I've been following this project for the past couple of years. The process of learning to manufacture enormous Nixie tubes as a product is a testament to Dalibor Farný's incredible dedication and skill. Who wouldn't like this succeed as a viable business? It's so niche, yet so cool.
One hopes that others who see this art work are inspired to use these incredible display tubes.
My wife and I agree that eating well is one of the most affordable luxuries. Eating in ordinary restaurants and ordering takeout becomes less attractive once you hit a threshold of kitchen competence. Our experience is home prepared meals costs 1/3 as much as purchased meals, and rarely results in a disappointing experience.
That's interesting because I find home cooking to be very expensive, if you value your time. Cooking for one, the marginal difference between the price of groceries vs eating out is easily outweighed by the time cost of shopping, food preparation and cleanup. Of course if you enjoy cooking it's a different story.
When I was saving for the down payment of my condo, one of the biggest changes I made was making my own lunch, rather than eating out every day.
There are going to be regional differences of course, but here in SF, a modest lunch costs at least $20. My average was around $25, or about $6500/year.
I adopted "meal prep Sundays" where I make all of my lunches for the week ahead, and the average cost is consistently around $5, making my annual weekday lunch cost about $1300. +$5200/year post tax to be used on other things.
Applying the same general idea to dinner unlocks further savings.
The funny thing is - I don't know that I'm even sacrificing time with this approach either. It takes me maybe 1.5 hours on Sunday for the lunch prep thing, but I'm saving a bunch of time by not physically going to restaurants, ordering, taking deliveries, etc. The variety is lacking with this approach, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my book.
I'm going to make some assumptions, so please forgive me if this is not accurate. You said you were in San Francisco and looking to buy property, so I'll guess you were probably a Senior Software Engineer at the time, based on presumed age and Hacker News demographic/location.
The median wage for that position and region is $295,000/year according to levels.fyi [1]. I happen to also live in the same city with the same job title, so I can confirm anecdotally this feels about right. It might have been lower back when you were saving though. Not sure how long ago this was, but let's roll with it.
5200 / 295000 = ~%1.8 of your gross income.
I'm a bit doubtful that you were able to prepare a week's worth of food in just 1.5 hours, including shopping and cleaning, but if so, that's incredibly efficient. Let's assume 16 waking hours per weekend day.
1.5 / (16 + 16) = ~4.7% of your weekend.
So very roughly speaking, we're looking at a marginal difference of saving around 1/50th of your income at the expense of around 1/20th of your free time. Personally I feel that's not worthwhile, and in my case the numbers are actually more stark.
This of course does not factor in the non-zero time to go out for lunch. This could significantly change the calculus. We're also not including non-financial factors which might play in.
I like the term "confabulation". A hallucination is an artifact of an intoxicated or malfunctioning brain. In my experience, confabulation is a common occurrence in normal brains, and can occur without intention. It's why humans make such poor witnesses. It's how the brain fills in the blanks in its senses and experience.
I was defeated in my first couple of attempts to reach page 100 in _GR_, so I picked up _The Crying of Lot 49_ to get a handle on pynchonism. That confirmed for me that reading _GR_ would pay off, if I could get past the early world building. Pynchon replaced Vonnegut as a central voice in my worldview, as I felt Vonnegut had settled into self-plagiarism. Thirty years later, Vonnegut is restored to his rightful place in my worldview, along with Pynchon (who has since become the self-plagiarizer). There is plenty of redeeming value.
What worries me about interacting with any cloud LLM or other AI is that the provider will record/analyze/sell my inputs, as is done with search queries today. I bet models can be trained to elicit personal info from the users. Users will be happy to comply, as long as they think it will give them a better answer.
I occasionally watch "let's play" videos as a harm reduced alternative to actually playing games. A half hour spent watching someone play a game/sim totally relieves my FOMO. It also dissipates my urge to build a gaming PC. As a maker and musician, there's tons of inspiring and informative content on YT. I feel that I'm quite net positive on my use of YT to enrich my life.
> a harm reduced alternative to actually playing games.
There's probably some merit to this statement, but I sorta laugh at the difference in harm between 'watching' and 'playing'. Maybe the most candid thing for us to do is acknowledge that the "harm" we're talking about is a lack of gratification.
Sure. Impulse control plays a major part in both though, which is mostly why I find it funny. My ex-boyfriend had ADHD and swore off video games for the same reason, but he'd end up watching YouTube for hours if I left him unchecked. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I feel like the difference between both addictions is smaller than it seems.
