My own experience with men's jeans in recent times has been that the waist size is accurate, but the fit type is critical. I won't fit into any type of "slim fit" and "regular fit" needs to be one waist size up. "Relaxed fit" or its newer cousin "athletic fit" each work for me perfectly. That has been the case for two brands of jeans, at least.
Here we have a problem: Hollywood tropes. Shows like The Big Bang Theory aka "Blackface for Nerds" make it nearly impossible to even talk to normals without sounding like Sheldon F. Cooper.
World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is also running, though it has had struggles since moving datacenters, and it seems their external stats are still out of commission.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
Old greybeard here - I went the other way, learning 6502 assembler on an Apple II before I learned C. Having that 6502 experience when I first took a C class helped me immensely.
I think any kind of assembly experience is tremendously helpful in learning C. Assembly makes pointers and pointer arithmetic very intuitive, in my opinion.
See also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has been the story of American businesses: "It's too much trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead. No one will notice."
An additional data point is that Midewin's bison area is surrounded by a double fence - a barbed-wire one to keep the humans out and a stout steel one to keep the bison in.
The Fermilab bison used to have (probably still do) a sign in their field that said, amusingly, not to jump the fence into the field unless you can cross it in 9 seconds, because the bull can do it in 10. (grew up on the DuPage county side of Fermilab, got to take physics there too, which was awesome)
Also, you were far more likely to get actual documentation back in the day. You're never going to get a detailed first-party technical reference for today's Apple computers (at least not without being Big Enough and signing a mountain of NDAs); compare that to the Apple II having a full listing of the Monitor ROM, or the original IBM PC Technical Reference Manual.
The very existence of those manuals improved the software, as the technical writers were trained in a different discipline than programming, and it really showed.
Even some well-documented modern software is obviously documented by the programmers and programmer-adjacent.
That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.
Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)
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