AI model weights. Patches for MMOs (World of Warcraft famously used this to good effect).

Volunteer work is my go-to answer in these situations.

I'm around 40, am always very busy with work, and I can't hold complex conversations in the language that 95% of the population of my country speaks exclusively. My personal interests are extremely technical, and unusual (bordering on arcane). So meeting new friends is a bit of a challenge for me too.

It was still a very effective way to meet awesome people of all ages, some younger, some older! I even met my wife that way.

A pocketwatch manufactured in 1889. I keep it running as a memento mori: the watch may outlive the watchmaker. Build things well -- they may be all people remember you by, one day.

I also have a slide rule at my desk at most times, to remind me of false-precision.

I guess the oldest though, is a Wu Zhu coin from the Three Kingdoms period (currency is a technology, too?). I keep it to remember that all empires arise from chaos, and must return to it; that all assets eventually have no value. That the things that endure, are stranger currencies still.

Oh in English -- I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).

Not having a Facebook profile. I've had someone initially refuse to associate with me on the basis that they couldn't investigate my life beforehand.

I just laughed and asked them how they managed to survive before the Internet (we were both old enough). We both got over the weirdness of the situation, built a robot, and were friends for a while before they moved away.

I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.

I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.

Oh this happened to me in reverse. My workplace (a client's office, technically) dumped a bunch of stuff at my house without permission, and I did not keep it. Expected me to store boxes and boxes of financial records, for infinity years, no contract or anything. They also defaulted on money owed to me, which I had to pay taxes on, even though I received nothing. Never have I met such an arrogantly entitled company owner.

Sold it all as scrap paper. Recovered 0.005% of the money owed this way. Later their company was dissolved due to nonpayment of taxes. If they ever come back to the country, they may have heir passport withheld until they pay what's owed. Which is whatever the tax department says it is, because they have no financial records.

Lawyers, accountants, and software engineers accumulate these things like you wouldn't believe. We can't tell you about current secrets, only stale ones.

I once knew that the top level password used at a corporation valued at 6 billion dollars was 'password123'. They had no backups, no VPN, and that password was used at all the high-value access points. It's since been fixed, but it was that for years.

So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...

Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.

My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.

Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.

Instead of wind mills, you could have gravity mills. Pump water into a higher-altitude reservoir on low-gravity days, and let it flow down -- turning a turbine -- on high gravity days. At least electricity would be cheap.

Or if it varies by region, pump water horizontally (or let it flow slightly downward) from a high gravity region to a low one. Then pump the water upwards there, then horizontally again to the high gravity region. Then let it fall down to turn a turbine that runs all the pumps -- perpetual motion (ish)!

Predicting tides becomes hard. Everything is going to be really windy all the time, as the atmosphere expands in low-gravity regions and contracts in high gravity ones. This makes tall buildings impractical, as they would also have to be built for some maximum gravity rating on top of the constant gravity storms.

The oceans would be weird, and violent. Hurricanes might get far more powerful than what we deal with, if the right gravity conditions occur.

For any sort of civilization to emerge, gravity would have to change/vary really slowly. I don't even want to think of orbits. Kerbal Space Program would be like, really hard in that universe.

I issued a (valid) DMCA notice to a small corporation who used the intellectual property of a colleague but did not pay them for it (they promised payment in writing, then just... didn't pay for a year or more). Their whole business website was down for a week or more as a result, as their registrar just took down their website without checking anything, and they didn't really have technical staff to resolve it.

The whole DMCA system is quite a broken mess, and is often (usually?) used unethically. However, it is possible to use correctly, even by private individuals. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it a little, that day.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it's a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There's no specific amount of current that produces light that's bright enough in a lit room, but isn't too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I'm in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won't think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I' don't like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there's a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.