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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Years and years ago I built my own 16 bit computer from the nand gates up. ALU, etc, all built from scratch. Wrote the assembler, then wrote a compiler for a lightweight object oriented language. Built the OS, network stack, etc. At the end of the day I had a really neat, absolutely useless computer. The knowledge was what I wanted, not a usable computer.

    Building something actually useful, and modern takes so much more work. I could never even make a dent in the hour, max, I have a day outside of work and family. Plus, I worked in technology for 25 years, ended as director of engineering before fully leaving tech behind and taking a leadership position.

    I’ve done so much tech work. I’m ready to spend my down time in nature, and watching birds, and skiing.



  • Some suggestions, either online or local;

    Bookclubs
    Walking groups
    Chess, board games, table top
    Theater groups (meetup groups to go to the theater as a group)
    Escape room group meetups.

    Depending on if you are in a city or a smaller town the locals options will vary. I’d look at meetups site and browse local activities. For most any activity you will find a range of ages, but some will skew more one way than another.

    Best of luck!


  • The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn’t an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn’t include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?



  • While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.

    I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.



  • I don’t know that I follow your illustration, but let me try an alternate explanation for my point.

    One way pi appears is by taking the perimeter of the great pyramid and dividing by its height to get 2Pi. We can write this as

    4L/h ~= 2Pi
    2L/Pi ~= h

    The great pyramid has a height of 280 cubits, and a base of 440. From this, using right triangles and Pythagorean identities we can find the long side and all angles.

    Specifically, we look at the slope of the outer face, which we can express as rise over run. In our case, 280/220 = 1.27 or as 51.843 degrees.

    As long as that ratio of rise over run holds you will preserve the above ratio with pi. You can fix that slope and vary either the base or the height, and the other value is predetermined. So how did the rise and run ratio come up? Not every pyramid had this relationship, and there is an infinite number of unit length combinations that wouldn’t give rise to this ratio.

    So let’s look at the old units, in particular, the palm.

    1 palm = 4 digits.
    4 palms = 16 digits.
    5 palms = 20 digits.

    If for every 5 palms up, the block is 4 palms deep, you get the ratio of 1.25.

    That gets us within the 4% agreement with our starting ratio.

    Again, you could choose a unit length, and have the rise be 3 up for every 2 palms deep, and you now wouldn’t have this ratio. There are an infinite number of ways to construct a pyramid with a unit measure that doesn’t.

    I hope that makes sense. Have a good day.


  • You are right, maybe, in that people are simplifying it too much.

    Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius. Measure out lengths using a unit circle and your lengths will be a multiple of the circumference of the wheel used.

    But what does it mean that pi pops up in pyramid construction? I think they mean it is the perimeter divided by the height of the great pyramid, which is 2pi. But how would measuring the perimeter in wheels cause that to just fall out? It wouldn’t. That would depend on the slope of the sides.

    So where did pi come from? From the ratio of their standard units of measure, cubits, palms, and fingers most likely. They would have measured “rise over run” using standard units of measure. Most pyramids slopes end up being a ratio of these units, but not all of them approximate pi.

    Source: my recollection from my math history courses for my undergrad math degree.


  • Yeah, this is one of those situations I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, in a perfect world what consenting adults do on their own time wouldn’t change perceptions of their competency or leadership.

    Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and executive leaders do carry the expectation to keep their private lives private, and if something is public it shouldn’t be controversial.

    My two cents is that the guy was naive in thinking this wouldn’t undermines his executive role as leader of a campus. And naivety isn’t a great trait in a leader. But the president shouldn’t have made disparaging remarks about him and should simply have left it at a vague “differences in judgement.”


  • I read a NYT article on this and the videos included them having sex with the pornstars and they also published their own porn videos.

    In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gow and Ms. Wilson said that they believe they were fired over the videos, which included sex scenes together and with others under the username Sexy Happy Couple. Both said they felt it was wrong for the university to punish them over the videos, arguing that doing so infringes on their free speech rights.

    Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

    The article also includes some basic legal history that doesn’t make it seem like they will have much recourse.

    NYT gift article


  • I look at the long arc of history and see that progress is not monotonic (always increasing or decreasing). We are experiencing setbacks to overcoming our challenges, as have those who came before us. But while we can read about years passing in a paragraph in a history book, we have to live and experience those years. And with all the challenges comes new technology and drive and awareness to solve problems. As unfortunate as it is trouble breeds innovation and commitment to change far better than comfort and easy times.


  • I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.

    The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118

    While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.

    I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.

    I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.




  • I’ve lived on East and West Coast in the US, visited most states and the places you mention in Canada, and I just moved from Washington to Maryland.

    Realize that everything you listed as a preference is the same for millions of people. Lots of people like paddle boarding, nature, and the cities you are looking at, so those places are going to be expensive. Without knowing more about your acute needs to move I can only give general advice.

    First, don’t move without a job lined up or at least a plan in place. Look at college towns including in more states than you listed. They are more liberal on average, and have a baked in supply of people looking for roommates. Even older grad students are looking for roommates and are often quiet.

    After that, look for things to minimize costs like public transit. You say south of Maryland, but that covers a whole lot including places with pretty bad public transit.

    When you do move make sure you have any vehicle titles or purchase documents as you will need them to get new titles and registration. Update your insurance policy with your new address. Make sure you have your birth certificate, social security cards, and photo id so you can get a place to live and get your new state id. Make sure you know what it costs to do all of that (likely hundreds on the title, registration, new id). Even more if you don’t have one of the necessary documents and you have to pay a notary to send a form to get a new title mailed to you.

    Look at room mate apps or sites to potentially vet a low cost place you can move into more quickly than getting your own place and going through the credit checks and down payments for a lease.

    And look at your credit to make sure you don’t move just to find that you won’t clear the checks they will perform.

    Open a bank account at a bank or credit union with branches where you are moving to, or at least part of a no-fee ATM network. E.g., I can get cash from my credit union account without any fees from 7-11 and they are everywhere.

    Make sure you have a few blank checks on your wallet for oddball expenses or deposits that don’t take cards or have fees to do so. Have a little cash as well.

    Once you have a job planned, costs figured out, make a spreadsheet. MAKE A SPREADSHEET! You do not want to move across the country to find that you didn’t factor state income tax or vehicle registration costs and suddenly can’t make rent. Include all likely costs and see if your budget has some wiggle for miscalculations and other issues.

    Make a spreadsheet of all the tasks you need to do. Keep track of them because the details of moving will screw you hard if you don’t mind them.

    The more money you have while moving, the better you can solve problems. Hard truth for life in general.

    If the above sounds overwhelming, then you need to plan all the more carefully.

    Make sure you don’t make unrealistic assumptions about the culture of where you are moving and get taken advantage of our targeted for violence. Even in the most liberal places there are places and people unfriendly to LGBTQ people. Don’t be a victim.

    Best of luck and happy to answer questions about specific cities, I’ve been to many.



  • I use a terminal whenever I’m doing work that I want to automate, is the only way to do something such as certain parameters being cli only, or when using a GUI would require additional software I don’t otherwise want.

    I play games and generally do rec time in a GUI, but I do all my git and docker work from the cli.