If your webservice is multi-tenant, and one downstream service has high latency, how can you reject only the requests that use that specific downstream service?
I recently made a change to the Moirai Programming Language that allows for dynamic costs for plugins. This change allows the Moirai interpreter to reject requests dynamically if the cost of a plugin changes.
For example, consider this plugin:

plugin def writeObjectToDB { signature T -> Option cost Named(RuntimeDBLatency) } 

We can say that the architecture upper limit is 10,000 units and the value of RuntimeDBLatency is usually 2000 units. At runtime, if our database starts having latency problems, we can increase RuntimeDBLatency to 10,000 units and then requests which use this plugin will fail.
We can be more sophisticated as well. Imagine that we "dry run" the request with the usual value of RuntimeDBLatency. If the dry run succeeds, then the system knows that the request is being filtered because of downstream services. The system can then put the request in a distributed queue where it can be asynchronously handled with a lower priority.
In either case, tenants which are not using that specific downstream service will not be impacted by outages.

Sent this to my team today. Let me know if my logic makes sense (I don’t think you need to see the topology to understand what I’m getting at.)
So everyone is aware, the next big network project is routing between corp and the cloud instances. Currently, if we lose MPLS at corp, the remote sites lose connectivity to Azure, AWS, and GCP.
The primary objective is to get redundancy between routes at corp so the remote locations can hairpin through us to get to the clouds via IPSec.
This is going to bring in a ton of routing changes at corp. the biggest hurdle I see is that we run EIGRP internally which is not supported on FGT since it’s a Cisco-proprietary protocol.
I think we can bring OSPF into the picture simultaneously with EIGRP since O routes have a higher AD than D routes. So the OSPF ones will never make it to the routing table until we’re ready to pull the trigger
^ this is why I stood up eve - to test
Constantin wants to move the IPSec tunnels for the clouds to the VPN router for simplicity to redistribute routes to EIGRP - but I’m leaning towards using OSPF so that the IPSec tunnels can remain on the FGT because they are much easier to manage from our network administration perspective that way
I think Constantin’s idea is less overall configuration changes, but has to be done all at once in one maintenance window. I think my suggestion is a lot of configuration changes, but we can do them all before the go-live

Disclaimer: I am reposting this so more people get a chance to see the post! If you applied to the previous post, no need to apply again! :)
Hello there! This will be a long post but I do encourage you to read all of it so you have an idea what kinda game you are applying for. This would be a long-term campaign, so be willing to commit to the game! Have fun reading!
Game details:
We play using both Discord for voice and video and Foundry VTT for maps and character sheets! Webcams are mandatory since we all have been using them and it helps a lot with roleplaying when you can see the other people! Make sure that your PC or laptop is capable of running Foundry, here is a link to the Foundry system requirements: https://foundryvtt.com/article/requirements/
Do note that you don't need to buy or download anything! How Foundry works is that I send you a link and you'll join through there so no need to worry about that!
We are here to make the story together so while there is a main plot for you to follow, there will be distractions along the way and of course, things that relate to your characters and what they might find interesting!
During session 0 we will go over the initial plot hooks, how your characters might know each other, safety rules, and so on!
The available days are listed in the questionnaire. The start time for the session regardless of the day would be at 9 pm GMT+3 and when a day has been chosen, we would play consistently on that day every week!
RP to combat ratio:
I would say 50-50 since you as players can with your decisions affect how much combat or roleplay there is going to be but I as a GM, am geared more towards weighting narrative but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be some cool combat set-pieces ;).
There might be moments in the game where we focus more on the social aspect of the game, interacting in character with the world around them and then there might be some more action-oriented sessions where you get to sit at the edge of your seat!
I will say that how I like to run games, I like to focus on characters and what their motives, goals, and flaws are. This would be a more character-driven game so be ready for that and don't be afraid to get into character and have fun while doing so!
How to apply:
All that I require from you is that you read the whole post and then fill out the questionnaire to the best of your ability. I pour a lot of time into making sure that the sessions are good and that everyone is having fun and you can contribute to that by being genuinely interested in the game!
Here is the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/TAnUSBRAoEpKe1Ra8
Basic rules of the campaign:

• Be consistent: I know that emergencies can happen and sometimes life throws a curve ball. Those happen to me too but if it does, I expect you to let me know ASAP when you know that you are not going to be able to join for the session. The general rule in my table is that as long as we have four people playing, we will continue with the game.
• Cinematics: I like to inject some cinematic in the game and I will let you know when there is a cinematic. This happens usually at the end of the session to show you what happens somewhere else where your characters are not necessarily present.
• Campaign may have mature themes: I like to run narrative games and they usually lean towards a more serious tone and while there are moments of lightheartedness, it's not what I am going for this campaign. This is not a campaign for joke characters or happy-go-lucky characters. I will NOT include SA or intense torture roleplaying in my games and there is no tolerance for that. These will be discussed more during the session 0!
• Be attentive during the sessions: During the session, I would like you to feel that you want to be there so I do put a lot of time into prepping the sessions with maps, NPCs, music, etc. So as a player, all I require from you is to know the basic rules, how your character works, and just generally be respectful towards everyone on the table!
• Don't be a dick: Don't rage quit if the dice don't go your way or if you do something in the game that can result in a bad consequence to your character and then it happens. No PvP, unless both agree to it and it needs to have a good reason! Just be respectful and be able to communicate and I am sure we will get along very well!
• There is always a possibility of death: We are here to make an awesome collaborative story together that we can look back to years later with fondness! This however doesn't mean that I am going to pull my punches in combat so that's why I roll in the open. If the dice decide that it's time for your character, then that's how it's going to be. Of course, sometimes there is something that can save you but those are rare. Also, I am not going to go out of my way to kill you and I will make sure that you always know what kinda situations your characters are going to.
• Have a good mic and connection: Having a good mic is important because most of us use headphones so if your audio quality is so bad that it makes our ears bleed then that would be a dealbreaker :D. Bad mics can also negatively just impact the flow of the game if they keep cutting out!

The most important rule is to: HAVE FUN! We are here to play a game and make a story together and everyone's comfort is important to me! If you have doubts or if something feels off, you can always come to talk with me!
Game Rules:

• Write "One Piece is real" in the final questions so I know that you read this far ;)
• Ability scores are determined using point buy with 28 points or a standard array.
• Death saves are rolled in secret
• We are starting from level 2
• Criticals are maxed damage + die rolls
• If you go down, you get a wound up to a maximum of 3 when you get up again. On your third one, if you fall, you die

The reason for Banned spells is that I like to make mysteries and that players need to think. For example, Remove curse would make a situation where you can get cursed not that tense. I like to make curses into plotlines so thus banning the spell gives us that opportunity.
Here are the banned spells:

• Identify
• Detect Thoughts
• Locate object
• Zone of Truth
• Remove curse
• Goodberry
• Silvery Barbs
• Geas
• Legend lore

Banned subclasses:

• Twilight cleric
• Eloquence bard
• Peace cleric

Races from Eberron, PHB, and MPMM are available minus Tortle, Fairy, and Centaur. Also, flying races are not allowed
Here is a little bit of info about me!
My name is Michael, 22 years old. I have been a GM for 3.5 years now! I have enough experience so I won't fumble around but obviously, I don't know everything.
Something about myself is that I have been a huge fan of TTRPGs ever since I started 3.5 years ago. In that period, I have had the pleasure to play multiple systems such as 5e, pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, cyberpunk RED/2020, mothership, City of Mist, etc. So I have quite a lot of experience and I know the ropes! I also like to draw, write stories, do worldbuilding, play video games, and watch movies and anime.
I am a huge fan of One Piece, it was also an inspiration for this setting so if you are a fan, you'll notice some subtle references here and there!
I do enjoy Eberron as a setting and have read quite a bit on it! Still, while it's an established setting with its lore, that means that there will be things that I might be unaware of or I might change things here and there. I like to stick to the established lore since it's quite expansive and really good but expect changes at some points!
Final words
Thanks for reading this long-ass post and I do hope that you can see that I am putting my all into this! I hope you do too so feel free to fill out the application! Take it slowly and don't rush it since I am using it to gauge how interested you all are to join in! I will keep the post up for a few days and conduct interviews before Sunday. If you have questions, feel free to comment and I'll answer when I have time!
I hope all of you have a nice day/evening and I hope to talk to you later!

Disclaimer: I am reposting this so more people get a chance to see the post! If you applied to the previous post, no need to apply again! :)
Hello there! This will be a long post but I do encourage you to read all of it so you have an idea what kinda game you are applying for. This would be a long-term campaign, so be willing to commit to the game! Have fun reading!
Game details:
We play using both Discord for voice and video and Foundry VTT for maps and character sheets! Webcams are mandatory since we all have been using them and it helps a lot with roleplaying when you can see the other people! Make sure that your PC or laptop is capable of running Foundry, here is a link to the Foundry system requirements: https://foundryvtt.com/article/requirements/
Do note that you don't need to buy or download anything! How Foundry works is that I send you a link and you'll join through there so no need to worry about that!
We are here to make the story together so while there is a main plot for you to follow, there will be distractions along the way and of course, things that relate to your characters and what they might find interesting!
During session 0 we will go over the initial plot hooks, how your characters might know each other, safety rules, and so on!
The available days are listed in the questionnaire. The start time for the session regardless of the day would be at 9 pm GMT+3 and when a day has been chosen, we would play consistently on that day every week!
RP to combat ratio:
I would say 50-50 since you as players can with your decisions affect how much combat or roleplay there is going to be but I as a GM, am geared more towards weighting narrative but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be some cool combat set-pieces ;).
There might be moments in the game where we focus more on the social aspect of the game, interacting in character with the world around them and then there might be some more action-oriented sessions where you get to sit at the edge of your seat!
I will say that how I like to run games, I like to focus on characters and what their motives, goals, and flaws are. This would be a more character-driven game so be ready for that and don't be afraid to get into character and have fun while doing so!
How to apply:
All that I require from you is that you read the whole post and then fill out the questionnaire to the best of your ability. I pour a lot of time into making sure that the sessions are good and that everyone is having fun and you can contribute to that by being genuinely interested in the game!
Here is the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/TAnUSBRAoEpKe1Ra8
Basic rules of the campaign:

