Although it's not its main topic, I enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, which goes over this in a way that really fascinated me. The book's ideas seem contested but as a layman it was a great tour of many years of humanity.
They hardly refused to talk. See them answering his questions in the full video of the call, if you can still stomach him talking. There was an awkward silence in the middle.
Even so, it's not good to spin this event into something it isn't. The video is misleading and I felt manipulated by it.
As a kid in the 90s I discovered indoor free flight(1). It's a hobby where you build flying machines with balsa wood and carburator paper, and you power them with elastic bands using an old clock mechanism. Then people compete to see which airplane flights for the longest time, some flying for over 30 minutes!
This was magical to me. My "mentor" was able to build tiny butterfly-like contraptions with four flapping wings, and many other flying machines of different kinds.
I just launched Kyaraben, it's an alternative to EmuDeck that autoconfigures Syncthing for your devices.
For those not in in that niche, the goal is to set up a Linux desktop or Steam Deck for retro (and not so retro) video game emulation, so you just drop in your ROMs, open a frontend via Steam, and play your games.
https://fnune.com/waza
A site I made to properly learn judo vocabulary in a way that builds up from basic concepts to form more and more complex technique names.
NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.
I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.
Plugging my own FF/Chrome browser extension that lets you add domains you want to block and will simply prepend matching text links with an angry emoji and prompt you to confirm whether you want to visit the page or not: