In US, life insurance will not pay outwithout a death certificate. Going missing will never allow one to pay out, until someone convinces a court the person who went missing is dead.

Some policies, primarily Whole Life policies, have a Terminal Illness Rider. These allow up to 70% payout prior to death if someone has less than a year or two to live. Alzheimers is probably not on the list, but each company is different.

Better option is to get a lawyer and put every asset you have in a trust with your beneficiaries as thr trustees. Set up power a of attorney as well.

I’m a slow reader and have trouble sitting down with a book, though I will if the book is good enough. For folks like me, I’d recomend starting off with an audio book. You’ll get the story and it might get you interested enough to eventually pick up a book. It’s a good transition from movies or tv into reading. I know multiple people, along with myself, who’ve gotten into reading by starting with audio books.

As far as books go, you might like one of these:

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

I recommend this book to everyone! If you like video games and humor, this is the book for you. It’s a fantasy / sci-fi about a guy forced into a type of game with a sidekick (who I wont talk about due to spoilers). It’s fantastic. Quick paced and very funny. Highly recommend this in audio book format.

• The Heist by Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg

FBI agent and con man forced to work together, buddy action style. Similar to Rush Hour in tone and silliness.

• The Intern’s Handbook by Shane Kuhn

An assassin beomes an intern in an office. It’s dark, but funny, especially if you work in an office type setting.

• Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Detective and con woman team up. It’s funny and fast, and kind of weird.

Most likely it’s because you haven’t found the types of books you like, or at least the writing style you like to read. Modern writing is much more condensed than it was even 20 or 30 years ago.

What’s your favorite genre of movie or show?

Lin-Manuel Miranda would be able to do it as a musical.

Scrape, fill, prime, paint.

Scrape the raised area with a razor blade. Block sand it with 80 grit, hitting more than just the bad area.

Cover with a thin coat of wood filler, using heavy pressure to force the filler into the fibers. Once that dries, block sand again with 120 grit, then once more with 180 grit. Make sure you sand beyond the patch to blend the repair into the rest of the sill.

Thoroughly clean the dust. Apply two coats of primer to the full sill. Once dry, sand lightly using 220 grit, without a block.

Clean up any dust, then paint.

You’l have a smooth sill with no signs of damage.

I have ADHD, so hobbies, mostly. And 3/4 finished projects that I’ll totally come back to and finish one day.

My degree is in Computer Engineering, dipshit.

You made up this fantasy that somehow I don’t know what I’m talking about based on nothing other than you wanting me to be wrong so your world view isn’t challenged.

I stared out with the assumption that you were having a good faith discussion. It’s now clear that you’re a troll, tech bro, AI lover, or all of the above. At this point, I’m done with you and encourage others to be as well.

Friday.

I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those “engineer level” developers you speak of.

Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it’s a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns… even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn’t have enough context or because something is new.

Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.

Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It’s creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.

Stories put together by larger studios are made to suck every penny out of it they can. They make formulaic stories, distilled down to an average denominator of the population. Predictable, mediocre, and bland have become the norm, in order to mass market one thing after another. We are being inundated with heartless, soulless content.

Look for more indie or low budget things. Those are put together by people who want to do it. By people who want to tell their story, show their art, and make something great. Great stories are still being told, you just have to find them.

*Edit: spelling

Agreed. When using a hosted font, the browser sends a full GET request. That includes all headers that service has access to. IP address, browser agent, referrer, origin, etc. Some of this depends on the site’s CORS (which are often incorrectly configured) and other settings, along with browser cache; but in general it’s just another GET.

By using the hosted font, Google is absolutely getting tracking information. Yes, they say it’s not tied to an account, though it’s easily done since they have the IP and browser / device info. True, it’s not as intensive as an analytics api, but it’s still tracking. I have no doubt that they map the font usage to account metadata in order to build and sell usage profiles. It is speculative, in the same way the person standing over a body, holding a bloody knife is speculative of the killer. It’s close enough for their purposes. Also, many ad blockers block analytics urls, fonts are a different matter (though you can enable font blocking in some.)

For stronger security, and to prevent data leakage, when building a web application, host your own fonts. When using the web, block third party fonts. Or if you care to go all-out, setup a forced redirect to locally hosted fallbacks instead of going out to the open web to get a font.

Google isn’t freely hosting fonts as a kindness.

I still say it to mine.

It’s a creased area that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Creases such as elbows, armpits, knees, and groin are places where sweat and dead skin gather and should be cleaned. Behind the ears, especially if someone has long hair, is another, but tends to be forgotten, especially by kids.

I can confirm. I have the family plan and got ads when I was listening earlier today. Contacted support. Got no where. Canceled my subscription.