• Be consistent: I know that emergencies can happen and sometimes life throws a curve ball. Those happen to me too but if it does, I expect you to let me know ASAP when you know that you are not going to be able to join for the session. The general rule in my table is that as long as we have four people playing, we will continue with the game.
• Cinematics: I like to inject some cinematic in the game and I will let you know when there is a cinematic. This happens usually at the end of the session to show you what happens somewhere else where your characters are not necessarily present.
• Campaign may have mature themes: I like to run narrative games and they usually lean towards a more serious tone and while there are moments of lightheartedness, it's not what I am going for this campaign. This is not a campaign for joke characters or happy-go-lucky characters. I will NOT include SA or intense torture roleplaying in my games and there is no tolerance for that. These will be discussed more during the session 0!
• Be attentive during the sessions: During the session, I would like you to feel that you want to be there so I do put a lot of time into prepping the sessions with maps, NPCs, music, etc. So as a player, all I require from you is to know the basic rules, how your character works, and just generally be respectful towards everyone on the table!
• Don't be a dick: Don't rage quit if the dice don't go your way or if you do something in the game that can result in a bad consequence to your character and then it happens. No PvP, unless both agree to it and it needs to have a good reason! Just be respectful and be able to communicate and I am sure we will get along very well!
• There is always a possibility of death: We are here to make an awesome collaborative story together that we can look back to years later with fondness! This however doesn't mean that I am going to pull my punches in combat so that's why I roll in the open. If the dice decide that it's time for your character, then that's how it's going to be. Of course, sometimes there is something that can save you but those are rare. Also, I am not going to go out of my way to kill you and I will make sure that you always know what kinda situations your characters are going to.
• Have a good mic and connection: Having a good mic is important because most of us use headphones so if your audio quality is so bad that it makes our ears bleed then that would be a dealbreaker :D. Bad mics can also negatively just impact the flow of the game if they keep cutting out!

The most important rule is to: HAVE FUN! We are here to play a game and make a story together and everyone's comfort is important to me! If you have doubts or if something feels off, you can always come to talk with me!
Game Rules:

• Write "One Piece is real" in the final questions so I know that you read this far ;)
• Ability scores are determined using point buy with 28 points or a standard array.
• Death saves are rolled in secret
• We are starting from level 2
• Criticals are maxed damage + die rolls
• If you go down, you get a wound up to a maximum of 3 when you get up again. On your third one, if you fall, you die

The reason for Banned spells is that I like to make mysteries and that players need to think. For example, Remove curse would make a situation where you can get cursed not that tense. I like to make curses into plotlines so thus banning the spell gives us that opportunity.
Here are the banned spells:

• Identify
• Detect Thoughts
• Locate object
• Zone of Truth
• Remove curse
• Goodberry
• Silvery Barbs
• Geas
• Legend lore

Banned subclasses:

• Twilight cleric
• Eloquence bard
• Peace cleric

Races from Eberron, PHB, and MPMM are available minus Tortle, Fairy, and Centaur. Also, flying races are not allowed
Here is a little bit of info about me!
My name is Michael, 22 years old. I have been a GM for 3.5 years now! I have enough experience so I won't fumble around but obviously, I don't know everything.
Something about myself is that I have been a huge fan of TTRPGs ever since I started 3.5 years ago. In that period, I have had the pleasure to play multiple systems such as 5e, pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, cyberpunk RED/2020, mothership, City of Mist, etc. So I have quite a lot of experience and I know the ropes! I also like to draw, write stories, do worldbuilding, play video games, and watch movies and anime.
I am a huge fan of One Piece, it was also an inspiration for this setting so if you are a fan, you'll notice some subtle references here and there!
I do enjoy Eberron as a setting and have read quite a bit on it! Still, while it's an established setting with its lore, that means that there will be things that I might be unaware of or I might change things here and there. I like to stick to the established lore since it's quite expansive and really good but expect changes at some points!
Final words
Thanks for reading this long-ass post and I do hope that you can see that I am putting my all into this! I hope you do too so feel free to fill out the application! Take it slowly and don't rush it since I am using it to gauge how interested you all are to join in! I will keep the post up for a few days and conduct interviews before Sunday. If you have questions, feel free to comment and I'll answer when I have time!
I hope all of you have a nice day/evening and I hope to talk to you later!

I saw someone else did something like this recently and thought that I might have something to add to the discussion to help people figure out whether they think this program is right for them, or for people currently in the program to help them plan out classes.
My background is very heavy in statistics and finance (I'm an actuary), so my grounding in calculus, statistics, linear algebra, and business topics was considerably better than most of the other people I interacted with in this program. Conversely, I'm sure my programming skills were probably about average or maybe a little bit below compared to someone with a more targeted background towards those skills.
I started in Fall of 2020 and just finished up this month, Spring 2024. I started out just taking one class a semester and never changed up that plan, would highly recommend doing the same if you're working full time alongside; there's no reason to rush this program. I got a 4.0 GPA overall, although I never really stressed that much about it and definitely did not shy away from "harder" classes in order to bolster GPA. I did this to learn, not to get good grades. The classes I took, in order (my memory of some of the earlier ones might be a bit jumbled as so much time has passed):

