• 81 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It honestly sounds like you’ve got deeper issues with your boss. I would just shop for another job.

    I’m quite introverted and have learned to only respond to questions when asked. I have no issue sharing any information. However, I have a major issue with understanding the scope of information worth sharing and when to stop. I do not let myself feel awkward in silence or the need to carry any conversation. If a person piques my curiosity, I can talk with them for days. I can find something curious to talk about with almost anyone. People that lack depth become a repetitive conversation that I will avoid.

    Personally, I don’t like to be actively manipulative with people. It goes against my nature. However, if someone annoyed me like this, and I had no other outlet. I would subtly use their psychology against them about like how a psychiatrist turns a conversation to introspection and analysis. Once a person is made vulnerable through unexpected introspection they are easily dominated. I can get away with a lot of things like this because I am a big dude where people expect me to be assertive and dominant in many ways that I really am not. Your results may vary.


  • I wouldn’t start with python. Just do bash scripting. Python is inaccessible still if you do not use it regularly and it still has the ridiculous complexity problems of all languages.

    I think the scope of all computing is hard for anyone to take in effectively. It really takes something like Ben Eater’s 8-bit breadboard computer project (YT) for a person to really start understanding fundamental computing.

    My favorite microcontroller experience is Flash Forth. You can put it on an Arduino with an ATMega 328 too. The simplicity of FORTH can teach a ton in a short amount of time because it gets a person straight into access to bits, registers, and assembly, along with the hardware documentation. Once FF is on the microcontroller, it is running the FF interpreter natively. At that point, you only need serial access through USB. It is quite easy to flash an LED, read the ADC and setup basic I/O. Branching and loops are a bit more difficult. This eliminates the need for a language that uses a lot of arbitrary syntax. It does not require a lot of documentation, and you do not need to fuss with an Integrated Development Environment.

    I would focus on the ideas, that anyone can count to 1 and anyone can break down logic into if statements. It might be bad code, but bad code is better than no code when it comes to someone getting started.



  • It is half okay, but only if they are not getting paid to screw up your results. It is a coup against democracy where freedom of information is freedom of the press and is an entire fundamental pillar of democracy. Google’s entire business model has always been neo feudalism. A web crawler and search engine is like a library, it must be neutral, objective, and publicly funded as a non profit. Much the same with YT, it is our digital public commons and the most efficient form for information sharing in the primary form of human communication.


  • Don’t underestimate the stupidity curve. There are always more people at the bottom. Just because a candidate is a worthless criminal, does not mean an inevitable outcome. Squeaky wheels get the attention the others deserve. He has already proven that people follow him anywhere like headless zombies.

    I’m sure there is a contingency plan with the weirdo party. There is no shortage of criminals without any ethics ready to boost their cronyism clown posse.


  • We are at a phase where AI is like the first microprocessors; think Apple II or Commodore 64 era hardware. These showed potential, but it was only truly useful with lots of peripheral systems and an enormous amount of additional complexity. Most of the time, advanced systems beyond the cheap consumer toys of this era used several of the processors and other systems together.

    Similarly, now AI as we have access to it, is capable, but has a narrow scope. Making it useful requires a ton of specialized peripherals. These are called RAG and agents. RAG is augmented retrieval of information from a database. Agents are collections of multiple AI’s to do a given task where they have different jobs and complement each other.

    It is currently possible to make a very highly specialized AI agent for a niche task and have it perform okay within the publicly available and well documented tool chains, but it is still hard to realize. Such a system must use info that was already present in the base training. Then there are ways to improve access to this information through further training.

    With RAG, it is super difficult to subdivide a reference source into chunks that will allow the AI to find the relevant information in complex ways. Generally this takes a ton of tuning to get it right.

    The AI tools available publicly are extremely oversimplified to make them accessible. All are based around the Transformers library. Go read the first page of Transformers documentation on Hugging Face’s website. It clearly states that it is only a basic example implementation that prioritizes accessibility over completeness. In truth, if the real complexity of these systems was made the default interface we all see, no one would play with AI at all. Most people, myself included, struggle with sed and complex regular expressions. AI in its present LLM form is basically turning all of human language into a solvable math problem using regular expressions and equations. This is the ultimate nerd battle between English teachers and Math teachers where the math teachers have won the war; all language is now math too.