My caffeine intake fluctuates in an almost cyclical pattern. I’ll injest a lot to the point of ineffectivness, then scale back to nothing, then slowly ramp up again. It’s not purposefull, just a natural progression I tend to follow.

Right now, I’m off it completely. I’ll stay this way until I have a day where I’m really tired. I’ll break down and have a cup of coffee. That’s usually the breaking point for me.

At the max, a day could be two Monster energy drinks, four to five 12oz cups of coffee, and an occasional cup of black tea. A few days at this point and I feel nothing from it, and begin to scale back.

I haven’t gotten to that level since starting on ADHD meds. Turns out I was self medicating without realizing it.

I’m going to be that person, and disagree with the common opinion here. Of course, my take is my own, so take everything below with the finest grain of salt.

I think it’s perfectly fine to have friends of the opposite gender. And by opposite gender, I mean the gender you’re attracted to. However, I do think it’s an issue to have a best friend of the opposite gender. A best friend is the person you confide in, you can lean on when everything else is rough, who will be there no matter what. If that person is the opposite gender, and isn’t your SO, then it’s an affair; not necessarily a physical affair, but an emotional one at the very least.

The “waiting his turn” comment sounds like a little bit of immaturity mixed with jealousy. I don’t mean immaturity as a negative; more like someone who has room to grow. Based on that comment though, it sounds like they aren’t comfortable with the situation, even if they say they are.

I’m not saying you should break up. I’m not saying your SO thinks the same way I do. People are nuanced and I only have the very limited information you gave. Based purly on that, it sounds like your SO’s thoughts lean the way mine do.

What it comes down to is what you and your SO think. If you’re not on the same wavelength, then there will always be a wedge between you two. You can still make a relationship work, it’s just going to be harder. On the flip side, if you’re both, deep down, truly fine with it, then there is nothing to worry about, and you should go live your best lives.

Whatever happens, this random internet stranger wishes you both the best.

I don’t understand why they keep adding AI crap to everything. There can’t be a huge market of people who want it. It’s incredibly expensive to develop and run. Just from an economics point of view it doesn’t add up.

Is it just the corporate equivalent of FOMO? Wouldn’t it make more economic sense for them to release a base device that is capable of having AI apps/agents installed if and when the consumer wants it, rather than defaulting to it? Or are they so tightly bound in their own bubble that they don’t see the problem?

It’s like basic economic theory, has been thrown out the window; along with common sense.

Could be either, depending how you write it.

Lean into the creepy factor and ramp up the anxiety by adding recent events found in the tape and a feeling of en-ease as they’re discovered. Deja vu can solidify it further, causing chills down the spine. Add an event that is then found on the tape before it happens, proving it’s a prediction. As the tape is repaired, more is discovered. Your indication of progress is how much tape is left to repair, providing a mystery, and anxiety, of what will be found next.

Lean into the sad factor by showing the world now and reminiscing on the lost. Ramp it up with something the character loved, maybe shown in the tape, and then showing the last of it going away. Add in the nice old man, the character’s savior, dying; not from age, but because of the destruction. Could show malnourished children, though that can be triggering. Showing malnourished animals would give a strong visceral reaction without having the same trigger. Be careful going too far in this direction as it can quickly become depression porn. You’d need to have a ray of hope or something the character is fighting for. The tape could help if it’s shown to have accurate predictions. It could show a happy, green field, blue sky, kids playing type thing at the end. This could give the character hope.

Another layer of sadness would then be an oscillation between believing in the happy prediction or not. To ramp that up, show one tape prediction as false, or presumed to be false to the character though actually true. (Think Shrek 2 when he thinks the potion is a dud until the next morning, though the audience sees it worked after he turned away). It’d be up to you to determine if the final hope is true or not, letting you end on a high note, or a low one. Either way could be impactful.

Overall, it’s a fun premise which you can take in many directions.

I might be an outlier, but I enjoy working. I like what I do. I also like having money.

Most days, when I get home, I do whatever housework is needed and still have time to spend with my family, work on home projects, or relax and play a game or whatnot.

Take care of yourself by exercising and eating right, find a job you enjoy, and you won’t be dead tired after work. Granted, there are occasional days when I’m exhausted, but they’re the exception, not the norm.

I’m middle age, and as much as you are not looking forward to working, that’s how I feel about retirement. I don’t know if I will ever retire, not because of money, but because I think I’d get bored.

What are you talking about? C# is massively popular, especially with corporations and government. If someone wants to get a job writing software, they won’t go wrong learning C#.

Python is great for data evaluations and scripting. There’s nothing wrong with learning it, or any other language for that matter… including Java, C, or C++