1. CSE 6040 - I mentioned how my programming background was weaker relative to my mathematical background. However, reflecting on my experience in this class, it was probably still pretty strong. This class is focused on generalized programming skills, you don't really get into the analytics and modeling that much; it's more of a primer on things like functions, recursion, computer memory management, etc. It's been a few years, but I don't remember struggling with this class at all, and most of the concepts covered (object oriented programming, things like byte encoding, hexadecimal forms, recursion, etc.) were things I was already familiar with in another programming language (this class was in Python) or was relatively easy to pick up. From what I remember, the assignments were auto-graded and you had unlimited attempts, not to mention the fact that most of the prompts were to produce some predetermined result... and, as long as you were able to verify that your code produced that result, you got full points. I didn't miss a single point in this entire class. I believe there were "final exams" which were really just timed window coding assignments much like the homework, and you could do the assignments at any point during a 4-day window or something like that.
2. ISYE 6501 - This class was R-based and focused on basic analytics models. The material was much more applied than 6040. Similarly, the material was not difficult, and I was familiar with a lot of the basic models already (such as GLMs) from having worked with them in my job. The grading was done on a peer-grading framework; based on who anonymously is assigned your homework to grade, you can get someone who's a stickler for every point on the guide, or people who are a bit more lenient. I never really worried much about how things were graded in this class; yeah, I did miss some points arbitrarily, but nothing that made that much of a difference. If you generally put in the work and understand the material, your peers will recognize that. I found this a bit more interesting than 6040 because, rather than a deterministic "right answer", there was some more creativity implied here to solve each problem. There was a final project for this class where you walked through a hypothetical analytics problem and explained how you would go about solving it. I found this an interesting thought exercise and enjoyed this class. The pacing felt a little fast, as you basically had an assignment due each week, but the assignments were small. Like 6040 I found this class to be quite easy but I didn't 100% it due to the peer grading thing.
3. MGT 8803 - I almost applied to be exempt from this class, as my background intersects a lot with the material. The accounting and finance modules for this class literally did not teach me anything new. Supply chain was new for me and I found it interesting. I'm trying to remember what the other module was. I think it was marketing? I didn't like it. Overall I found this class quite easy for the aforementioned reasons, however I've heard from a lot of the other folks without business backgrounds that this class was pretty tough so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Taking this in the summer cut out one of the modules, normally there are 5 but in Summer there are 4. I figured this made sense to take during the truncated semester because I was unlikely to cover that much new material, and it turns out I was right about that. Each module lasted 2 weeks (I think in a normal semester it lasts 3) and has a timed multiple-choice test at the end. A lot of people didn't like this format compared to ISYE 6501 and CSE 6040; I'm not really sure how else this material could've been covered. This class was OK, the material is not really that deep but it's a pretty good primer on a large number of business topics.
4. ISYE 6740 - The first class I took that was actually pretty challenging, which makes sense considering the first 3 courses were just the basic core. This is pretty much an intro to machine learning as a discipline, and the first time I remember digging into academic papers that discuss some machine learning topic and attempting to recreate the results (this is something we did a lot in the more advanced classes going forward and incidentally now that I have graduated is probably one of the best ways to go about learning a new topic). I remember this class as having a format similar to ISYE 6501/CSE6040 in that you had large programming assignments to do, as well as open-book "exams" which were really just timed programming assignments. Assignments are not auto-graded; TA's review each one and thus the assignments have much more of a focus on explaining your findings than producing the exact expected output (unlike 6040). Some of the theory questions have you applying complicated matrix algebra rules that I'm not surprised a lot of people struggled with. The TA responsiveness in this class was pretty good from what I remember, but your mileage may vary. I remember getting 3 weeks to do each assignment but I also remember not thinking that was a lot of time, these assignments are very extensive, have many parts, and take a long time to get through. Like with 6040 I ended up not missing a single point in this class but I did find it difficult and spent significantly more time working on it than in prior classes, probably 10-15 hrs a week, give or take.
5. ISYE 6644 - I was familiar with maybe 50% of the material we covered due to my extensive statistics background, however I was not aware of the exact mechanics of random number generation or the concept of a batched mean, for example. I remember this class having several "check your understanding" quizzes that focused on the mathematical foundations. Didn't struggle with this much in terms of difficulty and found the material very useful. Setting up custom simulation environments is very useful and arena is pretty cool even if it's unlikely you'll ever use it. Some assignments feature similar tools in Python (simpy). There might have been some coverage of R in this as well, or at least the accommodation for people that wanted to use it. There was a project for this class, but you didn't have to come up with the topic on your own, you could pick from a list, and you could do your project on your own if you wanted (which, given the option, was always the choice I made, due to the inherent randomness in picking the right members of a group). However you can do a group project if you want.
6. MGT 6203 - The first of the classes I took that required a group project. I recommend you are proactive in putting together groups in situations like these, posting threads on Ed/whatever the forum is as soon as the class begins. My group was alright; not everyone in it was great, but we had enough going overall to make up for the weaker group members. The project has some arbitrary guidelines from what I remember - you need to put together a midterm report and video presentation that is no more than ~2 minutes long or something like that (if it's 2:01 you get penalized) and the final report is 5 minutes or less, and everyone in the group needs to speak. I honestly don't remember much else about this class, it was pretty forgettable, but not horrible. Not overall that difficult, another business class so a lot of topics I was already familiar with, but there was more new here than in 8803.
7. CSE 6242 - Another class with a group project. Again, I was proactive, and again, overall, my group was... okay. Some people who were really good, some who were... not. This class is characterized by a lot of assignments that are autograded, like 6040, but the assignments are a bit more difficult. Overall not that difficult with the exception of the D3 assignment, but that's more due to the fact that I'm not really sure how the autograder works for that; it tries to determine based on some internal structure of your html code whether or not you're fulfilling the requirements. I got a perfect score on all of the assignments, and they give you the chance to score over 100% on I believe either assignment 1 or assignment 2. A lot of people bombed the D3 assignment (I think it's assignment 2) but still did well in the class because it's not that hard to do well on everything else, so keep that in mind. This class does a great job of exposing you to a lot of new technologies, but there isn't that much depth to it. That's not really the point of this kind of class though, it equips you with the tools to explore things deeper if you so choose.
8. ISYE 8803 - I was a big fan of this class. It's taught in MATLAB but you can use Python if you so choose, you'll see in reviews of this class that you should really just use MATLAB since a lot of the sample code etc. is not in other languages, so that's what I did. However, they must've recently added Python and R code for sample solutions, so feel free to use what you want. MATLAB was interesting, there were parts of one assignment I also used R for (grouped lasso in R is a lot more straightforward). This class is all about high dimensional data and representing it in a more simplified and comprehensive way, think about something like sonar which might have datapoints separated by milliseconds and thus a very dense representation of a signal captured over a short period of time. After ISYE 6740, I found this to be the class that taught me the most up to this point.
9. CS 7642 - Taking this class in summer is kind of rough. There's 6 homework assignments that are autograded, similar format to CSE 6040. There are 3 projects which are much larger programming assignments for which you'll write papers explaining methodology, results, etc. These projects take a while, particularly project 3. I did well on projects 1 and 2 and decently on 3, although I spent the most time on 3 by far; it involves reinforcement learning to simulate a soccer environment and train agents how to play against an AI developed externally. The AI baselines are hard to beat, and I didn't manage to beat them, but I wrote a decent paper explaining what I did. The final exam for this class should be dropped as it doesn't add value to the class, people regularly score extremely low on it, the average score in the class was something like a 45%. I scored a bit lower than average but still got an A in the class because it was heavily curved. Reinforcement learning is a very interesting topic, though, and I would highly recommend this class as a primer on the material. It's probably a good idea not to take it in the summer, though.
10. CS 7643 - This class was pretty difficult but I still think 6740 was tougher. The material is extremely dense. There are parts of programming assignments that are autograded, but also short answer portions that are reviewed by TAs. Grading on those were pretty subjective. This is the only class I can remember really needing to discuss things with TAs to understand what was being asked a little better. Unfortunately, the TAs in the semester I took this weren't the best. They seemed more concerned with unintentionally giving away a bit too much information in any of their responses. I can understand this, but it came off as intentionally opaque most of the time. There was a group project for this course as well, and my group was excellent, probably the best experience I had with a group in this program. I can imagine how much this course would've sucked if I would've had a mediocre/bad group. Based on discussions with my group, some of the grading seemed highly arbitrary, with some TAs grading similar responses to the same question differently. Like I said above, though, I never really worried about this. I never once in this program ever disputed a grade, and I continued with that in this class as well.
11. CSE 6748 - Practicum and final class. For this class you get to choose between a number of pre-determined Georgia Tech sponsors, or form your own project for your own employesome external entity. It was a lot more work to do this, so I just went with one of the pre-determined GTech ones. I really enjoyed this one, I had constant communication with the sponsor as I developed my project and came up with something that I was quite proud of. I wanted to explore a natural language processing task, so I picked a project that I thought would allow me to do this, and was very satisfied with the result. There's a number of videos you have to watch that explain some overarching aspect of analytics that were pretty interesting as well, you can watch all of these in a single day and then focus on the project if you like. It's possible to finish the entire semester's work in just a few weeks, I was able to do the entire project and write the final paper in about a month's time, at which point I coordinated with the sponsor to tailor the work I did to a format that they would be able to implement for their business problem if they wanted to.

I can't comment on the job placement prospects of this program, as I just finished it and was actively employed the entire time I was in it. As an actuary there's not much this program does that my exam certification process didn't in terms of career prospects. However, it did position me much better within the context of the expanding role of data and analytics in insurance going forward, and also opens me up to similarly mathematical roles with a firmer grounding in big data and also some business elements (quantitative finance/data science roles). There were also things I learned in this program that I was able to apply directly to my day-to-day work. If you're considering this program, I would recommend you think about a few things:

1. I'm pretty shocked at how many people I saw during my program who didn't really think that much about why they're doing this. I get that the barrier to entry is low, but it's a serious commitment if you're actually trying to graduate. Most of the people who start this program don't finish, so consider whether you're ready to spend almost 4 years going to school part-time, or if you're able to double up on classes for some of the semesters. Most of the people I know in the program doubled up at least once, I never did but I was never in a hurry. If you must double up, don't make it your first semester. Dip your toe in the water, see how it is, and then reassess. But, above all else, think about why you want to do this, and use that as your guiding goal to bring you through to the end.
2. Something I tended to see pretty much without fail in most of my classes - a lot of the graduate students in this program spend way too much time worrying about minute, particular details that don't really matter. Maybe it was just my philosophy that I would probably never dispute a grade, or that I was never really that concerned with getting a perfect GPA, etc. but I was always marveling at what I saw asked in Ed posts. People would ask whether they could use a certain programming language for an assignment, what packages they were allowed to use, would post screenshots of bugs and ask for TA's to help walk them through it, etc. Generally, without fail, the TAs would respond along the lines of: use whatever programming language you want, as long as you can display your output/submit it in a way that we can verify by running ourselves, we'll make the effort; use the debugger to step through your code to find the problem; etc. Generally, in most cases, the assignments and questions are designed in a way to teach you something, to get you to realize/understand some pattern or data concept that has some underlying logic that makes sense. For example, the idea of saliency maps on image processing takes the 3-channel RGB color pixel shading representation of an image and condenses it into a single channel, and, as a result of that, loses some resolution in suggesting parts of the image driving a model result that might be different depending on the channel; i.e., an image with a very heavily blue-shaded part that detracts from a certain result, but with a red-shaded part somewhere else that increases the probability of the modeled result. This was part of a conceptual question on how saliency maps differed from other pixel influence attribution methods in Deep Learning, and is part of what you should logically understand since it reduces the channels of the image representation from 3 (R, G, B) to 1 (usually grayscale). I think people tend to run to the TA the second they have difficulty with something and don't stop for a second to think it through, one exercise I might recommend is to consider: if you ran into this problem out in the world and you didn't have a TA/managesome other authority figure to explain the answer to you, what do you think it might be? Does the answer even matter? If it still matters and you have no idea how to solve it, maybe then you can go to the TA.
3. In every single group project I worked on, we had an initial planning session where we determined the scope of what we wanted to do. For most of the projects, this was an essential deliverable in addition to the final paper. However, in almost every case, someone in the group was always playing some game of runaway scope where they kept on wanting to add methods/questions to exploration beyond what was initially planned in ways that I intuitively knew would be impossible to manage in just one semester. I often had to say something along the lines of "if we have time we'll do that" or "when we write up our paper, we can put that in the avenues for future exploration section" or something similar. It turns out that we never had time to look into these things, and our initial scope was usually well-defined considering the time we had. I'm not sure why this was always so front-and-center in my focus, maybe since I used to work in consulting and project budgeting/scoping is so unbelievably important in that context. Whatever the case may be, understand that you won't be able to change the world every time you do a project. Make some incremental improvement, reflect on the results, and then include some notes in a "potential avenues for future exploration" section. I was pretty surprised at how many people had so much trouble putting the pencils down at the end. I can practically guarantee that, for the classes where I did a project on my own, I probably did substantially less work than other individual groups for precisely this reason. In general, you probably don't have to do as much work as you think you do.

So, would I recommend the program overall? Absolutely. It's not perfect, I found some of the formats annoying - CS 7642 has no business having that final exam, it adds nothing to the class at all, is arbitrarily extremely difficult and the class is good enough and complete enough with the removal of that exam that its inclusion to me appears to be the result of some arbitrary quota somewhere. I also don't really like the group project format and profoundly disagree with the reasoning that GTech and most other academic institutions give as to why group projects are even good or necessary, however I do acknowledge that from a logistics and resource standpoint it's unmanageable to grade individual projects for every single person in a given class and group projects do decrease the number of papers that TAs will have to read. Considering the scale of what GTech has managed to do, and how many students enroll each year, I'm surprised the program is as well-managed as it is. Yes, it does require a lot of self-teaching, but in most cases you can actively engage with TAs multiple times a week if you're struggling with topics and from what I've seen they were very responsive.
Anyways just wanted to give my perspective as someone who just finished this program and still thinks it's worthwhile despite its flaws.

