Paul Warren

@dariana Sure thing! Long Covid diagnosis ~18 months ago, after one confirmed infection. For me the emotional loop comes and goes, but it's definitely a thing. More often I randomly start having very strong emotional reactions to normal things, crying at slightly sad movies or TV shows, getting giddy at seeing my wife come up the driveway, things like that. Brain fog too, mostly for little things, like a shopping list, which I never used to need, and it's difficult to tell if learning is harder because of that, or that I'm 44. My long muscles all ache, all the time, like I've been for a long walk yesterday, even with being on bed rest for a week, my hands also, mostly because I type all day for work, have to be really careful with posture. Same muscles have very little strength and stamina, though this has improved over the 18 months, with the assistance of an exercise physiologist. Another thing is my temperature regulation is all whack. Will feel cold at 19C, put on a jumper, and then be feeling hot 10 minutes later, and my instinct for when to put the heater on is no longer reliable. If I do too much movement in a day, I'll have a crash where I experience covid-like symptoms and get completely exhausted for a couple of days after, not quite bed bound, but not able to do much. Luckily I have a young GP who's kept up with the COVID research. Low dose Naltrexone has helped a lot with the muscle aches. I work from home in tech so have been able to keep that going I have seen slight improvements in all areas over the last year, in particular the last 3 months or so, though I know that's not universal. It sucks. I am now disabled and have to plan movement quite carefully. I'm finding it mostly manageable now, but it's not been easy. Here's hoping you can manage and that you improve quickly!

@palomakop Yeah, I hosted some forks of popular keyboard firmware at my homelab hosted forge: https://git.pwarren.id.au/ they're quite deep and the LLM slop crawlers loved to trawl through that mire, I ended up making them private repos which now 404 to the slop crawlers, so the outgoing bandwidth is significanly less. They don't seem to stop though! Also implmented some apache config level blocking of the User Agent strings, which also helped enough. If it gets worse again I'll look at something like anubis.

Thanks all for the pointers and comments :) Things appear to not be quite as dire as I thought. Jen called around a bunch of insurers today and we got some much more reasonable quotes for similar coverage. Our normal broker who's been excellent and been able to find us lots of options previously didn't have access to as much as we thought, so I guess it always pays to shop around, even for brokers who's job it is to find good quotes! And yeah, the bank has an insurer of last resort, which is not great for the mortgagee, but also in our case has a retail insurer which was reasonable. We're now insured for $1mil rebuild costs at $5500 for the year, instead of the $9000 from the original quote which was only $750k rebuild cost. An interesting/scary tidbit from that research is that only central city suburbs in Tasmania are outside the bushfire risk areas. The suburbs even we can't afford to buy into.