I'd argue passive consumption of content is worse then playing video games. I have no horses in this race, I admittedly spend way too much time streaming content. But at least with games you're doing something. Actively using your brain. There are studies showing games can improve dexterity and problem solving abilities. I doubt watching stuff does the same.
Depends who you're talking about. Those of us who've literally skipped work to play video games definitely find it easier to watch others play rather than dip our toes in ourselves.
Yeah it's all down to the individual. I used to play all the time when younger but now I play in pretty short bursts and it works fine. I just avoid any games as a service type games.
The PS5 is really nice at this because you don't even have to exit the game. Just send it into rest mode and when you come back your game is still running ready to pick up where you left off.
For me it's a lot more satisfying than watching a YouTube video, but YMMV.
Actually a really big harm is the opportunity cost and substitution for real life.
Video games feel like achievement but they're not --> so they don't get the rewards in life that come with real achievement --> so when they engage with real life it kinda sucks (from neglected chores, to neglected career and relationships) --> So they go to video games for that gratification feeling of status/achievement.
ironically enough thinking your life revolves around opportunity costs, achievements and reward cycles is a much more severe form of gamification than having a good time and playing some video games.
People putting in those 80 hours to get that one bonus and the guy trying to get all the Steam achievements are spiritually the same person, whether the source of the dopamine rushes is virtual or analog doesn't make much of a difference, including in terms of resulting misery.
Games as a form of creativity, play and connection are fantastic precisely because they're simply leisure activities, something increasingly lost on most people.
I was heavily addicted to Diablo 2, playing nonstop for months on end. I watch let’s play videos and can skip through the grind while getting the endorphin hit. I’ve played the re-master for maybe 16-24 hours total in 12 months. For me it’s less about the cost of the game and more about the potential amount of time I may sink into it.
One of these doesn't empty your wallet in the process. As a recent example, Stray costs $30 for 4 hours and no replay value, you bet your ass I watched that on youtube. It's even 2-3x worse in the console domain, especially for any AAA title.
> harm reduced alternative to actually playing games.
I don't quite see your logic here. How is it "harm-reduced"? Playing a game can be quite enriching and stimulating, whereas watching a video you're just sitting completely idle. To me, it sounds like you're just irrationally worried about playing a game for some reason.
Speedruns are bad at getting the normal feeling of a game across, and encourage watching multiple versions and attempts, and throwing a hundred speedruns together encourages a lot more watching than a trickle of half hour playthroughs as particularly interesting new games come out.
I think this suggestion does the opposite of help.
However... I have a little cousin in my family, and all she does it watch twitch. I've asked before "Don't want to play the games you're watching?" and she looks at me like I asked to solve fusion.
So, there is a hand shake meme of people who play because of twitch and people who just want to watch twitch... Good for twitch. Bad for humans.
I used an Alesis Quadraverb GT with an ART X-11 midi foot switch since 1991. I love great sounding pedals as much as the next guitarist, but I really didn't enjoy the care and feeding of a pedal board (those were pretty much all DIY in that era). The Alesis is still working 100% at age 32.
It's not even that complicated with hardware of that era.
Let's say you are afraid to destroy the through holes of the multilayer PCB by de-soldering the broken parts, or heating bordering parts up too much, whatever.
In most cases you can pull the caps just off from their pins, clean the pins, (even with paper tissue only) and simply solder the new ones to the old pins still anchored in the board.
Once I discovered "desoldering needles" I basically stopped being scared of desoldering through hole parts altogether. You can get a set cheaply on aliexpress or amazon or whatever.
You slide the needle over the component leg and then melt the solder. The needle slips over the component leg. Wait for the solder to cool and pull the needle out. Hey presto the leg is separated from the PCB pad. Also works great for cleaning solder out of a hole after traditional desoldering.
Indeed, don't throw out old boards due to bad caps. I'm working on building a recapping skill so I can keep my old hardware alive as well. It's pretty cool to have the ability to take old non-working or marginal hardware, apply heat and modern capacitors to it, and make it stable again.
Same thing happened to me. Then I decided to start reading ahead every 5 pages, scanning for something that engaged me. I finally found it in the chapter "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering". I read a while more, and determined it was good enough to go back 80 pages and keep slogging. Pynchon's bricks sometimes require that cheat.
One hopes that others who see this art work are inspired to use these incredible display tubes.