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Initialism. If this were the neocon era it'd be an awkward shoehorned acronym like SKYHAWK or something though.

well, she.

The problem is that they get cuter as you domesticate them, so it's a moving target.

Yep. Having gotten better-than-most-beginners at a few things in life, the most apparent thing is that there are levels to everything and your best competition is yourself yesterday, because someone's always naturally better at whatever you're working hard at.

Another one of these cats is Bettina "Betti" Hanlon who is working on her CS PhD and totals 572.5kg at 76kg in raw, drug-tested powerlifting with a lot of her career ahead of her in both CS and Powerlifting.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01855

https://www.openpowerlifting.org/u/bettinahanlon

https://goodlift.info/lifter.php?lid=19928

And here's the thing about both of them: they're mutants, they obviously work extremely hard, and they're not the best in their fields. Bettina was 53kg off of first place at IPF Classic Worlds this year. You can have a gift, work that gift extremely hard, and still be "only" in 8th place in the world. Hell, everyone who plays Nigel Richards says it's like playing tennis with a wall, and they're even beating him sometimes because there's a lot of luck in Scrabble. (He once successfully challenged "sulfidic" because that spelling is in one international dictionary, but not in the dictionary in the tournament he was playing in). There's levels to the levels, you know?

John Urschel cited the CTE risk when he decided to quit the NFL and pursue his math PhD. He just published https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06785 which seems to be a significant result from where I'm standing, but I can't really tell what's what with math at that level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel

> In August 2015, an incident gave him a taste of what a prolonged NFL career could mean. Urschel suffered a helmet-to-helmet collision with Ravens safety Terrence Brooks during an open-field drill in practice. The impact knocked the OL unconscious.

> While recovering, Urschel realized that he could not solve high-level mathematical proofs and noticed a drop in his cognitive abilities and sharpness. It took almost a month for his mental clarity to return, giving him a firsthand glimpse of brain trauma's dangers.

> Subsequently, in spring 2016, he secretly enrolled in MIT's applied mathematics doctoral program. He juggled MIT coursework during the week with Ravens games on Sundays, staying up late to balance both commitments.

> Since his early NFL retirement, Urschel completed his PhD in 2021, served as a member at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and returned to MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2023.

https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/legitimate-liability-ex-ra...

> Related, which I always loved: Winston Churchill "You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."

This seems to be a rewording of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_dogs_bark,_but_the_carava...

Illustrated books often have a note about how the illustrations are made. One of my son's books had a joke note, saying that the illustrations were taken from a text of the monks of St. Parmesan (or something to that effect). Maybe the author was in on it, but it seems like a poorly thought out joke because so many cheeses were made by monks!

What's kind of funny about CNC is there is a wood working tool that is the opposite of what you just mentioned. The Shaper Origin is a CNC router where the gross movements of the router are provided by the human operator's hands moving the thing, and the fine movements of the cutting head inside the router body are provided by XYZ positioning of the cutting head reacting to the machine's position over the workpiece using optical tracking. So you can get precision and an expansive work range, with a small footprint of the tool.

> Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background (for some reason).

Huh, I tried to do this a long time ago and permissions bit me and I quit. I was making a nice UI that would run ffmpeg to stitch together some video files, so it would use native UI elements to pick the input files and output location, then generate the ffmpeg command and run it. It worked fine on my machine but it ran into permissions on my friend's machine who needed it and I gave up because they found something better.

They address this in a roundabout way in the article:

> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.

The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.

In The Conquest of Bread Kropotkin talks about the massive productivity gains of Europe in the age of steam and steel, and uses numbers to show how there's enough beef and mutton and bread and chicken to go around and enough trains to get it to everyone who needs it, such that we can look forward to a future where a worker gets much more for much less work. And we have hit that in some respects: a chicken is nearly free now compared to its historic prices, and the 40 hour work week was not widely established when that book came out. So we work less and get more now, but we don't work a few hours a week in exchange for a life free of any economic insecurity, as has always been on the horizon for technology optimists.

Sounds like a hell of a plan. I'd probably write it up on a whiteboard, take a photo, and make that my 4th or 5th slide on my Bumble profile. Radically transparent alignment.

A company I had private stock in just sold. The email I got saying that they wanted to get me paid ASAP was electric. Finally, for just a day or two, I was in the elite of the elite: people who are owed money and that the enforcement arm of the US government will ensure are made whole. The payday was under $100, but the feeling was priceless.

You gotta think that maybe he was playing chess, not checkers, when he conceived his daughter. The perfect way out.

