Reading “realistic” novels about regular people — about their marriages, lives, quotidian travails — is extremely boring because most people are extremely boring.

I think that’s the main problem I have with “serious” literature: it’s written by, for, and about people I’d never want to talk to for a single second in real life.

City-run ISP makes 10Gbps available to all residents and businesses.

In Salisbury, NC, of all places.

Fibrant’s site is unavailable — probably crashed due to the Ars link — but doing a 10Gbs fiber handoff is quite an expensive proposition for the average home.

First, you’ll need a switch like this if you want more than one machine to be able to use it at full speed.

That’s $1,300, and one of the cheapest 10gbs examples you can buy that supports SFPs.

Then you’ll need the SFP, which is around $270 for a generic.

Then you will need a 10Gbs NIC in one of your machines, which is around $240.

That’s if you want the possibility of full 10Gbs speed to all of your network (which you’ll never see from the internet in real world use yet, by the way).

If you want 10gbs on just one machine, you’d only need this or something like it.

So, yeah, not cheap! But still very cool.

I’m not against college — in fact, I think anyone who can afford it should absolutely go.

If you want any sort of a decent life, rampant credentialism now demands it. Heck, I’d recommend getting a master’s if you can swing it.

However, do it as cheaply as you can — start off at a community college and transfer. Anything to lower the price, as the risk premium is very high.

These days, I see master’s degrees required for jobs that a bright fifth-grader could do, so for most people (outside of IT and a few other rare fields) if you don’t go to college you’re going to be stuck in a low-paying job all your life, guaranteed.

You might still get stuck there — even back in the 1990s I knew a very sharp dude in his 40s with a chemistry degree working at Subway — but it decreases the chances.

Just don’t try to learn anything. Concentrate on graduating. Focusing on actually learning is not something to optimize in current society.