Being able to chalk off the often embarrassing or cruel lessons of childhood as something personal, rather than something someone saved in video, to hound you with for the rest of your life.

That I can't do religious stuff! I don't have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it's not sacred -- all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of "higher power" (clients) without anger or discomfort, it's really not a big deal!

I'm not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I'm honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I've studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)

I've discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They've always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It's become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!

Primarily, that what we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.

An interesting realization was that "saving money" and "reducing waste" are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job -- the rest "save tons more money than I do" but don't have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.

Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don't spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it's in a context where working would be impossible, or there's a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).

I prioritize not wasting my time first (it's the only resource I can't buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.

When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing -- so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn't put it in the bank -- I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.

Anyway it's not the right advice for everyone, I'm just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it's maybe useful to someone out there.

We live in rented honeycomb-like structures to extract maximum rental value, performing all our work in VR offices managed by social media companies. The concepts of "home" and "alone" no longer exist.

Historians rediscover the original movie Home Alone, and over the course of 16 academic papers, explore these antiquated notions. The first four papers cover the economics by which noncorporate entities have legal rights and may own land. The next four the idea that some places could be different from others, making leisure travel relevant. After that, the idea that physical goods could be owned (and therefore "stolen" by "thieves"), not only leased as a DRM-protected service.

The final four papers are just screaming.

Vietnam. I've never seen someone with a gun that wasn't army, police, or at an Olympic event. Civilians can only own shotguns, and even then under a lot of restrictions. It's quite uncommon but I've heard of companies with rubber plantations out in the middle of nowhere having one gun on site. I've only heard of it being used to kill the odd wild boar that accidentally wanders into the office building.

There are some illegal guns from time to time, but not that many. It's something I've only seen on the news.

The current situation suits me just fine -- at our population density, I'm not comfortable with gun ownership being widespread. When you put enough people in a small space, there's always someone angry nearby, always someone celebrating, being born, dying. With everything happening everywhere all at once, adding guns to the mix would not be great, I think.

Also as one of very few immigrants to Vietnam, I am already seen as a target for thieves. People imagine I must be magically very wealthy or something -- I'm not. I came here with nothing and built a company, to progress to maybe middle-class. I live in the slums quietly like a normal person.

I would be OK with the police or army running shooting ranges where you could rent a gun to practice target shooting. Maybe that already exists, for all I know. I haven't really checked. There are archery ranges though, this is good enough for me :D

On the other hand -- more or less all citizens are trained to service an assault rifle. The means disassembly, cleaning, maintenance. My wife was fastest in her university class. We just don't own guns.

I rather like KDE Connect.

I've got some form of open source sensors multitool that gives me the raw data from my phone's sensors. That helps me troubleshoot other sensors at work.

Oh and while not strictly speaking an app itself, I rather like Godot. Within a day I was writing my own android apps (it uses a Python-like scripting language). Mostly stuff to send/receive UDP networking packets to test various systems. So my next favorite android app might be one I write myself ;)

A lesson that took me a long time to learn, and at terrible personal cost, is that being smart doesn't matter very much. I was good at academic stuff as a kid, so tons of adults told me that was the most important thing ever, and I've come to realize that was wrong of them.

Let's say, as a fictional example, that I'm top 1% of the population in terms of some abstract measure of intelligence (IQ is an awful one, but let's not get caught up on that). If no one values time spent with people on a lower rung, not only can I not spend time with the people below me on the curve, but people higher won't spend time with me. That gives me such a tiny fraction of the population I can interact with, it's absurd! Meanwhile, people smarter than me are still common enough that I'd encounter several a day -- I'm hardly exceptional enough to be terribly important. What a lonely life that would be!

So three further lessons I've learned, and I think these are important, go something like this:

1. Intellectual challenges are not scarce. They are a dime a dozen, I can invent them myself inside my head, or pick any number of other problems online. Sometimes I can get paid to solve them, whatever. So I don't need more people to give me those. What's really valuable are the people that challenge you to grow, to become more. It doesn't take intelligence to look you in the eyes when you're being a smartass, and ask you "Do you want to be right, or helpful?".
2. Better to look for (and learn from) people who are kind and wise than who are smart. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth, the opposite of wisdom and kindness are substantially less desirable.
3. The harshest lessons in life are always when you trust the wrong person. Harsher still, is when this person was yourself. So it's wise to enter all relationships carefully -- with respect, I don't think the fact you are thinking about this beforehand is wrong, but your focus might be misplaced. I'm just a stranger on the Internet though.

Back in uni, my colleagues and I had something we called "default mode" -- the idea that all technology had an inherent desire to kill all humans or otherwise be as destructive to life and property as possible. "Default mode" had to be actively prevented by careful engineering -- e.g. all devices are assumed to be maximally harmful until you engineer them to be otherwise with a high degree of confidence.

We also had something we called "destructive optimization". This was essentially the elimination of an object that was so poorly fitted to it's purpose that it made it actively harder to do the intended thing. So, like smashing a tool that is so bad, that the task is easier to accomplish without it. Often, these tools would be inherited from graduating grad students on the instruction of a well-meaning supervisor. For example an overly complex and poorly documented robotic arm that has weird bugs inherent to the design, iterated on a dozen times -- less work to redo than fix!

The terms are best used in tandem, e.g. "it entered default mode, and had to be destructively optimized".

Nearly two decades later, I still think in these terms and laugh about it (while also taking them seriously). I now own an engineering company. My focus is still firmly on preventing "default mode". I also make OK money "destructively optimizing" software tools sometimes.

When space, time, or power it requires is no longer a good trade in exchange for the task it completes.

I live in Asia, so the space something physically takes up is often the biggest cost. The footprint of my house is like 25 square meters, so if I want to keep a bunch of older computers around, I'm going to need to rent a bigger house.

My time has also grown more expensive over the years.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don't use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules and various headers You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I'll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

I immigrated to Vietnam. That was ok.

Visiting north America again years later was quite a shock!