dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Help stop the spread of social anxiety. A fact sheet.  FOMO (fear of missing out) and status anxiety are highly contagious social anxieties. 😨 What are they? The fear of being excluded from knowledge, experiences, and interactions (FOMO), and consequentially being considered unsuccessful by society (status anxiety). What Are the Symptoms?

Why not? Calculators sure changed mine. A lifetime ago, in a safe but stifling job, I found an online mortgage calculator that visualised the power of extra repayments. Having just borrowed to buy a home, it opened my eyes. I was hooked. Learning that early escape from debt was possible made it my obsession. I checked that calculator after every stymied project and pointless restructuring. So, like, twice a day. With few opportunities to flex my skills in my IT role, I wrote other calculators to rationalise and strategise my approach to life.

 ... Because the default voices are awful. Still want text read to you by something resembling a human voice? It's easier to switch to the latest in text-to-speech (TTS) technology than you think.

For a disposable Linux command-line shell VM: Load/create a Colab notebook , Change the runtime type to 'T4' if you want to use an LLM (AI),  Paste the following into a cell and run it: XTerm !pip install colab-xterm %load_ext colabxterm %xterm An interactive terminal will start.

Generative AI uses energy and pumps out CO2, yes, but so do humans.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 6 If the world of Genshin Impact is so good, why don't you just go and live there? Good question, but first, a digression for context. My spouse commented that video games are subversive by allowing people to become powerful alluring characters. Me, a superhuman anime waifu? Novel, but fleeting. Even with jiggle physics.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 5 Part of Genshin Impact's approach to its artificial scarcity is to bombard you with varied rewards so that, much like real life, there is always another way to progress. However, with that abundance comes complexity. The game's transparency only goes so far in helping you navigate it. Where else can you turn for help? Who else can you turn to for help? A lot of what makes the Genshin Impact experience great comes from outside the game.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 4  At some point in Genshin Impact, as in real life, you will face running out of stuff.  What has that taught me about approaching that scarcity, and can I apply it to everyday life? Many Ways to Play

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 3 The drive to play on is supported by the constant accrual of rewards, plus the assurance - not mere promise - of future rewards. "Pfft." You may say. "How can one trust claims of certainty in a game genre explicitly run on chance?" Trust through Transparency 

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 2 Genshin Impact satisfies my craving to micro-manage. Even offline, planning my next moves in the game world displaces anxiety about what may happen in the real world. It exhausts my rumination like a mental chew toy, after which I have little urge to fret further. Nevertheless, should I be worried that I so easily place a trivial computer game before more mundane matters? A better question to ask may be, ' Why do I?' I have a theory:  Always Be Compensated

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 1. Genshin Impact is more than a gorgeous open-world fantasy game with deep lore and a stirring soundtrack. In a half-year or so of play, it has taught me... Fight Worry with Worry

Got a site which won't allow you access from overseas?  Got no VPN? Got an internet-connected Raspberry Pi?  Read on.

The space between us is smaller but the gap between our experiences is wider. How can science fiction help?

Racism appended to COVID-19 discussions, and how to respond.

Access cloud storage, like OneDrive or Google Drive, as easily on a Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Linux) desktop as you would on a Windows PC.

Cloak your location and create a firewall bypass device with a smartphone. 🕵Uses the Tor network . Does not require root. 1 - from Google Play, download and install: Orbot Orweb browser Socks Server Ultimate (Optional)