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To have an original idea i need to take my mind of things.

For small problems i like taking a walk, sometimes talking to someone helps (a dog is great at that, they love the attention, or a guinea pig which will also talk back to you (week week brrr...) just to be able to work at the situation at hand from a different perspective since you have to explain the situation to someone without knowledge about it.

doing something totally different for a while.


say you search for a new job using your email at your current employer...

using company computer is the same problem if you open your private emails on their machine


Zero Trust.

apart from them getting to know everything what you do it is also important to understand that your employer will be liable for anything you do with their computer.

(Download something by bittorrent, even if it is a legitimate Linux distro -> no fun to explain when /when, not if/ your employer gets sued)


have old pc hardware mostly.

get an WD Green 120 GB SSD for about 20 - 25 €.

Have a teenager / child come over with their parents and we build their first pc from the parts up.

The kids install the windows license which came with the pc because school requires windows programs for homework.

Kids are proud, most of them would not be able to get a computer of their own otherwise.

computers are to slow for gaming, just useful for libre office... to bad...

the kids will get an introduction to google and how to use youtube the right way (you either waste your life on youtube or you will get on a path to better grades - your choice) and a stern warning to stay off facebook, tik-tok and the ilk.

hardware lasts until 8th - 9th grade usually, by then they have cheap smartphones of their own.

one interesting note: i was a proud owner of an Commodore PC 10-III (msdos, 4.77 MHz, 640 KB RAM) and my own legal (!) copy of turbo pascal 4.0. i did a lot of things with that beast.

None - Not even one - of the kids who could have visual studio community, lazarus, haskell, whatever on their machines will ever try their hands at programming (while having a virtual tutor on youtube !).

They wouldn't even scratch (oh the pun indeed) the surface of cs...


Exactly that.

This means accepting loss and hurt.

Definetely a very hard thing to do if the bad people are familiy.

Might be impossible if the bad person is your spouse and you have kids. Might mean that your kids are retaliated on.

but the most difficult thing is to be sure that they are the bad people and not you yourself. If you don't struggle with this then you might be the problem - Not them.


No longer working for bad clients.

There are so many bad clients out there which will actively hurt you to press the most benefit out of you until you drop. dead.

you can only hurt me once. the second strike is only possible because i did not quit the first time. So it is my fault.


Genetic longevity has evolved.

Consider a queen bee. Her livespan is so much longer (several years) compared to the worker bee (4 weeks during spring/summer/fall, until winters end for the hibernating generation).

The Queen's task in the live of the hive is to provide an unqenchable source of high quality genetic material to grow worker bees from which in turn will provide the hive with the periolous work required to sustain the hive.

And yet still there is an end to the queen's live.

Cloning a plant from a branch by covering a branch in soil, have it grow roots and then sever the connection is a mechanism of getting a new copy of the organsism. It might be interesting to find out if that resets the clock on a multi-year plant in respect to the original individual from which the branch was taken... Consider the top of an pineapple... you can grow an entire pineapple plant including the fruit from it...)

So longevity is not the absence of aging.

There might be serveral distinct constituents to aging:

1 the accumulation of damage (wear and tear)

2 an actual genetic programmed decline of biological function

3 an update to the genetic programming of the entire organism is not feasible

1 There might be damage which can not be repaired. For example there might be toxic substances building up or there might be a limit to the complexity or plasticity of a neural network. After exceeding such a limit the function may no longer be available in the required quality (Cortanas's Rampage..., Prions, the degradation of tendons (for example: the ligaments in a humans knee degrade...)

2 There is a cycle of life which has evolved in multicellular organisms. Single cell Organisms still have a cycle while not aging:

Build up sufficient material in the cell to sustain 2 individuals * divide into 2 individuals, such that every clone has at minimum the required parts to sustain itself * repeat

All multicellular organisms start reproduction from a single cell. In their youth they build up to their adult forms which are reproductive. After reproduction the parent generation may or may not nurture the offspring.

The complex mechanism of growth from a single cell to adult form relies on molecular clocks: Puberty starts at a certain age, and even before that the development of the embryo requires a sequence of aging - for example the fingers of a hand develop out of a flat proto-hand because the cells between the fingers die. So autocytosis - programmed cell death - is essential to the development of an organism.

*3 Evolution works by altering the genetic programming by mutation in the offspring, putting these copies in living specimens of the next generation into the environment and just by chance the mutations prevail whose specimens did not die before reproduction.

So longevity and aging is of no concern to evolution by itself.

Those mutations which can prevail in the environment will be found at a later date - dying off means vanishing from the population.

So the question is how would not aging benefit the sustained success of a genetic conglomeration of genes in an ever changing environment ?

While you can not fundamentaly alter the programming of an adult individual organism ?

Longevity and aging are of no more concern to evolution as much as it affects the success / survival of the next generation while changing by selection as much as is required to survive.

You don't do anything for your offspring - you get the mayfly.

you feed the baby - bees.

you feed the baby and teach it - the cat which trains the kittens to catch mice

you extend on the training routine until you develop a culture which preserves survival techniques through the ages - homini

You need an ever extending life time to achieve this support to the next generation.

But from the point of self-reliance of the kids in their life there is diminshed evolutional pressure to keep the parents alive.

So longevity / absence of aging would be a fluke - if the old generation was not consuming ressources while still running an old inefficient set of genes and reproducing child generations with less adaptations than the current great-grandchildren.

So no aging would hinder the survival chances of the offspring.

Therefore longevity is selected for as long as the set of genes in the next generation is getting a benefit from the parents being still alive.

Immortality is actively negatively selected.

Aging is allowed by the diminishing effect of parental death on the survival chances of the offspring.


Data Tau http://www.datatau.com/news is a site using the hacker news stack focusing about data science. Quite slow, but some nice articles / links there.


The pain you feel might be from the part of you (it might feel like a part of your soul) that is now missing - that is the reason it hurts so much.

Realize that this part of you is with your friend as you had shared time, life and love together.

But in all that hurt and pain due to the loss also realize that there is a part of your friend still with you. Find it. Your tears will lead the way.

That might be a way love bridges even death.


This notion that you do not need any kind of mathematical knowledge is widespread.

Ever tried to delete 1 000 000 files in Windows Explorer ? Select All, Shift delete ?

Takes ages. Why ? because Explorer creates a list of files to be deleted by adding one after the other to the list while updating the screen.

del bak\[asterisk.asterisk] /S /Q /Y >NUL takes some time, but is way faster.

rmdir bak drops the entire directory and returns instantly.

The difference ? O(n^2) versus O(n) versus O(1)

Useful knowledge ? ... possibly.

Even then 'just' programming a website, winging full stack or doing anything worthwile you can get by without knowledge, but it sure helps...

P.S. how do you escape an asterisk ? Even google didn't know / i didn't find it...


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