ekholm_e

I mean, it depends. Gambling in moderation is fine, and it can be fun. Aside from concerns about supporting casinos/gambling companies (which I'll acknowledge are real), I don't see any difference between paying $200 to play blackjack for a couple of hours and paying $200 for some other form of entertainment (e.g. attending a live show).

When my wife and I moved into our previous house (in a bit of a rough neighborhood), the owners before us had an ADT security system installed. We didn't re-up the contract, but we kept the sign.

This. I'm a former teacher. I left to get a PhD in educational psychology, and now I'm a data scientist for a large school division. The number of ed tech companies I interact with who clearly have little grasp of research-based best practices in education is staggering. But they can all build slick-looking websites and dashboards.

It sounds like a job for a pocket-size notebook.

This. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k

I'm a data scientist and not a graphics programmer, but my guess is that it's just abstracted away more. If you're using ML/DL libraries, you're mostly just calling APIs that handle the linear algebra and calculus for you. Unless you're actively contributing to those libraries, you likely don't ever need to "touch" any of the underlying operations. Up to a point, it's useful to understand how things work under the hood, but where that point is kinda depends on your job. For instance, I could write code to do 'naive' matrix multiplication, but I couldn't, like, contribute to BLAS.

George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

My wife works at the Fed, and I can confirm that 1) the Fed does decommission/retire bills and 2) that whole process is very tightly controlled. The retired bills are typically shredded, and if you go on a tour of a Fed bank, you can get little baggies of "Fed Shreds."

So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in the cube is decommissioned.

I used to work as a barista, and we had several entrepreneurs/small business owners who worked at the shop regularly. Most were friendly with one another. I'm not sure if any actually did business together, but they definitely chatted here and there.