Only if its something you don't want to be doing. You're not billing yourself for your hobbies.

No we're not going to die, but its nice to have things to do in such situations. When I was a kid we had a hurricane come through that knocked out our power for over a month.

That's not ideal unless you want to self-host a web-enabled local one. Most people need access to their password manager while on multiple computers and devices.

Most of the big ones have browser plugins, web management, and mobile applications.

If you subscribe to just about any VPN service (I do ProtonVPN) most of them have a good password manager.

They're just being a bit charitable with the definition of "void." They don't mean completely—or even mostly—empty; just that the density of matter is lower here than in most other parts of the Universe.

if I recall correctly, its on the scale of the Local Group that we are in a void. There are only three galaxies of any note nearby: the Milky Way (us), Andromeda, and Triangulum. All the other galaxies in the Local Group are relatively small and insignificant. Most other large galaxies have more massive neighbors within their respective groups than we do.

From my understanding, the solar system itself is also currently in a region of lower stellar density within the Milky Way, though that's a transient phenomenon that changes as we orbit the galactic center. I.e., if I remember correctly, around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, the solar system was passing through a denser region. One theory suggests that gravitational interactions with nearby stars may have increased the likelihood of asteroids being deflected into the inner solar system.

When looking for a picture of something, you're looking for a light reflection. The planet 110 light years away is close enough to its host start that it reflects a lot of light - to the point where there's still a tiny bit visible this far away. We also know exactly where to look - from this distance its basically right beside its star.

Any hypothetic planet 9 though, is much, much farther from its parent star, and will reflect very, very little light. And what light it does reflect would have to travel dozens to low hundreds of AU back to Earth again where it would be further reduced. Also because it is gravitationally bound to our own star but outside of our orbit, it could essentially be almost anywhere in the night sky.

Nothing would be confusing about it if that's what was written. The summary says "400m years ago" - which is apparently incorrect.

RISCV has ambitions greater than microcontrollers. Its a royalty free architecture as apposed to ARM which requires licensing fees.

There are already RISCV ITX motherboards (the Milk-V Jupiter) and small SOC computers that can run more complex setups.

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Basically, this.

Degrees aren't magic. Someone without a degree can know a hell of a lot more about a subject than someone who does have one - even for advanced subjects.

What a degree is though, is some level of proof to the rest of the world that the person has at least some baseline level of knowledge. If I'm hiring a programmer: 1 has a Computer Science degree and one doesn't. The guy without the degree MIGHT be significantly better, but I'm taking more of a risk because he also might be clueless. Now there's some risk in hiring the degree guy too, but there's LESS risk, because an accredited school has said that he has taken their classes and passed their exams to demonstrate at least some minimum level of proficiency.

They also show some level of commitment. A person who is willing to attend a school for 4 years and see the process through to the end has at least in 1 facet of their life finished a long and complicated task.

I'm personally in favor of the degree approach. That's what I did. Now when hiring I'll interview both sides and give everyone a fair shake. I've had good and bad results from both groups (degree and non-degree), but for younger people I still advise getting the degree as the better option.

Thanks - when I read TFS it sounded bad in my head. Thermal expansion would be very difficult to precisely repeat over extended intervals, which would make me very leary of trusting any storage technology that was relying on something constantly thermally expanding and contracting at set rates over a period of years.

Yeah - modern cars last a long time compared to those of old. I get some motivation to replace old cars for environmental reasons, but nothing is free. A more efficient vehicle required a lot of energy output to produce it in the first place and will still require some form of potentially non green energy to keep it going in the future.

Even if it pollutes more, keeping an older vehicle on the road may be more environmentally friendly than replacing it due to having to effectively make up the production energy cost.

Never underestimate the environmental benefits of just keeping things longer and not constantly churning production lines.

Don't know if I can switch as I'm still on a locked in rate, but I'm already a customer paying the extra for unlimited data.

Yes Comcast is notorious for high prices and bad customer service, and I'd love to support my local ISP (which I did for a long time), but the local guys have absolute shitting reliability. I'm paying more for Comcast and I'm locked in for a year or two but honestly the increase in reliability has been more than worth it (with the local guys I was getting disconnects probably a dozen times per day - with Xfinity aside from a cut cable that resulted in several hours of outage, its been rock solid).

Maybe it'll help some iPhone users migrate, but that's a hard no for me. Every time somebody hands me an iPhone I'm confused for a second on why the URL bar is at the bottom.