I feel this! When I need to do something in my computer my first impulse is usually to think about writing the code. Doesn't matter how many free tools are already around. Why? Because software design and coding is fun! It's not cost-effective in terms of time and effort, but way more fun than reading a manual for an existing thing and getting good at that thing. Example: right now I'm looking for a self-hosted wiki to organize my upcoming D&D campaign. As I look through the docs for dokowiki and wikijs I'm already thinking, how hard can it be to write one? A mind is terrible thing!
This is like asking do I have the flu or is my car on fire? Maybe and yes.
The various opportunists engaging in MAGA's takeover of the US government are out to loot the palace and steal all the silverware, and being the geniuses they are they've decided to replace the guards with street thugs and turn off all the smoke detectors while they roast weenies in the drawing room. So yeah, there's a chance they might burn the place down.
But our illusions are definitely falling away. Today's expectations are based on the belief that the post-WWII boom of the 1950s was just a healthy economy in a healthy state, instead of the giant anomaly it really was. The boom came about because during the war millions of ordinary people were fully employed and well paid in defense jobs, and they accumulated savings. They had been raised during the Great Depression to be hyper-thrifty, and because of rationing and war production there wasn't a lot to buy anyway. So when industry transitioned back to consumer goods, people had money to spend, and lots of exciting shiny new things to spend it on - televisions, dishwashers, "automatic" everything. Spending created more jobs and higher salaries, and prosperity spiraled up.
By 1960 the spiral was over, and should have ended, but the business world put it on life support by handing out consumer credit like candy. This went on for the next few decades, until being in debt up to your eyeballs became the new normal.
In the actual American Dream people had actual money, not a "credit score". The illusion is that they're the same. But really one is prosperity and the other is getting conned.
Oh yeah it's very exciting. In 2024 a vaccine that targeted glioblastoma, an especially nasty brain cancer with an almost zero survival rate. The vaccine mimics certain aspects of tumor cells, triggering a fast, vigorous immune response that attacks the actual tumor. Encouraged by the results, they've somehow generalized the vaccine over the past year to stimulate an immune response to cancer cells in general. Immunological therapy is totally different from chemo or radiation, and a generalized approach is vastly different from what the whole field has been doing for decades. Very promising.
One night my daughter asked me, "Where is dreamland?" I explained that it's a made-up place you think of while you're asleep, and how everyone has their own. Little kids take things so literally, when we talked about "going to dreamland" at bedtime she probably wondered if it was an actual place she went somehow - but where could it be? Great question.
On the same day this came out, University of Florida scientists announced a possible new treatment for cancer - not a type of cancer, ALL cancers. It works by stimulating the immune system to kill the tumor, and it's based on a treatment for glioblastoma that had highly successful human trials last year. Hard to believe these same two developments both came out of the nutbin of Florida.
The controversy isn't about what they are, it's about what we call them and which categories we put them in on charts. It's like arguing over silly group names - is it a murder of tomatoes or a flock?
I woulda tried them on JSON. As long as they use an editor that keeps track of nested brackets I think it's much more natural than XML.