It was a gift, but now that I've owned it a while, I'm rather fond of my Garmin. The battery lasts for weeks, and it provides detailed stats on activities, sleep habits, etc.. I was surprised but I rather enjoy keeping up with family and friends when they share their bike rides/skiing/diving activities. It's also a handy compass and gps that I now automatically have available on any hike.

It's interesting, GME was up 12% yesterday after announcing they would hold bitcoin in their treasury. But now down that and more after announcing a Michael Saylor style playbook of issuing convertible bonds to buy bitcoin.

I think antioxidants are quite important. You can't eliminate all sources of free radicals in the body, nor should you want to, so allowing natural mitigation from antioxidants seems like it would be fairly important. I've always tended to shop around the periphery of the grocery store (i.e., primarily fresh produce, meat, and maybe a little dairy.) Eating a diet of less processed foods naturally seems to provide reasonable sources of antioxidants, which at least makes some intuitive sense as our bodies evolved for millennia to thrive on these food sources.

As a US citizen, it was honestly a relief to have the attacks against the bitcoin ecosystem and self custody abate with the change of the administration. As a liberal leaning voter, I also didn't mind the DNC getting their asses handed to them after endless self-goals and a total disdain for the general voting public. However, all that is a small consolation if the judiciary gets stripped of its independence and the limits on power that allowed the US to flourish are systemically removed. This president and administration are way too cozy with authoritarians and their methods for my liking. I really don't care about pumping my bags - bitcoin was going to survive just fine regardless. I'm less confident about the outcome for democracy in the US.

I'm setting off tomorrow on a 5 day canoeing trip. There was definitely a lot of thought and planning around how to get potable water for drinking, cooking, cleaning up, etc. over the course of the trip for 15 people. It really makes you appreciate everyday access to clean water from the tap.

Spam prevention here seems to mean the same as channel jamming. It's an interesting concept. I didn't read the linked paper, but it seems like the burned funds would need to be aggregated or a channel will accumulate a lot of tiny outputs. That also raises the point that it changes the economic incentive of the channel opener slightly. Whereas now forwarding a payment may reduce your balance, it simultaneously grants you an equivalent inbound liquidity on the other side of the channel. That would no longer be the case if bits of the channel capacity are gradually lost to the burn outputs.

It seems like this would reduce risk for routing large payments, but it could make small payments extremely costly if they fail.

There is no security in 0-conf. Use it at your own risk. That said, Zeus does have a reputation, and they take no risk in opening the 0-conf channel to you. They're probably not incentivized to rug you, but you're absolutely trusting them when receiving on an unconfirmed 0-conf channel.

I've not used it, and there's not much information provided on the filter, but I suspect it's sufficient for light use. Keep in mind you'll have to replace filters regularly. My makerspace had two 40W 12"x24" laser cutters that some days were kept in nearly continuous rotation. They were the most popular tool by far. We now have six, so it's less of an issue, but external ventilation saves a lot of hassle here.

A 40W CO2 laser is incredibly useful (cuts acrylic, plywood, cardboard and etches a lot of materials), but requires ventilation. A basic electronics lab. There are various versions of desktop CNC endmills/routers as well.

I do my own tax prep because I don't want to fund the lobbying that makes the tax code ever more bloated and convoluted. It's a lot more work than just avoiding the companies I most disagree with (ethically) in my portfolio, so yeah, I put my money where my mouth is there too.

The relentless march of enshittification. You have to answer 20 questions just to book a flight these days. How many bags? Every airlines sizes and weight limits are a little different. Do you want to pay extra to sit next to your spouse? How much legroom do you need? It's no trivial thing to just compare fares. Perhaps my AI agent can soon sort it all out, but what a mess. I liked SW because, despite not being the cheapest, they made the mental burden of planning very mild. They used to be highly reliable too.

Ouch, that background section could have been written by a cargo cult. A bitcoin wallet operates almost nothing like a bank account. That choice of term was kind of unfortunate - it often deceives new players.

What sort of fish are these? They look a bit like remora, though I can't say I had ever seen or heard of this particular behavior. Pretty fascinating; great shots!

The extent to which bitcoin has leveled the playing field across the world is just astounding. Whether, by luck of genetic lottery you grew up in Palestine, or on Wall St., bitcoin offers the same access to the protocol and network. It grants global financial access to the most repressed, and limits the power of their dictators and abusers.

And in an era shaped by ever faster productivity improvement, whether by AI or other technology advancement, bitcoin is the first credible solution to the age old problem of spreading around the benefits of our ingenuity. Without it, we risk a dystopian future, where the benefits accrue to an ever shrinking pool of the population while the majority struggle to survive. Our fiat inflationary system is coming face to face with the cold hard realities of technological progress.

All this to say, the world needs bitcoin, and the degree to which it changes the game can't be undersold. It's a true revolution in decentralization and a trust in math and cryptography over politicians. There are no insiders in bitcoin.

It's unfortunate that we still have snake oil salesmen and affinity scams in this day and age, but it shouldn't be surprising. However, if people took a minute to understand what they have in Bitcoin, it's actually quite easy to spot the fraudsters. I'm sorry about your friend, but he clearly didn't learn what bitcoin is, or what it's about before he was sucked in by the lure of "easy money" by a con man.

My first career was mechanical engineering and this was my go-to source for any prototyping supplies. Their catalog is extensive, but more than that the data the have on every part (and allow you to query) is incredibly detailed and useful - basically exactly what a designer would need.

Say you want a bolt - you'll need a certain material for the application because maybe it needs to be corrosion resistant, or have high strength - you can filter by that. Then whereas other places will let you select by thread size, McMaster has selection for overall length, thread length, head type, tensile strength, self-locking, you name it. All these details that make it incredible useful to incorporate into a design. And then each part has a fully dimensioned drawing with tolerances and callouts so there's almost no ambiguity! Who does that?

McMaster-Carr is really a master class in UI when it comes to shopping for technical products/materials. It's clear they put in the effort.

I second CLBOSS. It's not perfect, but it manages your liquidity pretty well and gets you plenty of usable inbound. There's also a much simpler fee adjuster plugin if you just want to keep established channels balanced.

Yes, CLN supports blinded paths in bolt12 offers and invoices. They are normally only used when the node has no public channels (and really needs these.) I noticed some interoperability problems with them recently, at least with LDK - still trying to get to the bottom of it, but blinded paths are generated when needed and it works between Core Lightning nodes for sure. Because of the strong privacy guarantees debugging blinded paths issues is much trickier than with standard invoices and payments.

Edit: you should be able to use lightning-cli decode on either the offer or the invoice to see which paths or route hints were included.

Well with that kind of evidence, obviously! Also, options don't work like that.

Besides bitcoin I just own some (micro)strategy options contracts. Ditched the 401k, but rolled over just a bit into a self directed IRA to play with options. The options dabbling has treated me very well, though I'm not sure I would count it as diversification.

Even going with a chromosomal definition gets difficult quickly. It seems like that would make for a binary classification, but that's only mostly the case. There's XX and XY, sure, but 0.15% of people are XXY, and there are some with just a single X chromosome. There's even XXYY, or XXXY combinations (seems like mathematically we're halfway between male and female ratio here.) How about XXXXY? Nature is wild - it keeps life interesting. Also it doesn't care about our labels.

As an engineer, if I had no problems to solve I would be miserable. I think we need at least a little struggle; I would say we're almost prewired for it. Maybe things like scientific discovery and advancement could provide enough of a goal, but betting on that sounds like a gamble.