low is -7°C (19°F). The ground shouldn't ordinarily thaw until April, and it's going to be 3°C (38°F). I'm at 45° N latitude, and I shudder to think about what's happening closer to the Arctic.
Irony edit: The spouse got me a gift certificate for cross-country ski rental.
36°C here in Perth, half of eastern Australia is on fire. It's crazy to think there are still climate change deniers out there.
They’re not just out there, they’re running many countries.
I still haven't figured out what I'm gonna do with my life. For some reason, the very thought of a normal life is depressing to me. There's nothing wrong with a normal cozy life but I just hope I'm not destined for normalcy... :/
There’s nothing wrong with normalcy. But every human is by definition unique so normality is an illusion. Just do whatever gives you joy.
I feel very similarly. I can't see myself living a normal average life and enjoying it, but I don't know what other options I have the ability to live.
A good first career, so I can finally make enough money out of my studies to have financial independence and mobility, and can start actually pursuing my dreams before I reach 30.
What are your dreams and what could you do, to maybe live them already now? I’m asking because I’m in a similar situation - currently in my last year of masters and already working on the side. I’m currently saving for the ability to maybe take a few months off after my masters and travel and I’m saving for my financial independence later
Well, I've embraced my kinks as much as I reasonably can to help combat depression (and it's been quite effective), so my dreams are mostly NSFW. Other than those, though, I hope to complete my several-years-long part time computer science course and get a decent job (I have mediocre grades, barely any qualifications and not enough recent employment history for references).
I almost managed on two occasions before my brain screwed it up. I'd have been working at a banking contact centre by now if it hadn't. Yes, customer service is generally bad and working the phones is worse, but at £9 an hour it would have been the highest-paying job in my history apart from the knackering Amazon fulfilment centre.
Good luck on your Masters. A holiday would be nice. The last time I went overseas for a holiday was probably 14 years ago.
Either a good(or at least above average) computer, with 32 gigs of RAM and 512 or more GB of storage, or a phone with 12 GB of RAM and 128/256 GB of storage, to store all the crap people send to WhatsApp, have room to buy new games that still receive dev support or have actual/active communities, and more seriously and way more personally, all the pictures my parents took of me and themselves up to 18 years ago, since those aren't stored for you by some social media platform because they're actually real pictures taking up a bunch of books under my bed or stored in my parent's nearly broken half-gig PC which I really don't trust. Obviously my father can't provide this on a minimum wage (well,he's autonomous so any wage figure is a guess), especially when my mother isn't working, so a more realistic gift would be a Nintendo switch (lite or not) with SMM. (Ideally 1&2.) Since just the switch lite alone is a minimum wage, this won't happen either so the only real 'gift' I'm getting is that going to a coastal city where my uncle lives, where we go regularly.
Can phones come with 12 GB RAM now? What is it all for?
Nobody seems to ever mention this in reviews and general discussions but RAM is quietly going up like crazy in cell phones. 4 GB is standard now, the high end Samsung S10 has a 12 GB option.
I always liked RAM as the "quiet" upgrade that doesn't do much for performance benchmarks but can cut off so much loading time by simply allowing for more stuff to remain open in the background to come back to without having to reload. Same reason I never mind browsers using "insane" amounts of RAM, it's often the main program I have open on my laptop and with the kind of crazy monstrosities websites have become, nowadays, I think using a good chunk of RAM on website data is a good use of hardware.
What would you use 32GB of RAM for? 16GB is enough for most use cases - even 8GB can take you very far if you use Linux with a performant desktop environment such as XFCE or KDE (yes - KDE is fast now). Unless you have a particular need for it, investing in a stronger processor and/or VGA and SSD storage will bring more noticeable performance gains.
I'm not who you're replying to, but I have 32gb in my current laptop. On my previous laptop there was this one time I had to convert a dozen or so PST files from one format to another, and the only way to do so was using a copy of Microsoft Office. The PST files were huge, so they took like a half hour to an hour each. So, in the end I spun up four windows 7 virtual machines with 4gb ram each, running microsoft office, with each one processing one PST file.
That turned out to be a huge mistake. I forget what I was using at the time, maybe VirtualBox, possibly qemu/kvm, but in any case the VMs allocated all of my host's memory, dragging everything to a crawl and making it virtually impossible (heh) to do anything as it started frantically swapping to my ssd.
Anyway, moral of the story, if you need to run 4 virtual machines on 16gb, you can't give them each 4gb ram. Whether you should be doing such things on a laptop in the first place is another argument, but in any case, I have 32gb ram now, and have never had this issue again.
Another brilliant idea of mine was to use VFIO to pass through my laptop's Nvidia Quadro card to a VM, use that to run Windows, and I could game inside a VM with a 2-5% performance loss. I ended up running into a bunch of problems with how my dGPU muxes video with my iGPU, and how it presents its VBIOS to the UEFI. Spent a bunch of time patching my vbios into qemu's OVMF UEFI, compiled custom versions of qemu, and a bunch of other stuff... In any case, if my idea panned out, I could give 16gb to windows and 16gb to linux, and I could have them live on separate virtual desktops, so I could simply hit
ctrl+alt+rightto switch to windows with full GPU gaming support, andctrl+alt+leftto switch back to linux with full open source coding support.TL;DR: If you know you have a need for 32gb ram, you can find a use for it.
