When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?
Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?
Oddly enough!
If you want to read about stuff I work with, I post some of it to vintech@voltage.vn from time to time.
Also you can use the I Ching implementation by sending your query to kong_ming@voltage.vn (the bot will communicate with the machine on my desk using a little Lemmy-MQTT bridge I wrote). Internally, that machine uses an el-cheapo version of the simulated-universe-detector – using a circuit that is hard (but not provably impossible) to simulate that is based on diode breakdown in 2N3904 transistors.
I'll connect up the fancier version eventually. I've built it before, but the original design used export-controlled parts and could be construed as nuclear technology (it's a very sensitive particle detector), so I don't really want to carry it across borders. I live in Vietnam, my luggage gets searched 100% of the time as-is, and someone at CERN published a neat design I can adapt that relies only on unregulated parts (https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector)! So I'll get to that in a few months or whatever.
I could also use a Geiger tube but that feels sort of boring.