> The good ole days when fraudulent execs still went to jail

Well, not one guy. Lou Pai cheated on his wife with stripper Melanie Fewell who was also married. He was known in the Enron offices to enjoy Houston area strip clubs. But in a first for him, he knocked Melanie up over the course of the affair. Pai's first wife and mother of his first two children Lana Lee learned about it and started divorce proceedings. To satisfy asset division as part of their divorce terms, Pai sold $250M worth of Enron stock just months before it crashed and Enron went bankrupt. Pai then married Fewell. Pai was briefly the largest(? maybe top two?) private land owners in Colorado, and his ranchland included Culebra Peak, one of CO's 14ers.

In 2008 he settled a civil suit alleging insider trading brought by the SEC. The settlement was $31.5 and does not include an admission of the SEC's claims. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 5 years.

Lou landed on his feet. He and Melanie are still married. They and their daughter seem to be big figures in dressage, running Canaan Ranch and the Bred in the USA Syndicate, which seems to be a syndicate of 14 breeders. Maybe someone who knows horses can explain exactly how big a deal they are; they might not be much after all.

https://www.usef.org/us-equestrian-teams/athletes/natalie_pa...

Weirdly my mom said that Portuguese Portuguese is the closest language to Latin that she'd ever encountered, not French or Italian or Spanish. My high school required an ancient and modern language, so I did French and Latin, then dropped Latin and picked up Spanish because it's kind of wild not to know any Spanish in the US. When learning French it helped with roots, sure, but it really helped with knowing how subordinate clauses work, why you'd use the subjunctive, that kind of thing.

In middle school my foreign language choices were Spanish, French, or Latin. I picked Latin because it was cool. When it came time to talk about subordinate clauses and noun cases in English, Spanish, and French, what I'd learned in Latin was invaluable. It's like learning a purely functional style programming language versus an imperative one: they'll both inform how you think about solving problems in the other. Getting really good at another language is good because it makes you better at thinking about grammar.

"I needed it in college" is the answer to "when have you needed calculus after high school." In fact I was wrong though: I had forgotten that calculus was a prerequisite for AP Physics in high school. We also did plenty of probability in high school. I will say that Bayes and information theory in college were really cool and would have been a cool hook for teaching something in high school though, but there's only so much time. Had I taken AP Statistics they may have come up.

"I needed it in college" is the answer to "when have you needed calculus after high school." In fact I was wrong though: I had forgotten that calculus was a prerequisite for AP Physics in high school. We also did plenty of probability in high school. I will say that Bayes and information theory in college were really cool and would have been a cool hook for teaching something in high school though, but there's only so much time. Had I taken AP Statistics they may have come up..

Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.

The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.

I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.

Yeah, for me the real click was in AP Physics where we derived an equation for some motion property rather than just being handed the formula as I had been in, say, 8th grade science. The meta lesson is that you can use math to get more information out of a model than you think you have, which, yeah, keeps you from becoming a 5G get the facts style individual.

> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.

There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.

> and meanwhile alerted their Dutch colleagues as well

It's great that they were able to do this! I wonder what that looks like on their end. Maybe it's just a matter of having a direct telephone number for the closest Dutch dispatch center?

Congrats on baby and best of luck balancing this. In my limited experience it's the balancing that is the actual work that allows all the other domestic and professional work for this part of my life.

Yeah I think having him later in my life and him still being a toddler just means "having kids" means wildly different things in our cases. In my case, the life altering pivots (getting sober, married, divorced) happened before meeting my wife with whom I had him. I guess I got extremely lucky having the nuclear life changer of a baby show up at the age where such a thing is welcome. We just started touring preschools and the rapid approach of a time where I'm not within 30 feet of him for 90% of the day is already a pretty daunting prospect.

But that sounds nice! Let me reword: after getting through the messy middle of establishing a career and weathering the insane time and money necessary to rear a young kid, a dude finds himself with a little more time and money, and doesn't know what to do with himself. He gets a fishing rod/road bike/membership at makerspace/skein of nice yarn and some circular needles/signs up for his first powerlifting meet. He makes new friends, shows his kid a new side of himself, and maybe gets a nice steelhead/race trinket/dining table/scarf/medal out of the whole thing.

> a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year

We are all descendants of like 1,000 individuals who kept having lil babies through an ice age. There are mobile home parks full of happy kids dotting my town, populated by people who paint houses and do landscaping and make ends meet. I have no idea what your profession is or what your housing situation is, so maybe that's already where you are. My wife and I talk gratitude a lot, and that includes being grateful that if we had to dig ditches to keep a double wide over our heads, we'd go ahead and do that and have some giggles with our little miracle in there.

> You hit a point in your life, reflect back on where you'd thought you'd be when you were in your early 20s, and think.. shit.. what I do all of this for?

Do people who say this have kids? I ask genuinely. Everything before my little dude was fake. Everything since him is real deal Holyfield. Probably knock off in the next 20 minutes and take him to Home Depot to look at some bullshit because we have a good time with that kind of thing.