Quoting myself:
I’d call your needs very particular.
useless point don't mind me I'm a logic nerd
I think that is at least weakly tautological, since
Can be rephrased as
I've fallen for one of the three classical blunders! Never get into a semantic argument when semantics are the subject of the argument!
Yeah, you're right. I suppose what I'm saying is if you're asking for 32gb ram, there's a good chance you know why you want it.
That is reasonable.
What are the three classic blunders? Never heard of it.
Sorry, That's a reference to this scene from the 1980's move The Princess Bride. It's not actually a real thing.
This movie was all over television in the 90s, but for some reason I never watched it.
It's really enjoyable. I highly recommend watching it if you get the chance. I've re-watched it recently and it withstands the test of time.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a must if you haven't already seen it - a lot of the same tongue-in-cheek stupid humour from the same era. Also the original Airplane movie.
I've never seen a Mel Brooks film that I didn't like :)
Ok, admittedly what I said in my comment is this comment but with actual specifications (Which as you pointed out I know very little about and are very useless.) I just wish I could overhaul all the hardware in my home because everything is so outdated and almost breaking. My phone is 1.5 GB of RAM and 8GB of room and my parents only recently bought a 32 GB SD card and my PC as i already said irritates me to no end because it never has enough room for anything. (And in retrospect this whole thing was mostly rant-y and ultimately pointless.)
My first instinct would be for my computer to be able to be upgraded. Pretty much all of my hardware is several years old and no longer all that great. The more I think about it though, a proper programming job would be better. My current job isn't awful – I have great coworkers – but it gives no real moment-to-moment agency, and I really miss that.
What sorta computer do you have? I have a gtx 970 I'll throw your way for the cost of shipping, and an lga 1150 (I think, not sure) motherboard for the same.
Oh wow, thank you so much for the offer! I'll probably leave it though; I wouldn't be able to fit a CPU into the motherboard, and my GPU (RX 470) is the least out-of-date part of my build, so the 970 wouldn't change much. Still though, I appreciate this tremendously — even knowing you'd be willing to help me out here was a fantastic thing to see for Christmas, so again, thank you!
Sorry for the late reply by the way. I swear I read this and promptly forgot to respond like five separate times :/
A legal name change, new documents, and an accepting family. A new laptop, an e-reader, a sturdy, comfy pair of leather boots. More clothes with more pockets, because pockets are cool.
I'll have to settle for my first paycheck. I'm not sure how much acceptance costs, but I think I should be able to afford the rest now.
First I will wish for 10 more wishes and see what the genie says.
“Don’t be a smart ass”, says The Genie.
This seems like a very low bar. Either way, even if you replaced the wish with "billionaires", their money would simply go to their descendants, which would become the new billionaires.
I would rather wish for a post-scarcity society, maybe in the form of a fully automated luxury communism.
The Culture, FTW.
As to @cardigan's banishment for those over a $100k/year income cap, that means a weird world without engineers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and other members of the professional class. It won't achieve any quality of life improvement for those who earn less. We've had a few very good years exceeding $100k, but many more badly paid, indebted years where school, rent/mortgage, auto costs, medical expenses, etc. left us far enough in the hole that we're just now above water. I expect this is increasingly true for younger U.S. professionals, especially those with kids, in high-cost communities.
So choose your wishes carefully, and vote Democratic Socialist.
Yeah... billionaires are an absurd distortion, but I have no issue with people making 100k. I do have an issue with societies in which you need to make 100k (or the local equivalent to 100k) to have access to things that should be universal like education, security and healthcare.
My sister lives in Sweden, and they do have rich people, but being rich is not a necessity. You can have a great life either way. Your children will have good schools, you can walk freely at any hour without a care and nobody goes bankrupt when their parents get cancer.
The Culture Series, a sci-fi series by Scottish author Iain M. Banks.
The science fiction author, Iain M. Banks, wrote a series of novels featuring the Culture, a space-faring post-scarcity society largely operated by benevolent full AIs. [You could say they collaborate with biological sentients for entertainment value.] There's nearly limitless capacity for material production. Every citizen has education and life opportunities exceeding the fantasies of present-day capitalists, including drug-secreting brain implants and near-resurrection from dangerous thrill-seeking.
This mention of the Culture follows from @mrbig's reference to "fully automated luxury communism". Most of the series' conflict centers on attempts to intervene or defend against cultures with different values. The Culture usually wins because it's just more advanced, efficient, and comfortable.
I never read these books, but they're on my list.
To not be bored. God, there is absolutely nothing to do today.
To quote my mother in law: Why is everyone sitting around looking at their phones?
well I guess i'm pretty fucking boring, doesn't really change anything for me.
Oh, grand thanks. That fixed everything.
Granted. A fascist totalitarian coalition takes over the entire planet. The world is now in peace. Enjoy :P
"Seems legit."
-Bill wurtz