Simon Sinek claims that people don’t buy what you make/do, they buy why you are making it. He further claims you are not trying to align yourself with everyone, you’re trying to align yourself to the people who believe what you believe.
I would qualify his takes as marketing methodology that can work in the right conditions. For example, if Apple couldn’t actually make/deliver products that are good, this wouldn’t work. You can believe building a flying machine will change the world – without being able to technically do it.
I do agree if you just tell people what you have – it won’t be enough. If you tell people why you’re making the product and why you built it – it will be much more effective marketing.
In his point about Martin Luther King – he points out a truth for all Christians. We have seen people that spend all their time reposting their doom-scrolling and pointing out the bad in the world. In the end, it just focus them and others on hate, anger, frustration, and lashing out. A trap we see many fall into.
A much more profound method is to do exactly what Jesus did – preach the Truth. That elevates and points people in a direction and vision of how things should, and will, be. It also requires much more from the person doing it – a personal understanding, and relationship, with Jesus in which you learn these things. Hate and anger are cheap and easy – Truth is hard.
Patrick Boyle is a hedge fund manager, university professor, and former investment banker that continues his deadpan roasting of current business trends with this report on ridiculous actual tech inventions of things that already exist or are just beyond ridiculous.
It reminds me of the Smart Pipe – a parody video that came out over a decade ago and proves we’ve learned nothing.
We’re still celebrating the 12 days of Christmas (until Epiphany) and I’ll confess Advent/Christmas is my favorite season in the Church. Yes, Easter is when the full saving power of God comes to us in Christ who dies for us and we are given the Eucharist at the last supper. Christmas, however, is when God shows us exactly how He is used to working in the world. That is a source of real hope for the whole of our lives. Especially when everything looks like it has gone wrong and there is little hope.
The coming of Jesus the messiah is foretold for hundreds of years by the prophets and foreshadowing of the Old Testament. It’s not hard to understand people were expecting another Moses or David who overthrew enemy armies and freed them from slavery – giving them a promised land to live on and freeing them from slavery to other nations.
Instead Jesus came to free us in a very different and much better way. Jesus didn’t come into the world as the kind of conqueror or revolutionary activist that anyone expected. We see people clamoring for, and even starting, revolts against the Roman occupation. Even Jesus own disciples keep asking when Jesus will overthrow the Romans (Acts 1:6-7). But Jesus again and again points them back to the true nature of freedom.
Instead, He established a new kingdom – not based on land or borders, but a promised land of freedom in our hearts where the true king, Jesus, would dwell every day with you. It would be a profound intimacy in which the full presence of God’s three persons will dwell in us, love us, and show us how to love others in our own hearts. That love and real living in Truth in our very being frees us from the futile things that actually enslave us and destroy our world: greed, hatred, unforgiveness, hurt, violence, and hopelessness.
But just like the earliest disciples, we can absolutely miss Jesus’ arrival if we aren’t aware of how God likes to comes into our lives.
When God, who created the entire universe and all of us, wants to send a savior to us – he doesn’t appear magically and just wipe away our problems like a lottery ticket. Instead, he decides to come in full human form – starting as a single cell embryo in his mother’s womb, being carried through a normal pregnancy, and born just like us. He enters creation as it is – and not in a palace or by magically changing how things are. This in itself is a powerful message of just how much he loves us and all He has created.
He is born to an unwed mother – who’s betrothed fiance nearly abandons her when faced with an unexpected pregnancy he knew wasn’t his. Jesus is born on the road in a city Mary may never have been too. The whole reason for the trip was due to a census required by the occupying Roman military force.
There was no reservations at a hospital or hotel – He is born in a barn that was likely just an open-air covering next to an existing house or part of a cave. There were no doctors/midwives, no anesthesia, no preparation, no family or friends – just her and her husband in an animal barn that likely smelled and was filthy. This means He is easy to miss if we are looking in flashy presentations, in wealth, or in big signs or wonders.