Something I was thinking about when I watched the final moments of the most recent EFAP was Mauler’s observation that the internet content creator landscape used to be different when AVGN clones ruled Youtube and his question of how that shifted into video essayists and commentary channels. I thought about that for a while and I thought of some reasons why the landscape changed that I would like to share.
Managers
Something that people might not be aware of is how many Youtubers have people managing their content in the form of things like setting up brand deals and other services that I am not familiar with. Some of them are very public about what they do, some of them are more private. The important thing is how managers worked in the past.
One thing that I liked about Machinima, ScrewAttack, and Channel Awesome that the creators probably didn’t like is that they forced the older creators to stick to a set schedule of uploads and some of them forced creators to follow a set formula. This meant that the manager would make sure that if a creator uploaded a video every Friday at 2pm, they would have an upload every single Friday at 2pm.
How would this work if the creator wanted to take a week off? Well, the creator would have to have a video to upload in advance. What if the creator wanted to spend 3 weeks on a super-duper big video? Well, they could absolutely do that, but it would be a passion project and they’d still have to follow the set schedule for regular uploads.
This created a content landscape that I actually enjoyed a lot as a consumer because it’s probably the way it should be for reviewers. Every week, or every day in rare cases, a movie reviewer would need to review a different movie, which meant that a reviewer might have to force themselves to sit through a movie they don’t want to see like Fifty Shades Of Grey to give it a chance to subvert their expectations and earn a glowing review, or dig deep to find a new indie movie to review to fill that quota if they really didn’t want to sit through Fifty Shades Of Grey.
The promise of Patreon and creators becoming more independent was that creators would exclusively make videos on topics they wanted to do, but I personally think that was the wrong way to go. I’ve maintained a position that I prefer it when content creators are encouraged, or even forced, to talk about things that they don’t want to talk about because oftentimes that’s when reviewers are most interesting. Some of my favorite Roger Ebert reviews were when he reviewed a children’s movie like Space Jam or Pokemon: The First Movie, and some of my favorite Zero Punctuation reviews are when he has to pick out a random indie game and commit to reviewing it regardless of what the indie game turned out to be, like when he reviewed Hell Pie.
What I think has happened is that the lack of managers has encouraged content creators to upload whatever they want, whenever they want, which has usually translated to videos about ‘easy’ topics, like videos about Disney movies, being uploaded weeks, or even months, apart, which has made the content creation landscape, at least for reviewers, a lot less interesting, and a lot less engaging.
It’s actually one of the reasons why EFAP has been losing my interest lately, because although they upload a stream every week the topics they choose are generally ‘easy’ topics because I genuinely think the hosts don’t have the ability to make an EFAP on something more obscure, or even just ‘difficult’ like Baby Reindeer, very interesting, or they just won’t do streams on those topics because, as Rags said: “This is our show, and we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
Honestly, my hot take is that I liked you better when you couldn’t do whatever the fuck you wanted all of the time. In fact, one of my favorite Rags moments on EFAP was when he clearly didn’t want to be involved with the debate with Twin Perfect.
Sponsors
I remember the Adpocalypse and how Youtubers transitioned to sponsors over relying heavily on ad-revenue. What that event transpired into is that audiences were far more accepting of basically any form of making money that Youtubers would use. Patreon became a very dominant part of Youtube, but sponsors also became extremely common and audiences would even cheer in the comment sections when creators would have their first Raid: Shadow Legends sponsorship.
Sponsors are what I want to talk about because I have seen Youtubers show that they have a bunch of videos on their computer that they simply aren’t releasing to the public because they don’t want to upload a single video without a sponsor on their main channel, as well as Youtubers having a second channel where they upload ‘slop’ content without sponsors that most of their audience is usually unaware of or isn’t interested in.
The problem is that the appeal for pretty much all content on Youtube is the personalities of the people creating the content, which is less about the actual personalities and more like “That’s an actual person doing what they actually want to do, that’s so cool,” but that is usually undercut by the presence of sponsors. The fact that Youtubers will sit on a video they made and not upload it unless they can get a sponsor to pay for it always seemed strange to me, especially for Youtubers where the image they present is “I’m just a normal, chill guy who makes Youtube videos for fun,” which needs the caveat of “Uhhhh, I’m actually really poor and if I don’t take this BetterHelp sponsor I can’t afford my rent this month. Please understand, I’m barely making any money on Youtube,” when a sponsor is included in the video.
As weird as this sounds, there are communities of creatives online that don’t expect to ever make any money putting hours, days, weeks, months, and years of work into a project. There are modding communities, bloggers, game developers, fanfiction writers, and artists that only want comments saying “You did a good job,” and Youtubers used to be that way, or they used to present themselves that way before sponsors became as common as they are now.
I don’t say this often enough, but I remember when Youtubers would make videos about not just random pictures on Deviantart, but on fanfictions and pornographic videos. They’d do those videos for things like clout, which is something that I don’t see too often on Youtube.
People might say that there are a bunch of Youtubers that talk about obscure media and Youtubers that make things without any expectation of earning money, which I say “Well, yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” and then I’d point to things like AVGN’s Atari Porn video, and old videos where commentary Youtubers would branch out from their niche to say “Hey, just for fun, we’re going to check out this weird fanfiction story,” or how Yahtzee would include fun projects he created at the end of his Zero Punctuation videos, like how he’d dub over scenes in video games like Half-Life and Painkiller, or how he made a slideshow with Garry’s Mod that depicted a love story between Heavy and Medic.
What I’m saying is that a large part of what made Youtube fun was that not every video from an established creator with 100k subscribers needed to be monetized, or even created with the expectation of being successful or well-received by the community. There was a time when the expectations people had for, say, Jim Sterling was for a high-quality Jimquisition video to be produced and uploaded to the main channel once a week, and for the other days to feature a minimally-edited video where he showed himself trying out a game or reacting to a trailer on his main channel.
In the past I said that I would like it if EFAP would talk about comments and read fanfictions on-stream and I was mocked for it, but I stand by that statement because, although EFAP clearly doesn’t want to do it regularly, when they do read comments on-stream it tends to result in some of the best content because it showcases a side to them that I like. Instead of being totally normal dudes talking to each other about a movie they saw or reacting to a video, they have to use text-to-speech or read the comment using a silly voice or, well, use just a little bit of creativity when reading those comments out-loud.
What I’m kinda saying is that, yes, I think we all like professionally-produced content, and we all accept that sponsors for videos are necessary. But, like, I don’t like how for most successful Youtubers only the monetizable content, often with sponsors, is presented on the main channel, while the other content doesn’t exist, is uploaded to a secondary channel, or is locked behind some kind of paywall.
It just feels strange that these normal, chill, relatable people have gotten themselves into a position where they can earn real money, in some cases a lot of money, to stand in front of a webcam for 10 minutes talking about their favorite movies, chat with a group of friends, or even just play their favorite video game, and in quite a few cases they won’t do any of those things unless there’s a way to monetize it. Imagine how it looks to say “Well, I can’t talk about this cool fanfiction story I read on my main channel to my audience that enjoys my content about that franchise because I can’t get a sponsor for it.”
I wonder if Rags, a regular host of EFAP, appreciates the irony of him criticizing Chris Stuckmann for advocating that filmmakers “Get as much time and money as possible to make their films in the ideal circumstances and for the process to be easy,” when he’s in the position that he’s in where, on EFAP, he has as much freedom as he wants in the ideal circumstances to make money with EFAP, and it’s easy, yet he still will complain if he’s asked to step out of his comfort zone, even a little bit, on stream.
Insecurity
A while ago I had a theory about Cancel Culture which was that usually Cancel Culture is incredibly exaggerated by the audience of the people being canceled, and that most of the people being canceled are perfectly fine. The go-to example is the poor lady who made a joke about AIDS before going to Africa that got off the flight and got fired from her job due to her joke going viral. What people often don’t mention is that she got fired because it’s a terrible look for the company’s PR person to be involved with such a massive PR disaster, and that she got hired at another company a very short time later. Plus, like, she made a racist joke and people were calling her a racist, it wasn’t like she was targeted for absolutely no reason.
My theory is that people think that Cancel Culture absolutely ruins the lives of celebrities and influencers online because of their intense reactions to being canceled. An early example being Seth Macfarlane, who was mocked for his poorly-received hosting of the Oscars and who seemed incredibly bitter about it, making Cancel Culture a plot point in multiple episodes of Family Guy, talking about how bitter he was about it in interviews for years, and even apparently getting emotional support from his friends and family after the ordeal, even going as far as to ask celebrities to say “I liked what he did and I thought he was hilarious, and very handsome.”
What I’m saying is that I think that in the early days of content creation on Youtube the people making videos were more willing to appear on camera and embarrass themselves, like with Spoony screaming at a big gaming event on camera, because even though they were aware of Cancel Culture being a thing they weren’t going to be reduced to tears by someone saying “You’re totally cringe and annoying,” and even went as far as to incorporate those kinds of comments into their video because it was extremely easy content to create. You probably know what I’m talking about, where a creator would read out “This content creator is SOOOOOOO CRINGE,” in a video in a silly voice which you can’t really do as easily with “OMG, I love your content,” and make it entertaining.
That’s changed a lot today with content creators seeming to project an extreme amount of insecurity in every video they’re a part of, which gets even worse in formats like podcasts. It feels like every commentary creator is a chill dude that isn’t offended by anything and only wants to have a good time talking about things they like because, well, that’s what they need to be to avoid being criticized too severely, but they constantly allude to being a very immature and thin-skinned person that is mainly concerned about earning money, to the point where they’ll say “I’m not even having fun producing content at all.”
In college I remember one of my professors saying: “When you were high school kids you were insecure and weren’t confident in your abilities enough to volunteer when you were asked. You’re adults now, and when you graduate you can’t do that at a real job. Part of growing up is being confident in yourself, and if you don’t want to do that, you can always work in fast food where you never need to grow up, while the other adults in your friend group are becoming doctors and construction workers.”
It’s something that I realized with Youtubers which is that a decent amount of them started their careers young and never had to ‘grow up’ the way that my professor said that we needed to. Even with millions of subscribers you still see a lot of Youtubers struggle to commit to any statement they make, and I hear “I’m just a dumb Youtuber who doesn’t know anything and is stupid and socially-awkward and is fat and smells bad,” too many times from rich and successful people.
The thing is, when you’re a teenager, or you’re in your 20s, that insecurity is charming and relatable because you're trying to find a place in the world and discovering the role that you will fill in society. But, when you’re 30 and your role is “I tell people about the latest internet drama and make references to Spongebob,” or “I talk about Star Wars for hours at a time,” even if you make $2 million every day there’s likely a part of you that says: “I don’t like who I am. I don’t like what I do for a living. Yes, I’m rich, but I don’t like why I’m rich, and I don’t like my audience.”
I think that this insecurity leads to people trying to make their content more ‘mature’, but the way they do it isn’t by presenting themselves as a more confident person, or by making a clear separation between the personality in their content and their actual personality so that they can have a good work/life balance, it’s by creating the same content with very superficially mature elements. So, you end up with the video essayists of the past that gained fame by describing the events of a movie and then giving their opinion on whether they liked or disliked it doing the same thing but with quotes from smart people, like Socrates, and making conclusions like “Some people are gonna like this movie, some people are going to hate it. The important thing is that everyone involved with this movie tried really hard and had fun.”
The thing is, teenagers and 20-year-olds get value from a relatable person that comes across as an insecure loser who is too afraid to take a proper stance on anything to commit to a statement. When someone is actually mature they find more value in someone who is willing to do a good job and defend the job that they did, even if they’re like Neil Breen who thinks they did a good job but clearly did a terrible job. A 20-year-old might declare that Twin Perfect’s debate with EFAP wasn’t embarrassing because he was just being himself or something, but a 40-year-old might not tell Twin Perfect that the debate was embarrassing, but they would no longer respect him, and I imagine a lot of 40-year-olds don’t respect a lot of Youtube video essayists because of how eager they seem to be to engage in self-deprecation.
Conclusion
Despite everything that I’ve said, I do think that the content landscape on Youtube is generally ‘better’ than it was in, say, 2010. We weren’t getting a 4+ hour video by The Little Platoon about Rebel Moon, for instance, in 2010.
What I would compare modern Youtube and classic Youtube to is the 1970s movie scene vs. the 1980s movie scene, which Quentin Tarantino has labeled as “The worst period in movie history,” which the EFAP crew have pushed back on.
The thing is, in the early 80s we got Blade Runner, in the same way that nowadays we got the 4+ hour Little Platoon video, but the theatrical release of that film was famously sabotaged by the company that wanted Harrison Ford to provide voiceovers for the film that ‘ruined’ it, or at least, ruined the ending of the movie.
Throughout the 80s films were made which satisfied audiences more than films from the 70s did because Spielberg was producing hugely successful films that are still highly regarded, but there was also a bunch of shady practices going on and a bunch of notoriously poor studio decisions made in order to appeal to a wide demographic, such as the fiasco with Supergirl and Masters Of The Universe, or changing the ending of Brazil.
In the 1970s we not only got more challenging films, but there was also a thriving independent cinema scene that gave us Death Race 2000, Eraserhead, THX-1138, and Duel. There was also Jaws, Star Wars, and A Clockwork Orange, which were big-budget movies that took serious creative risks that paid off immensely which just wouldn’t happen in the 1980s, or would happen very rarely.
I think that I do prefer Youtube back in, say, 2015-2017 when it seemed like we generally got the best of both worlds, challenging content about a diverse range of subjects with production values comparable to what we have now.
To close this, I would like to include a paraphrased interaction I saw on a podcast featuring a pretty big Youtuber that I think illustrates why Youtube has changed in the way that it has.
Youtuber: Look, I don’t need to work as hard on my videos now because not every video needs to be an event. I just want to take it easy now, pump out a video whenever I feel like it, get paid by the sponsors, and then spend time with my family, is that so wrong?
Host: It kind of is. I know your audience of teenagers will be like “He just wants to spend time with his family, dude, have a heart,” but a lot of Youtubers, especially younger Youtubers look up to you for inspiration. If you’re in that position and your attitude is “I’m going to half-ass every video that I make from now on and if anyone calls my content lazy I’ll use my 8-year-old daughter as a shield against criticism,” that’s the attitude that a lot of young Youtubers are going to have. They’re going to half-ass their content and when criticized, they’re going to find their own excuse, like “I have a kid now,” or “I have to eat,” or something.
Youtuber: That’s not my fault, though. I never asked to be a role model.
Host: That’s not how that works. You don’t get to decide whether or not people look up to you, have expectations of you, and emulate your approach to content creation. You only release 2-3 videos a year, and with your status every video should be a major event, but instead every video is half-assed, as you admitted, and then you use your daughter as an excuse for why you don’t put as much effort into your content as you used to. I think you need to have someone in your life, like a friend, that actually makes you feel some shame for your content and encourages you to do better, rather than your social circle being composed of supportive people like your family and the people who pay you through Patreon.
Host 2: He did have that. He fired him two years ago, remember?
Host: Oh, yeah, you fired your friend, or made him quit, whatever the story was. Did that not make you feel bad at all?
Youtuber: Friendships end, that’s just life.
Host: That’s the attitude that I hate that comes across in your content. You can’t just brush aside everything and bumble through life, except if you’re an internet personality, apparently.
Host 2: It worked for the MCU.
Host: It’s not working for the MCU anymore, though, and it isn’t working as well for this Youtuber. It’s probably going to get worse and when he decides to do more work and make better videos, like he used to do, it’s probably going to be too late, or he’ll need to make really good videos to get the views he once did.
Youtuber: My videos are really good, though.
Host: You admitted to half-assing them.