    I’ve been trying to learn this stuff for over a year and barely scratched the surface of what is possible just in the model loader code that preprocess the input. There is a ton going on under the surface. All errors are anything but if you get into the weeds. Models do not hallucinate in the sense that most people see errors. The errors are due to the massive oversimplifications made to make the models accessible in a general context. The AI alignment problem is a thing and models do hallucinate but the scientific meaning is far more nuanced and specific than the common errors from generalized use.


  • It is not super common to impregnate on first offense, especially if you were her first child. You can count the days backwards from your birthday to see when it happened. If you were the first child, you may have been a day or few late.

    Growing up, I found it funny how many of my friends happened to be born in the first week of September… Happy New Years. There is often, not always, but often some correlated reason why they were free to screw around too much.





  • Intent matters.

    Do you want to claim you found master of the universe? You better have evidence of the cosmological constants that are the building blocks of the entire universe.

    No religion on Earth has ever possessed ontological knowledge prior to the scientific discoveries of these fundamental building blocks. These are the true signature of origin. Every bit of information contained within religions can be explained by direct human observation and meddling. It would be very easy to prove divinity by relating such ontological information.

    In terms of history, it is always written by the winner. The accuracy is only found in aggregate.

    The best times to live are the times when there was nothing of note. The worst times to live are always eras with memorable names of individuals. Only the worst of humans stand out from the fray and plaster themselves on the wall of history. To say Genghis Khan did not exist is not a measuring of the man, but a fool that claims the giant shit stain on the wall does not stink.



  • That is not how real point of sale systems and stores operate in practice. I actually managed a retail chain of bike shops as the Buyer and back office manager. I was the one maintaining the point of sale connections and system. There are always errors in these systems largely due to new and incompetent sales staff that sell/return/enter duplicates of the wrong items. They can enter almost anything wrong, from gender to color, from model year to brand. I’ve seen them all.

    Connecting these systems online is an absolute nightmare. I tried it with shopify, but had to limit the sku’s to items I could completely control with minimal intervention from other staff. Generally speaking, the POS system in a local retail store can be more loosely managed where the staff can make up the gaps and mistakes when the POS system numbers do not perfectly match the local stock. If you want to track inventory like is required for online retail, you need a whole different kind of micromanagement and responsibility from staff. You also need something like quarterly inventory audits. These are quite time consuming and are a total loss in the labor time involved.

    For online retail to be competitive, the margins with e-tail are absolutely untenable trash for brick and mortar retail. They are not even close. The biggest expenses are the commercial space rent and labor costs. With e-tail, the labor is less skilled, and the space is a cheap warehouse somewhere remote. General retail margins must be 40%+ while e-tail is 15-20%. The two are completely incompatible. This is why real quality brands do not sell e-tail. It has to do with how distribution and preseason wholesale buying works. There is more complexity to this, but overall the two are not compatible. In fact, most high quality brands will not allow most of their products to be listed online except under certain circumstances. This is to keep things fair to all parties and prevent undercutting based on whomever has the lowest overhead cost.

    Selling online is only for low end junk and certain circumstances. If you are a high end consumer, you will likely understand this already. It is hard to produce high end goods and distribute them successfully. It takes local Buyers that know their niche market and can do massive preseason spending to collectively give the manufacturer an idea of what they need to produce at what scale. Otherwise, the business will not last long, or they must produce lower end and more reliable/limited products. This strategy will likewise fail due to over saturation of the market segment. It is far more complex than most people realize.


  • I think, printing more money under the same conditions is the primary inflation/devalue, while the federal interest rate determines the baseline for loan interest rates. If the federal rate of return is high, it makes no sense for anyone to buy loans for a lower rate as the US gov has a longer upstanding record of paying back those debts/returns. If the fed is paying a high baseline rate, so is everyone else. Why would a bank or anyone buy your debt if they can put that money in government bonds and get a higher or the same rate of return. So money is expensive because the federal rate is high. At least that is my most simple understanding.



  • So as far as bike fit and road, if a road bike is fit properly, you won’t have weight on your wrists or hands. It probably sounds a little unintuitive, but a proper bike fit on road is all about balancing your weight so that your upper body is neutral without any weight on your arms. Like, the primary test to see if your saddle position is correct is to see if you can pedal smoothly on a trainer while taking your hands off the bars completely.

    The key here is that the centerline of the crank arms is the fulcrum of the rider’s balance. The adjustment of this balance point is set by sliding the seat fore and aft, thus placing more or less of the rider’s posterior to the rear of center.