Joseph was a blue-collar worker of humble means. In Greek, Joseph is described as a τέκτων – tekton – a craftsman or builder of stone/wood/etc. Joseph would likely be a construction worker or bricklayer of today. Certainly not a social media, Hollywood, or political star. When Jesus is brought to the temple his parents could only offer a pair of turtledoves/pigeons – which was what the poorest families offered. It means they could not even afford a whole lamb.
They quickly needed to flee to Egypt to escape the persecutions of Herod. They lived as political refugees in Egypt for years – likely struggling to make ends meet, faced prejudices, and likely had no friends or family to help raise their child. They likely didn’t even have a temple or place to worship and connect with other Jews.
When they returned, they settled in Nazareth in Galilee – an area considered to be the ‘hick’ area of Israel. People recognize the disciples as being from the area by the way they speak – probably much like people recognize Southern accents. When Jesus calls his first disciples, even Nathaniel scoffs at Nazareth as a nothing backwater (“Nathan′a-el said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see”. (John 1:46)).
All this is to say this is how God likes to answers our prayers and come into our lives. Jesus’ life was the meanest start with no power, no money, no status. Instead, He comes anonymously, quietly – in a barn full of stench and disarray.
And that’s often just what our lives are like when we need Him most.
We often fill our hearts with all kinds of similar things. We may be in an ugly structure of a life leaning against or built on professional pride or greed for money, houses, or power and positions at work. We are filled with the dirty straw and broken furniture of family members estranged by neglect or hurtful words/actions, marriages that lack love and charity, or ignoring the needy all around us, foreigners, or people we disagree with politically or in our workplace. We may even have the most base filth of ourselves as well: sins of adultery, substance abuse, pornography, and passions we are slaves too.
But this is just the place that Jesus is used to coming into. If he can come into the world in a barn of the meanest sort, He is showing us He will come into our lives – no matter what is going on.
Evil (pride, ego, and guilt) wants you to be embarrassed and hide these things from Him or even let others tell you that these things are all fine (when we know in our hearts they are not). They want to tell Him there is no room in your inn and push Him down the road. But Jesus is ready to be born not just at an inn, but in the worst, most filthy barns of our lives. Christmas is celebrated in the shortest, darkest days of winter because He wants to come exactly when we need Him in our hearts the most.
It is sometimes hard to invite Jesus into these nasty and hurt corners of our life. Especially during the holidays with family. Sometimes we don’t feel worthy or feel too broken to want to accept His presence and love. Sometimes we’re unable to get things out of our lives like addictions – which might need both God and medical help. As creations of spirit and physical body – sometimes we need care for both at the same time.
It might also be because we don’t want to give up our pain or hurts. Ironically, we sometimes like to hold onto those things that are killing us. Hate is often more fun to hold onto than the work of relationships. Sometimes we avoid it out of fear of what our lives would look like if we started living freely without that pain. Others are simply not interested in reconciliation and are happy to hurt or ignore others.
Many today think they’re doing just fine on their own and don’t need Jesus – despite the growing scientific proof about the increasing emptiness and hopelessness we feel.
But it’s not just the things in our hearts – these push outwards into our lives. Maybe we recognize the work we’re doing is immoral or hurting people. Is Jesus a part of our work day in both the business decisions and how coworkers are treated? Perhaps we’re in a relationship we should not be in for our state in life, or is based on using someone to get what we want. Have we invited Jesus into our sexual lives fully?
Do we invite Christ to come into our hearts all day when making work choices or deciding how to respond to others? Do we invite Jesus to help us when faced with a tough choice – or what to say when someone cuts you off in traffic?
All of these things are an opportunity for Christmas – to invite Jesus into your world. No matter how unsightly it is. Trust me – as he showed with his own birth – He is used to it. It is an excellent challenge to think of something you are struggling with or an old hurt – and purposefully invite Jesus to come into that part. His coming will likely not be a huge, magical fix- but a quiet arrival that slowly changes our world. If we stay committed to it.
Christ is used to coming into the meanest and most difficult parts of our lives and world. Invite Him into just one new area of yours – and experience Christmas all year.