So I have an olympus spn35. Its rangefinder lines up perfectly with mountains ~10 miles away when it is adjusted to its inf focus hard stop. However, at closer distances the rf seems off. For example the actual distance to an object is 4', the rangefinder lines up at 4.5', but sharper pictures are taken if the focus ring is set to 4' even though the rf patch is now misaligned. I think this is also happening at other distances like 15', but my testing at that distance was less rigorous haha. Is this a common thing for cheaper rangefinders? Id like the camera to be sharp at close distances; how bad of an idea is it to "misalign" the rf to be correct at say 3'?

The Genesis of a Visionary

Hicks' journey into the world of legal and business leadership began with a fervent desire to drive transformative change. Armed with a juris doctor from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hicks embarked on a journey that would redefine the landscape of corporate governance and strategic growth.

Navigating Turbulent Waters

Throughout his illustrious career, Hicks has held pivotal roles in some of the most prominent companies in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. As the Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at Apria, Inc., Hicks played a central role in steering the company through legal and regulatory challenges, culminating in a transformative acquisition that delivered substantial value to shareholders.

A Beacon of Wisdom in Healthcare

Hicks' expertise extends far beyond the boardroom, making him a trusted advisor in healthcare and life sciences matters. From negotiating with commercial payers to navigating the intricacies of regulatory environments, Hicks' insights and strategic acumen have been instrumental in guiding companies through turbulent terrain.

Redefining Corporate Governance

Hicks is not just a leader – he's a visionary in corporate governance. His role in designing boards of directors for public companies and aligning business goals with societal impact sets the gold standard for excellence in the field.

Navigating Legal Complexities with Finesse

Hicks' tenure as General Counsel at Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals showcased his adeptness in navigating high-stakes investigations and litigation. From resolving complex regulatory inquiries to strategizing responses to nationwide legal challenges, Hicks has demonstrated resilience and strategic prowess in the face of adversity.

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Hicks' career is punctuated by transformative deal-making, from orchestrating successful IPOs to facilitating multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. His ability to drive strategic growth initiatives and unlock value for shareholders sets him apart as a true pioneer in the world of business.

Looking Towards the Future

As Hicks embarks on his next chapter, his commitment to driving value and innovation remains unwavering. His journey serves as a testament to the transformative power of leadership and innovation, inspiring aspiring leaders to carve their own path to success in the corporate world.
In conclusion, Michael-Bryant Hicks stands as a shining example of excellence in legal and business leadership. His journey is a testament to the power of vision, resilience, and unwavering dedication to excellence in navigating the complexities of the corporate landscape.
Feel free to share your thoughts and insights below – let's celebrate the remarkable achievements of this legal and business luminary together!

Common themes emerge from industry comments preceding the issuance of the final NHTSA rule. Note, extracts below are from only the first 1/3 of the 300+ page ruling read so far:

Commenters raised potential technical challenges to effective implementation of the proposed requirement. For example, Honda was concerned about AEB and radar sensor limitations when operating at high speeds—mainly the complex interdependency between speed and the distance and accuracy at which objects must be detected to be avoided (or even to mitigate a crash). Honda noted that higher speeds mean that objects will need to be detected at greater distances, and at greater distances there is less image resolution, greater positional error, and greater impact from things like roadway geometry. Honda and Porsche stated that requiring braking to occur at unrestricted high speeds leads to misidentification of objects and increases false positive activations. Honda further asserted that camera resolution is limited by the pixel count on the image capture chip and that at longer distances, the number of pixels for an object will be reduced, resulting in blur that makes it difficult to detect objects (the blur can be further exacerbated by the designed focal length of the lens). Further, Honda stated that a higher resolution can be achieved only through new sensor hardware that would require further developmental work as well as more processing power, including a change of imaging processing electronic control unit (ECU). Honda stated that for camera-radar fusion systems, small errors in the fusion algorithm are amplified at higher speeds (due to the longer distances) and could compromise the system's performance. Additionally, according to Honda, these reductions in sensor accuracy significantly increase the risk of misidentification of potential objects and may lead to excessive false positive activations, potentially creating negative safety consequences. This could include situations where the system mistakenly recognizes the same lane as the adjacent lane or roadway objects as other vehicles. Other commenters also raised concerns about the potential for false activations caused by the need for AEB to operate at very high speeds. For example, Volkswagen commented that false activation becomes more of a risk as speeds increase, and that these risks are not controllable, as defined in ISO 26262. Commenters raised concerns about whether braking was the most appropriate avoidance maneuver in high-speed scenarios. Honda was concerned that AEB activation might interfere with other technologies such as the Automatic Emergency Steering. Mitsubishi, and Toyota echoed the Alliance’s concern that in some situations AEB activation while traveling at high speed may induce unstable vehicle dynamics. Mitsubishi stated that these situations may occur due to unfavorable interactions with road surface conditions, road curvature, or for other unpredictable reasons. Mitsubishi thought that such activation could also lead to unexpected outcomes for a vehicle following the subject vehicle.
...Commenters suggested a number of different solutions to resolve their concerns. Most requested that the all-speeds requirement be removed. Alternatively, Honda and others (as noted earlier) asked that NHTSA establish a maximum speed at which AEB detection performance is assessed according to an established test procedure. Volkswagen asked that NHTSA exclude activation against vulnerable road users at high speeds, believing it would decrease false positive rates significantly. Volkswagen thought this could be justified as pedestrians would not be expected on the roads with these higher speeds. p.59-
The Alliance, Honda, NADA, Porsche, and Volkswagen suggested that the agency should allow manual deactivation to mitigate consumer dissatisfaction. Honda and NADA also stated that not allowing deactivation may lead to substantially higher false positive rates, while AAA stated that allowing for automatic or manual deactivation could increase consumer acceptance and minimize the perception that the systems are overbearing. NADA also stated that AEB false positives are a significant source of consumer complaints about AEB systems and that only 59 percent of respondents to a Consumer Reports survey indicated that they were satisfied with their AEB systems ...
NHTSA is not persuaded by comments that suggest that not permitting deactivation would lead to substantially higher false positive rates. NHTSA recognizes that AEB false positives are a source of consumer complaints, but NHTSA does not believe AEB deactivation is the solution to the engineering challenges manufacturers with lower performing systems might face in meeting this rule’s requirements.
p. 92-95
In response to the NPRM, the IIHS, the Advocates, NTSB, AAA, Adasky, and Luminar, expressed support for the full collision avoidance (i.e., no-contact) requirement in all proposed AEB tests. IIHS stated that their evaluations of existing AEB systems indicated that some current systems are completely avoiding collisions at the highest speeds IIHS has tested, which is 70 km/h. Advocates stated that the vehicles are tested under nearly ideal conditions and, by requiring a no-contact condition for success, the benefits of the system will be stronger under less-than-ideal conditions in the real world. NTSB and AAA stated that the no-contact requirement is consistent with the need for safety, and potentially necessary to ensure test repeatability. Luminar stated that they were concerned that regulating some degree of contact in these scenarios presents significant concerns for test efficiency, integrity and cost related to compliance. Luminar stated that the no-contact performance is within the capability of existing technology. Several commenters, including the Alliance, Honda, FCA, Nissan, Volkswagen, SEMA, and MEMA stated that the proposed no-contact requirement in lead vehicle AEB tests is not practicable at the proposed test speeds. Many of these commenters suggested a hybrid approach of collision avoidance at lower speeds and speed reduction at higher speeds. Multiple commenters stated that the proposed test speeds will require earlier intervention by AEB systems to meet the “no-contact” requirement, which they state will cause various unintended consequences, such as false positives due to test speeds or AEB intervention at a time where evasive steering may still be possible. p. 101-
Many commenters stated that the expectation of no contact in the real world is not practical. The Alliance stated that while the research indicated that certain vehicles performed better under certain test conditions, the number of tests run, particularly at higher speeds, is insufficient to make any reliable determination as to the repeatability and reproducibility of testing and that the agency ran only one test per vehicle at each of the different speed ranges in each scenario. Many commenters also observed that no vehicle was found to have met all the proposed requirements ... Further, Honda stated that to meet the proposed higher speed no-contact requirements, current systems would be forced to provide braking intervention with significantly reduced recognition reliability and that current AEB systems would need to be completely redesigned. Bosch stated that its testing shows that when the speed reaches approximately 75 km/h, there are reproducibility challenges with multi-sensor fusion of the object in time to initiate AEB and avoid the obstruction, and considerations should be made on how these requirements align with current functional safety requirements. p. 102-
NHTSA does not expect that false activation would occur for well-designed systems. NHTSA recognizes that false activation could occur when an AEB system has low accuracy and reliability. As mentioned previously, we agree with Luminar and other commentors that no contact performance is within the capability of existing technology. For example, Honda asserted that an AEB system will likely intervene improperly when the road in front of a subject vehicle is curved to the left and there is a vehicle parked on the right side of the road that causes no risk of collision. If the subject vehicle is equipped with sufficient technology to detect the shape of the road ahead, the AEB system would not improperly activate based on the mere fact that a parked vehicle appeared in the middle of AEB’s field of view. There are manners in which an algorithm can assess the shape of the road. The system will also be continuously receiving more data as the vehicle gets closer. p. 109-
Another technical option is having redundant systems as suggested in the Alliance’s comment. Regardless of whatever technical solution manufacturers choose, NHTSA does not believe that it should lower performance to match that of poor performers. Rather, manufacturers with poorly performing vehicles should strive to resolve their systems’ deficiencies so that they can perform as well as the market’s better or best performing vehicles. Additionally, while this rule imposes performance requirements for AEB systems, it does not specify how manufacturers must meet the requirements. The agency is providing maximum flexibility to manufacturers in designing AEB system for their vehicles. NHTSA recognizes that different manufacturers have different economic and practical realities that face their businesses. NHTSA principal concern is with the safety outcome and not the path that a manufacturer chooses to take to get to the required outcome. Given the various technical options, selecting technology for their AEB systems and setting the level of accuracy and reliability are at the manufacturers’ discretion. At the same time, the manufacturers should be responsible for any safety-related defects in their vehicle products, in this case potential false positive activations. Therefore, we expect that vehicle and equipment manufacturers will mitigate and resolve any product defect issues including potential false activation in their AEB systems. NHTSA will continue to monitor complaints on AEB systems from the public, including those involving false activations, and will evaluate the risks they present. p. 110-

How do you know if you've reached your limit or not in the Objectives when you get for example x2 Points? Does it tell you somehow? Or are you just not getting the extra points and have no way of knowing?

For me fight doesn't seem like a typical frequent response. I am more biased towards freeze and flight. But a key part of how I'm traumatized is blocking of anger and fight energy, to the extent that a lot of my behaviour becomes coping that tries to keep anger suppressed, like an IFS protector.
Some kinds of events seem to cause burying of anger and fight energy, that never really goes away. I can regulate myself to a seemingly calm state via various means, including time spent in nature and time spent online. But that involves an increase in dissociation, like burying the upset part of me. I don't know how to simply let go of or forgive some things.
The most common pattern causing this is when I make an attempt to communicate what is important to me, and that fails to have a result. Such patterns include explaining how something is important to me, or how something hurts me, and then that being ignored. Sometimes people can seem to care but it fails to make any lasting difference. Other times people can seem to not care at all. More precisely, one common pattern is when someone is being abusive towards me, and other people don't care about that hurt and want me to simply endure the abuse, and even keep trying to help the abuser while I am being abused.
One example was being bullied in elementary school, when teachers refusing to help, insisting I simply need to ignore it, and punishing both sides if I fight back, and me if I try to run outside of schoolyard bounds. Even decades after that, some things can trigger the associated anger.
Another example is experiences with my mother, where she was emotionally abusive, sometimes throwing terrible temper tantrums to control me in various ways. It is okay if others say she is not responsible for that due to being mentally ill, but it is not okay for the pain and damage I suffer to not matter because of that. She got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in her old age. I am also upset about how a lot of my communication with mental health professionals involved in her care seemed totally useless.
Part of the problem is that when my mother gets severely agitated, "hysterical" as some people call it, nothing else seems to matter. Previous communication I've had with her and other "normal" people all becomes irrelevant.
A lot of the resulting anger isn't at the abusive people themselves, like the school bullies, and my mother, but about other people who disregarded my pain, failed to protect me, and failed to allow me to protect myself.
The troubling thing is that when there is no more hope that communication can help, the only remaining alternative seems to be war. I don't like that.
Actually, there is another alternative, giving up, accepting shit, and doing whatever other people want. But as I said earlier in the post, this seems to involve burying upset parts of me and getting more dissociated. It increases impairment of my ability to function, and may lead to risk of bad things happening in the future when I've buried too much anger for self control to handle.
In the last few years, one answer I found has been to express the fight drive in a controlled way, making sure it is reasonably safe and not causing serious harm. Though it may only truly help when there is some hope that it will help reach objectives that I'm trying to fight towards.