    The only reason I can still ride is because my thoracic (spine section where the ribs are attached) is neutral when I ride, which by inference also means my arms must be neutral too.

    I am totally fine with people that don’t wish to try it or cycle for whatever reason. I’m simply trying to relate that road bikes are not like any other kind of bike. They are intended to be fine tuned to one’s anatomy, and this makes it possible to ride even when many other forms of exercise are not possible. I can’t swim or do anything sitting upright, standing, or reaching, yet can ride. GL. I wish you the best.


  • I was overweight in my late teens and by my mid twenties I was in really bad shape at 340lbs at my worst. I was in a Target with serious chest pains at one point. I'm not a whiner type and have a significantly above average pain threshold, but I wondered if I would even make it back to my car and get home that day. That was in '08. By '09 I had to move back in with family and started riding a bicycle everywhere. I had tried running and rowing when I was younger, and when I was overweight, some of that was from semi regular gym visits and weight lifting. Nothing ever really stuck like a real lifestyle though. They were always things I made myself add to my routine. I tend to overheat from aerobic exercise. Overheating in this context is really hard to define in a relatable way because it is such an intimate concept to my self awareness. Mainly my head tends to get much hotter than the rest of my body in such a way that I am extremely uncomfortable. I can easily put up with that unpleasantness. If I had never gotten into hardcore cycling, I wouldn't have known this unpleasant overheating was even a thing separate from exercise itself.

    I come from a background of hot rodding cars. Internally, I always had this notion that I was failing at life if I could paint cars, airbrush graphics, build motors, and fabricate at such a high level, but couldn’t do the same with myself and my body as the driver. This curiosity is a major driver in why I rode so persistently through the first couple of months to get past the worst discomfort and made it to a routine. The part that made it different from all aerobic efforts previously was the airflow on a bike, it’s massive. The cooling effect got me. I resisted the clothing at first, like everyone does, but after realizing its utility and purpose, it unlocked the cooling effect even more. I made it to under 190 lbs, worked in a bike shop, and raced. It was really the best I had ever felt in my life by a long shot. The lack of impact with cycling also has a fantastic effect on loosening up your body and improving aches and pains. I had felt like I was aging in addition to chest pains and other problems when I was 340lbs but that all went away with riding.

    I was super unlucky and was partially disabled by a driver in '14. I had a bunch of broken bones and barely survived. I now walk around slowly, and can’t hold posture for very long at all. Still, I can ride. It is nothing like it was in the past. I can only do ~30 miles in a day regularly when I could pull a 100 mile day weekly in the past, and have ridden 200+ miles in a day before. At the present, it does not feel like I can or should be riding, but so long as I maintain my routine that includes nearly daily cycling, I am empirically in my best shape in terms of the least aches, pains, and problems even with severe chronic problems. There is no chance I would be able to establish such a cycling routine from my current state, but I came into my condition as an amateur racer, so I had that advantage and never lost my race legs. If at all possible, consider road cycling. Get a proper bike and get someone to fit you on the bike (adjust and swap required components to fine tune your anatomy to the bike) because with road, the little details are super important or you’ll cause issues from that level of repetitive motion. There are a lot of disabled people on bikes too. In a shop, I was the Buyer and often helped people with unique needs. It may not be right for you, but is maybe something to think about. Cycling changes more than your physique, it impacts your physical and mental health in profound ways. Cycling really is a lifestyle. On a bike your both free and anonymous for the most part.



  • Not really. There are very few lobbyists for a non dystopian future. The battle for the right to own your tools is the absolute fulcrum of the future and the next several centuries. The loss of ownership rights is the largest sociopolitical issue and regression of the past millennia. The atrocity of feudalism was already hashed out as a terrible and failed social structure. Allowing it to reemerge will have extreme long term impacts

    The way people fail to see and understand this issue speaks to the potential force needed to shift the trend and trajectory. All it takes are a few influential and connected people working to shift the political conversation and momentum in the opposite direction to alter the course of the future. Funding a few individuals to speak up for us could make an enormous impact. Ownership IS citizenship; IS democracy. Trusting others while renting tools and property IS feudalism. It is a path to slavery in all but name. It happened before, and is always the inevitable outcome of this situation. Putting up any fight against the lackadaisical complacency of our present culture absolutely has the potential to impact the future in a substantial way.