My little sister was the special one, deserving of all the praise and the you can do anything attitude. I was the fuckup, who would be lucky to graduate high school. I wasn’t discouraged, just not encouraged. A lost cause I guess, ignored mostly except when I needed the occasional bail or whatnot. My sister wanted to pursue her dream of being an actor, but never made it, worked at a theme park to pay the bills while doing student films (long after she was a student), eventually getting divorced and working some copy editing or marketing type gig for a small company. She is not on speaking terms with the family, something about accusing mom of writing a negative comment on the YouTube video of one of those student films. I meanwhile had bungled through college, but with the help of my then girlfriend and now wife ended up as a fairly successful attorney. I’m not the “the” of anything really, but I’m doing pretty good considering my background and low expectations.

I remember having dinner with my family at one point when I was in college. I had started as a music major, but switched to poli sci before going to law school route. I remember my sister saying it was “sad and depressing” that I gave up my dreams of playing music, while she was pursuing her dream of being an actor. Ten years later I have a good income, a job I generally enjoy, a good family, etc. my sister is divorced, never achieved her dreams, is working a soul sucking dead end job, seems close to broke, and is isolated from her family.

I think about that a lot now that I have a baby of my own. I want to encourage the kid, follow your dreams, you can be anything etc. But at the same time I don’t want my kid to end up like my sister. I don’t know the answer. Maybe it’s a middle ground of “chase your dreams, but be reasonable, and life isn’t just about fake and racking up accomplishments, enjoy normal things, don’t pursue fame and fortune as if it’s the only thing that will bring happiness”.

Very interesting. So the VPN that comes with Google one is useless lol. The first time I connected it routed me through Google (like it’s supposed to), then through an ad network (!), then on my way. Switching it on and off half a dozen times for additional tests, it just didn’t bother routing through Google at all, just straight through my wireless carrier and showing the same user IP each time. So neat.

I was annoyed, like the OP, then I read your comment and now I’m impressed and have an urge to buy a copy of OED I most certainly will never open. They owe you a commission on my sale.

I’ve used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it’s sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say “ok make an image based on that description”). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.

I feel like if I ever become an audiophile, I’ll probably be looking at getting a separate music player with a DAC, a Tidal subscription, and a pair of kickass wired headphones. But for now, I’m mostly listening to podcasts and for music I use Spotify for it’s discovery features, and their audio quality is subpar already. Even if I had a headphone jack, I’m not really benefiting from superior sound quality but I am getting frustrated with tangled cords and getting caught on doorknobs. I’ll take the convenience of Bluetooth, especially while working out. And Bluetooth standards have been getting better anyway, in a few years it might be on par with wired.

I know literally nothing about computers and I’ve been daily driving Linux for well over a decade. I just use Ubuntu and I’ve been pretty much using all the default settings, apart from some customization here and there. There was a time years ago when I wanted to learn and tinker, but in reality I never learned to use the command line for more than running updates (I still sudo apt-get update cause it makes me feel like hackerman).

My point is, Linux is super easy to just set up and run. If you want to learn more, there’s plenty of opportunities for that. But it’s not something to be intimidated by at all. A lot of the community is enthusiasts (who’ve I’ve found extremely helpful back when I used to have problems) so you’ll hear more jargon in these spaces. But I’m sure there are tons of others like me that use Linux just fine day to day without understanding a ton about computers.

This is the advice I heard on the Vergecast. The best printer for anyone is whatever Brother laserjet is currently on sale.