Sort of related, but my epileptic dog has most of his seizures right as he's waking up. Perhaps he's suddenly losing his "protection" as his short waves are disabling.
I love Pillars of Earth too, and he has turned it into a series (the Kingbridge series) with the fifth book expected this year. I've read each book and overall enjoyed each, particular his detailed research attempting to accurately depict everyday life for each historical era, however it does feel like the same plot with new characters 200 years later with each release.
I have used airflow with two different organizations over the past couple years. When we had a complex orchestration with critical pipelines and enough human-power to manage the system, it was great. Trying to deploy it for a small team with no critical pipelines has been overkill and we recently migrated to dagster which is still in beta but accomplishes 90% of what airflow does with a much smaller footprint.
The fundamentals of actuarial science: probability, time-value of money, and tail-risk have absolutely benefited me. I do gripe that much of the material is out-dated. I sat for all my exams within the past 15 years and (for example) we had a lot of option pricing models that have been archaic since the 90's and no machine learning (material has been updated with ML, but it constantly feels a couple decades behind).
One of the most frustrating aspects of the process is that once outside of insurance/insurance-adjacent industries, the credentials are useless. I have my FSA (fellowship of the SOA) and CERA (chartered enterprise risk analyst) from the SOA. I no longer wanted to work in insurance and left for data science. I felt the need to obtain a graduate degree to feel qualified enough for the data science space. My Master's degree was a cake-walk compared to the actuarial process but that is what my peers care about, and I always feel not quite at the same level as my peers with PhD's.
It's even more constrained than my experience. The U.S has two actuarial governing bodies: the CAS and SOA - the former handles P&C, the latter just about everything else (life, health, retirement). The two organizations hate each other and it's almost impossible to get a respectable job in one industry if you have the wrong credentials. What makes it even more crazy is that the two orgs have the same exact first couple of qualifying exams.
My advice has always been: only consider dedicating your time to these exams if you're highly certain this is the career you want. The pay isn't as great as it once was, you're constrained to legacy industries, the process is as time-consuming as a PhD without getting the respect that comes along with it, and you need to decide early on which area of insurance you'll want to practice.