I had a car with an all wheel drive computer in a similar spot in the late 2000s.
I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.
Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
It's a little out of date, but the conclusions are still relevant.
Main things of note: Brickheads are pretty economical as a "parts pack." No significant correlation between per-piece pricing and IP licensing (except for Star Wars). Star Wars and City sets are overpriced.
As a kid I loved the giant boat hull piece because it was sealed and actually floated. This in combination with some larger pylon-type pieces from the Star Wars set meant you could build floating cities and vehicles and such and mess with them in the kitchen sink.
Lego suffers from a fandom problem among adults: They have strong nostalgia for how it was when they were kids and they think everything since then is against the natural order of Lego.
The best way to enjoy Lego is to give it to some kids and watch them get creative with it. Unlike all of the Internet complaints, kids have no problem having fun with Lego and being creative in their own ways.
- iMessage & SMS for most US based family, casual friends and co workers.
- WhatsApp for European Family
- Signal for one group of friends
- Telegram for another group of friends
Every time I message someone I have to remember what app to use. It’s annoying. This in addition to random threads that pick up with the same people on instagram, discord, etc., which I try to redirect to our “standard” channel as aggressively as I can.
While I knew that one off the top of my head... one of the neat "Show HN" that I recall from a bit ago: Show HN: Find the relevant Xkcd comic for your post using RAG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799291
> How it works - Simply paste your entire message or post into the search box to get the most relevant xkcd for it. No need to search by keywords, etc.
I will add that FreeCAD has come a long way in constraint based and parametric part design, and I'm able to use it exclusively running an Arch-based distro.
Deltahedra has extremely impressive tutorials on YouTube. No fluff -- no long intros or filler -- 30-60 minutes of dense content, clearly explained: https://www.youtube.com/@deltahedra3D
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
For what it's worth, I found (the start of the first book of) the Expanse to be this in a bad way, but the Martian to be this in a good way. I can definitely see why some people would find The Martian annoying too, but it feels more like a passion project than a TV pitch.
I don't like scifi or fantasy, hard or not, that turns into a technical manual. Which is another thing I heard of in connection to Weir. Brandon Sanderson's fantasy series with all those metals is another example. I managed to finish like 3 books but I simply skipped all the d&d manual like descriptions of metal usage.
FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.
I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.
Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.
This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece.
I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
Asimov was a brilliant mind, but I'm not sure the Foundation series holds up very well since chaos theory become established (it is 40+ years since I read the books though, so I could be remembering wrongly).
The sibling comment has a more structured reply to the whole process, but of note the article specifically mentions the FAA has exempted international flights.
I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.
A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.
The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.
I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.
Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.
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