Someone once described Chuck as one giant plot hole, and they had a point. There are lots of loose ends and inconsistencies that we’re all prepared to overlook because of the overall genuine pleasure of the show. This is Chuck, not Chernobyl. We don’t really care that no one ever gets stuck in traffic in Los Angeles, for example, or that flying to Moscow seems to take maybe half an hour.
But still, people make mistakes, and there often isn’t an accounting for those mistakes. We may not want realism, but we do expect some degree of consistency. Ellie blew it big time with her CIA misadventure, which inadvertently led to her Dad being killed. What on earth was she thinking? We’ll never know. The entire chronicle of Sarah and Chuck the first two and a half years or so is a chronicle of mistakes that they eventually do put behind them, but it’s pretty fraught journey—particularly Sarah’s terrible taste in men (Casey gets this immediately,) and her double standard about Chuck. Morgan’s entire life trajectory is one blunder after another—he’s lucky Chuck doesn’t whack him from time to time, since many come at Chuck’s expense. Whatever happened to the potential lawsuits from Lester and Jeff’s interviews for new female staff? Who knows? The only person who ever seems to pay for any mistake is Casey, who is dismissed by Beckman for serious, but understandable and forgivable, offenses.
Which brings us to Beckman. How on earth did this person get to be a general? Her tenure seems to be a litany of bad judgments and downright blunders, one error after another. Starting with the remarkable judgment (shared by Graham, but not, importantly, enthusiastically embraced by Casey) to have Chuck killed, although he has, as Casey noted, served his country well, and never asked for the intersect in the first place. (Notice they don’t tell Sarah.) This is a completely bonkers decision. The argument that you can’t have two intersects around is nonsense—you probably don’t want them in the same room, but still, that’s no reason to kill the guy. Casey tries to resist the order, but she shoots him down immediately—refuses to even listen. This person is a military leader?
But by far the worst blunder is her repeated and bewildering confidence in Shaw. Not listening to Chuck and Morgan explain about the fake fight is pretty inexcusable, and nearly gets Sarah killed. Moreover, Beckman seems perfectly ok with Sarah working with Shaw even after she learns the truth about the death of Shaw's wife herself. In what universe is this a sound judgment? Shaw makes lots of mistakes, actually, and pays for exactly none of them until the bridge encounter with Chuck. (Shaw was a really good tragic villain, but his spy credentials are never catalogued.) Either Beckman is oblivious, or she’s genuinely stupid. I don’t think you become a general by being stupid. Well, maybe you do. And Beckman seems miraculously unscathed career-wise from any of these (in some cases, potentially fatal) blunders. We never again hear about Shaw’s elevator fake fight, or, more generally, the reasons for Beckman’s blind faith in Shaw when all the evidence should be suggesting otherwise.
Shaw isn’t the only example of Beckman’s poor judgments about people. We can forgive her infatuation with Roan Montgomery because that’s what it obviously is—the two seem to have been a thing. But Montgomery is an old drunk at this point, and even he knows it. Then there’s her belief that the Turners walk on water or something. How oblivious can you get, really. And who can forget Beckman’s expecting Chuck and Sarah to be back in Burbank the next day, following an excruciatingly harrowing experience and Sarah nearly getting murdered by Beckman’s favorite spy. They should have gotten three months off and the opportunity to work for someone less pathological. Instead, we get Beckman prepared to send them off again the next day. Really, doesn’t Beckman actually report to anyone?
And Beckman’s treatment of Sarah is pretty awful too. She knows Sarah’s strengths, but then we also have the ridiculous 49B exercise, which seemed designed mainly to show another attractive woman in skimpy outfits. As a plot device, it barely worked, and still it seems a bit of an over-reaction. Far worse was he decision to send Sarah off on her own to take down the Volkov empire, with Mary. Somehow the two of them were going to do something miraculous or something—it’s never completely clear. Of course, why Sarah agreed with this bonkers plan made as much sense as continuing to hang around Shaw even after he discovered the truth about his wife’s death. But at this point we’re used to Sarah making boneheaded judgments, so we let these slide.
I love Chuck--it's one of my three or four favorite shows ever. But a little more accountability for sheer stupidity wouldn’t have hurt the show one bit.

In Star Wars, Darth Vader has to wear a suit in order to survive. What if this is also Pekka's situation? This might explain why she talks like a robot, probably because of a device that allows her to speak (she might not be able to speak normally because her face got disfigured and they had to replace her tongue, which would also explain why she has artificial purple eyes). Pekka is clearly able to think, remember and feel emotions, things that machines are incapable of. However, one might argue: "Didn't Clash a Rama prove that Pekka is a mecha that can be commanded by things such as mini-pekka?" Response to the objection: The problem is that the inside of Pekka constantly changes in Clash a Rama (there is even an episode where the knight uses its insides to play music) and Pekka, as seen by the trailers, has her own personality. How can Pekka be a disk-playing machine, a mecha and a being with its own personality at the same time? I have a theory for this: the Clash a Rama Pekka is not the true Pekka, but rather a fake one that they are using to fool us. Notice also how emotionally flat and antisocial Pekka is in Clash a Rama, the opposite of the trailers. As you can see from Clash Royale and Clash of Clans, both in animations and in game (if you look closely enough), she has HUMAN LEGS with small feet and pointy shoes. The pants she is wearing seem to be wrapped around body fat. In the Cannoneer trailer, we can even see that she has HUMAN ARMS AND HANDS. You can even see her elbow when the cannoneer hits the dark prince and she turns around scared. This implies that someone is inside the armor and that the armor is not the person itself. Pekka is either a shapeshifting skinwalker (if Clash a Rama is to be considered canon despite its inconsistencies) or a woman. How do we explain the other pekkas, including the super ones, in Clash of Clans then? They are clones of the original one, just like any other type of troops: for example, barbarians are all perfect copies of eachother, probably clones of an original barbarian, but clearly barbarians are not robots. One might also argue that the super pekkas are definitely not human because they have electrical armor. Well, the electro dragon and electro wizard exist too in the Clash universe, so this is not a good argument. Another thing that people might say against my theory: Sparky has a human soul too, yet she's not human. Well, I have already shown that Pekka has human limbs, so it can't be a machine. Want more evidence? Just look at the Clash of Clans ad where she chases a butterfly with natural movements. Final objection to the theory: "but Pekka in Clash of Clans does a robotic noise before dying!" Response: it's because the armor that is keeping the person inside alive stopped working.

Reading a relocation chart alongside a natal chart in astrology involves understanding the dynamic interplay between the original natal energies and the influences of the new location. Here's a step-by-step guide to interpreting the changes and consistencies:

1. Understand the Natal Chart: Begin with a thorough understanding of the natal chart. Each planet, house, and aspect in the natal chart represents specific energies and life themes. The natal chart is the baseline of an individual's astrological influences.
2. Generate the Relocation Chart: A relocation chart is drawn up for the new location using the same birth date and time as the natal chart. This chart shows how the planetary positions fall into the houses for the new location.
3. Analyze House Position Changes:

• If a planet moves from one house to another in the relocation chart, it indicates a shift in how that planet's energy manifests. For example, a planet moving from the 1st to the 10th house might shift its expression from self-identity (1st house) to career and public life (10th house).
• The inherent qualities of the planet, as seen in the natal chart, remain the same, but the area of life (house) where these qualities are now expressed or realized changes.

1. Blend Natal and Relocated Energies:

• The energies of the natal chart do not disappear; they blend with the relocated chart's energies. This blending can bring about subtle or significant shifts in how one experiences various aspects of life.
• The aspects (angles) planets make to each other in the natal chart generally remain the same, but their expression might be modified by the house changes in the relocation chart.

1. Interpret Aspect Changes:

• Pay attention to any new aspects formed by the relocation. For example, a planet that did not form a significant aspect in the natal chart might form one in the relocation chart, altering its influence.

1. Consider the Ascendant and Midheaven:

• The Ascendant (rising sign) and Midheaven (MC) are likely to change in the relocation chart. These shifts can indicate changes in how one presents themselves to the world (Ascendant) and in career or life direction (Midheaven).

1. Evaluate Overall Themes:

• Look for overall themes or patterns that emerge when comparing the two charts. Are there consistent themes that are reinforced or new themes that emerge?

1. Synthesize the Information:

• Finally, synthesize the information from both charts. How do the natal chart's themes and energies interact with the relocated chart's influences? Consider how the core personality and life themes (natal) adapt to or are expressed in the new environment (relocated).

So, while the core energies of the natal chart remain intact, their expression and the life areas they influence can shift significantly in the relocation chart. The key is to understand and interpret these shifts within the context of the individual's overall astrological makeup.