Stargazers Ghost Network, an extensive network of GitHub accounts and repositories that provides malware distribution “as-a-Service”, has created ‘GodLoader’ which hides in Godot engine .pck files as a Godot script – and then downloads malware when activated.
Utilizing a network of ghost accounts, they distribute all kinds of malware by relying on users browsing github and downloading Godot tools and engine cheats. To obfuscate things, they used more than 200 repos with more than 225 ghost accounts – each with a slightly different purpose in the entire distributed scheme. Researchers note the script method works across Windows, MacOS, and Linux since the Godot engine works across those platforms too.
Victims were often infected with cryptocurrency miners or RedLine infostealer. The method is good – it still remains undetected by many antivirus tools.
One more reason to put github projects you download into VM’s before giving them access to your dev environment.
During the later part of his presidency, Joe Biden was dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but it turns out some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from biggest names in Democratic donors: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker.
After a late Friday night qualifying run, the Chad Green Motorsports Nitro Funny Car team at the 2025 NHRA Muckleshoot Casino Northwest Nationals in Seattle gets to work in the pits, disassembling the racecar to assess its condition.
Funny cars are disassembled after every single run due to the absolutely bonkers forces these engines undergo. These guys have the process down to a science and they do it while the engine is still hot from the run to help it come apart easier.
If you can’t beat them – join them. There’s no question that the entire world’s military strategists are looking at the rampant use of drone warfare in the Ukraine to see how modern battles will be fought.
While casual observers see the switch to low cost drones as a eyebrow raising development – military experts realize it’s a radical re-thinking of a modern battlefield. One in which the large, powerful fighting tools of the past are quickly becoming nothing more than expensive, defenseless targets.
Just like we’re seeing in the Ukraine, instead of wanting a force of slow-moving tanks or a fleet of big fighting and support vessels, you can do a lot more with a ton of unmanned attack drones. It’s the difference between 3 big guys in a bar against 1000 little guys. The tactics of a small, expendable swarm can often overwhelm even the best defended capital ship by sheer numbers. We’re already seeing swarm technology being used to blanket an area. Ukrainian forces have driven a truck full of 117 drones, let them loose, and took out a up to 40 high-end Russian bombers before anyone could react.
Experts have pointed out it would be very easy to develop a system of 100’s of drones that would swarm a building or event with facial detection systems and assassinate key targets – completely autonomously and impervious to even radio jammers. All with off-the shelf parts for a fraction of the cost of normal military equipment. With hundreds of kill bots incoming all at once, it would be hard for any defensive service to protect their key assets from every single one.
The navy is taking note too – with smaller, modular fighting units.
The wish list is now simple: Rear Adm. William Daly, head of the Navy’s surface warfare division, wants to amass a large number of small, modular unmanned boats that can be quickly equip with payloads that fit in common containers and are designed to confuse and swarm the enemy.
The admiral rightly says the new hybrid fleet does not need to include large and/or exquisite un-crewed platforms. He is very clearly saying the old multi-million/billion dollar efforts are a thing of the past. The focus instead is on building lots of these craft very quickly and cheaply.
This isn’t academic, we saw the launch of a Mobile Ship Target (MST) here in Portland this year. It’s designed to mimic the electronic, shape, and other properties/signatures of just about any ship so the Navy can practice using various experimental munitions against it.
It’s a fascinating development – and a somewhat frightening new reality of the kind of drone warfare world we’re entering.
Being required to connect to the internet while installing Windows 11 has been one, in a long line of reasons, why many users refuse to update to the new OS, even though it has been out for 4 years (since Nov 2021). After finally reaching an adoption rate of just over 50%, it has since dropped to 49.08%
The most popular bypass to having to log in with an internet connected Microsoft account was to use “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet
Unfortunately, Microsoft is removing that trick, but user @witherornot1337 on X found that typing “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.
Or you could, you know, actually give customers what they want instead of the kind of backwards thinking that gave us the universally hated Windows 8.