Given that information in other posts about available information(if looking for it perhaps, per se), regarding "alternative treatments" for the situation that may be associated with the idea of "depression" and or the other nutritional augmentation/modification related items are somewhat "lesser known" than more "conventional approaches"/"main stream approaches", why are the "main stream approaches" the "main stream approaches" as per majority of physicians etc., general public etc.?
One might argue that these specific referenced items of information in question being "less well known" than more "well trumpeted" items like pharmaceutical medications, etc., amounts to somewhat of a "betrayal" arguably; and hence one might be lead to ask one's self "who is involved" in the betrayal arguably? "What are the mechanisms" via which this "betrayal" is proliferated throughout society, in general?
Well, presumably, this betrayal would involve several key actors.
-Sources of Information,
and
-Framers of Information.
A "source" of said information could essentially be argued to entail/involve organizations like the main-stream-media and/or a run-of-the-mill mainstream medical providers arguably.
Hence one might wonder perhaps, where the source of said issue vis. there associated potential entities/individuals/there associated organizations may lie, perhaps.
To suss this out, one may be "well guided" to potentially asses the sources of revenue etc., for said organizations etc., as appropriate etc.; "Follow the Money", "Qui Bono" etc.(not necessarily always true but at times may be useful "guides" perhaps)
To work from the "ground up" one may hence be "well guided" to asses, for example, the revenue sources of Main Stream Media first, as this is most ubiquitous source for "medical advice" in general perhaps;
-Pharmaceutical companies within group of largest 5 ad spenders vis. main stream media;
https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-spenders-pharma-ranks-top-five-industries-for-tv-media-spending-says-report
https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/which-pharma-brand-spends-the-most-on-tv
https://www.statista.com/statistics/953104/pharma-industry-tv-ad-spend-us/
-As is somewhat obvious media companies are in general, in some regard, directly or indirectly often effectively "advertising companies", in effect;
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/
Further, one can not truly reasonably expect to rely on main stream media coverage alone for decent medically oriented advice unfortunately perhaps in general.
None the less, fortuitously there are run of the mill health care providers. Hopefully they wouldn't have any conflicts of interest with financial behemoths like large pharmaceutical companies right?
Well, unfortunately pharmaceutical company money is very present in both the education of the average western-medicine oriented doctor, as well as in the environment which they may operate in, in a post college etc., "setting" if one will, etc.
For example;
Pharmaceutical companies' "presence" in Canadian medical schooling;
https://www.sootoday.com/around-ontario/canada-how-big-pharma-can-impact-the-education-of-med-school-students-1634906
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3778453/
In US, etc., as well;
https://time.com/6171999/big-pharma-clinical-data-doctors/
https://www.propublica.org/article/we-found-over-700-doctors-who-were-paid-more-than-a-million-dollars-by-drug-and-medical-device-companies
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19723256/
Well, if pharmaceutical company money is potentially "creating" "conflicts of interest" within medical schools, and among run of the mill doctors, well, certainly, regulators would call them out if they did anything "inappropriate" right?
Unfortunately, there may also be potential "conflicts of interest" present within regulators potentially as well. For example, via the "revolving door", and other there associated phenomena, as well as through funding and other more direct financial conflicts of interest as well; as may be documented via the following perhaps;
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-conflicts-pharma-payments-fda-advisers-after-drug-approvals-spark-ethical
https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-and-nih-let-clinical-trial-sponsors-keep-results-secret-and-break-law
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/npr-news/npr-news/2016-09-28/a-look-at-how-the-revolving-door-spins-from-fda-to-industry
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415060010/https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door-companies-often-hire-agency-staffers-who-managed-their-successful
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-corporate-funding-distorts-nih-research/2018/06/22/ad0260c8-7595-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html
Also, within there-associated research institutes/clinics/labs etc., the desire to secure sources-of-funding may also acutely draw in the influence of pharmaceutical companies into the "scientific research" process associated with the field of "medicine" if one will in general for example;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9302569/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19858802/
https://www.propublica.org/article/federally-funded-health-researchers-disclose-at-least-188-million-in-conflicts-of-interest-can-you-trust-their-findings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIsMldhzxns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y_EkKhs5BQ
Further, within research institutions and research at Universities etc., people would only, even if unduly influenced by pharmaceutical industry or other industry finances etc., directly or indirectly, none the less behave ethically, and in an up-standing and competent way in regards to conducting their research right? They certainly wouldn't produce dubious "scientific" or otherwise "academic" oriented research perhaps right? Surely, they would be concerned with being called out, and the there-associated consequence for doing as such etc. perhaps?
Well, it turns out that quite a lot of modern "scientific research", even if "fancy" and "rigorous" in its supposed "methodologies" "verbiage" etc., is actually of "dubious" origin, and representative of something less than "integrity" and "excellence" potentially, lets just say seemingly;
A large amount of "scientific research papers" submitted to "Academic Journals", are later retracted, etc.;
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point?ref=labnotes.org
Many, if not most of the scientific, etc., papers that clear the review process and are published, are later found to be un-reproducible, vis. results etc., outcomes etc., for "whatever reason", seemingly;
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cancer-biology-studies-research-replication-reproducibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Hence, from the education, to the research, to the regulation of the "medical industry" in the US, etc., one may find, arguably, objectively speaking, a relatively profoundly large presence of "pharmaceutical industry" financial influence involved in practically every stage of the; research, review of the research(if the "research" is even somewhat "legit" to begin with), govt. institution associated actions(for example; "Approval", etc.) associated with said associated "research", and one can even see said same organizations(Ph. Companies) similarly being the leading contributors to the main-stream-media associated "coverage"/"discussions" of said associated items, both directly, via advertising, and indirectly vis. implicit bias of said profit driven or funding driven main-stream media outlets etc.
Hence, arguably, the "influence"-of pharmaceutical companies' "motivations" may have a disproportionate and relatively overwhelming per se, influence upon the "medical" information that is presented-to, and made-easily available to the average member of the public in the "Western World" in general perhaps.
As an aside obviously, if one will, there are many other books, articles, research papers etc., which may somehow none the less, "make it through" this net of biases and still somehow report on it, if one will; on this, there associated variety of topics in question, which one may further perhaps research and analyze as to one's own preferences perhaps.

If it’s Aliens, what’s the good outcome and what’s the bad outcome?
Example good - they help us out / Bad - they destroy us immediately
But I don’t wanna know just Aliens.
What happens if it’s Ai? What’s the good outcome and what’s the bad outcome?
What happens if it’s spiritual and it is angels/demons, what’s the good outcome and what would be the bad?
What happens if it’s humans from the future? What is the good outcome and what is the bad?
What if it’s a living creature like plasma or the ufo ships themselves are some sentient objects like actual living metal from another reality, what’s the good outcome and bad outcome?
What if it’s actually a animal that lives on our planet but evolved somewhere else to be intelligent? Like if a fish or cow entity traveled here? What would be the good outcome and what would be the bad?
What if it’s actually god? I’m not saying it is but if people attribute the whole consciousness belief, one could assume there’s only one mind, what if god manifested himself? What’s the good outcome and the bad outcome? I don’t think this one’s plausible but still.
What if it’s none of these things at all and it’s just humanity? What’s the good outcome and what’s the bad?
I know the answer to some of these but I wanted to start a conversation mainly to focus on the differences these outcomes can be. All we see are people clamoring about tech being hidden and all this stuff but it never feels like there considering the negatives of finding alien life or alien life finds us. I mean the 3 body problem clearly makes this a issue and everyone in these subs still seems super optimistic.
Will you be happy if hell is confirmed?

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A Visionary Leader

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Financial management isn't just about crunching numbers – it's about strategic planning, effective communication, and above all, integrity. Forbes embodies these principles with finesse, navigating complex financial landscapes with ease and grace.

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TLDR; I've adapted three personal meditation practices and I find them interesting and rewarding. I'd appreciate any feedback on them; if they are healthy or potentially impeding my practice. I call them "sphere of space", "the mollusk", and "music focus".
I've been practicing guided and silent meditation for 20 minutes a day for about five days per week for three months. Wondering how others relate to these three personal practices I've adapted.

1. Sphere of space: During the meditation opening, when there's mindful awareness of the present experience (investigative body scan, surrounding noises and sensations), I also "sense" the space around me, at least how I imagine or "feel" it to be. Usually I do about a three meter radius in all directions. The temperature, density, and movement of the air. Surrounding objects and living things.

When in a room, one interesting part of this is imagining what's below me. I feel my seat and the density of my body making contact with the cushion/floor. But then I imagine what is below that-- wood boards, crawl space, then dirt and rock, worms and roots, cold and dark. Sometimes I expand to a wider radius-- I imagine what's above me: sky, clouds, the thinning atmosphere and threshold of space. My cross-legged body just a speck stuck to the side of a beautiful celestial sphere.
Once I meditated in a mossy clearing in the woods. When investigating body sensations, I imagined I could feel down into the moss as if it was an extension of my nervous system. Then I "felt" it stretch all the way to the trees, up the trunks, to the tips of the branches-- again, as if an extension of myself. I don't believe there's any real/physical component to this, just imagination; I don't believe there's any real mechanism for the human mind to connect to other living things in this way. I am a fairly staunch scientific materialist. Still, the thought exercise felt really good. It felt like I was scratching a part of my brain I'd never felt. It was very peaceful and rewarding. I have theories on why it felt the way it did, but this post is getting too long.

1. The mollusk visualization: I've been getting better at breathwork. Now I can string together a few seconds of (what feels like) pure focus/awareness of breath, with my brain relieved of all other thought processes. Of course, this can sometimes be extremely challenging. When I have trouble concentrating, I add increasingly complex visualizations. For example, first I imagine a light in my chest growing brighter with breath-in and dimmer with breath-out. If I still have trouble, I'll imagine the light spinning faster with breath-in and slower with breath-out.

I found that instead of focusing on one point in the body like nostrils, chest, or abdomen, it helps to feel the body as a whole. Its hard to explain but it's like feeling the whole body at once, just a big blob of flesh, bones, and skin. Feeling my blood moving around, spreading to the capillaries just beneath the skin. Just an organic mass performing the simple task of respiration.
It reminded me of a mollusk, like a clam. Then I imagine the air is very dense and dark. Essentially I imagine I am a clam at the bottom of a deep ocean. My brain isn't doing much. The body is simple, anchored, in stasis. The breath-in and breath-out is all that need occur; the central nervous system is barely whispering. No thought. Just existing, stable, breathing. Then I reduce the visualization until I'm in that hyper-focused breathwork state.

1. Music focus: I'm very curious to hear what people think of this one. I LOVE music. I love music where it's actually musicians playing real instruments. I love "actively" listening to music. But when I started meditating, my active listening unlocked another level.

Seated with eyes closed, I attempt to actively listen to music. But REALLY concentrate. Focus on, say, just the guitar part. Holding that concentration on every little detail of the guitar. If my mind wanders, I gently bring it back. Then I move to other instruments. Then to the entire song as a whole. Just working on focusing my mind and not allowing any other thought processes to come in.
This may not be the formal way to practice concentration meditation. And I see it as sort of training wheels-- practicing the focus and the redirection from the wandering mind (or to allow the wandering thoughts to float away like bubbles while I stay behind). Eventually, I aim to do this with simply breath, or simply being. But can "music focus" meditation be counterproductive to my practice?
Those are my tidbits. Happy to hear any feedback and thanks for reading!

Married since 2012. 3 children. Caught her cheating in 2019. Stayed for the children. At some point between 2019 and now we agreed to get a dissolution in 2025 so we could get our personal finances in order. Admittedly I stepped away from my graphic design career in 2019 because of obvious depression. Started working odd jobs and got rid of most assets. Now the only asset we share is a car. A month ago I caught her cheating on me again with a guy next door. I decided that day to leave and visit a friend 3 hours away to cool off. I showed up randomly a few days later. I went into the house and the children were left alone. I called her 4 times and no answer. So I call the police. CPS gets involved. Basically says she's fine but she said some bullshit about domestic violence from years ago. Totally hearsay. They come investigate me and try to push for alcohol use and I'm like I drink maybe twice a month if that. Last year for example I cycled to work from June - October. This entire time I did not drink. My wife told me a week ago she is moving out of our apartment in July. We are in agreement with dissolution but I'm wondering if this is even the route I should take. We've talked and agreed with $600 a month in child support but the Ohio child support calculator is showing around $450. I'm wondering if with all of the evidence I have, her admitting to police she's committed adultery if I should go for custody. That or being the man if the agreed dissolution and no court fines is a win. What does everyone think? I have very little money now but could easily gain traction in a month or two. Is there a way to hold off on divorce if I did want a few months to build a savings to fight? Or should I just shoot for dissolution with no alimony and consider that a win? Sorry if this post is all over the place. Stressed.