tombert

Yeah but then that sort of invalidates the wager right?

The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.

Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.

I never really understood Pascal's Wager.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.

I remember hearing about that.

Of course, this is just when they got caught doing it. Who knows how often it happens where they don't.

Tinfoil hat thoroughly fixed upon my head, but a part of me kind of thinks that this might have been a long-game from big tech in the same vein as Grapes of Wrath.

Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.

I think the problem is that people view MS Office as the "standard", and therefore any deviation is considered "wrong" or "broken".

If you genuinely think that California or New York are anywhere even approaching "communism" then I have to question where you got that information, and for that matter your definition of "communism".

You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.

To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.

Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.

I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.

I had some skepticism from a friend when I told him that graduate school is significantly easier than undergrad. It's not that the work is "easier" in any kind of objective sense, it's that almost by definition if you're going to graduate school it's for a topic that you think is interesting, and as such you're going to have more interest and/or aptitude for it.

I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.

I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.

It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.

Mario 64 is probably the game I have spent the most amount of time playing.

I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.

As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).

Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.

It just made me sad. He didn't seem like a bad person.

I know he's an adult and he's allowed to make his own decisions and he's allowed to throw his money away if he wants. I'm not his dad and I can't make decisions for him, but it seems really gross that there's an institution that exists seemingly purely to extract money from people who don't understand math.

I've never been a big fan of D, but I also haven't done much with it so it's possible I would like it more if I did.

So, simple question: why D? Keep in mind that "I think it writes pretty code" is a perfectly valid answer.

Oh I know. Actually it's even worse than not having "infinite money reserves"; the tables almost always have max bets meaning you can get to a situation where a single win will not recover your gambling, even if you had a money printer right next to you.

I almost never gamble, the last time being ~2012. I figured it might be fun to set aside like $100 and try the strategy regardless, content with walking away if I won the minimum bet. I actually won on my first bet and cashed out immediately.

I went on a cruise ship a few weeks ago. I decided I was going to try the martingale strategy in roulette.

I played the game for a grand total of like fifteen minutes, and even in that short time I ended up chatting with the fellow gamblers and ended up feeling a bit depressed. One guy there said he was down $700 because of the current long streak of red, and we were “due” for a black any time now.

He seemed like a nice enough guy and I tried to explain that each throw is basically an isolated event, so you’re never “due” for anything and the red streak can keep going for a very long time, well after you run out of money. I then realized he was not interested in a lecture from me about statistics and let it go.

My strategy worked, I won back the initial bet of $10, cashed out my chips, and left. I was happy to be $10 richer but it makes me sad how this guy might genuinely leave this vacation in severe debt because he doesn’t understand basic stats.

Actually thinking back I think he might have said "nuclear fission and geothermal". This was months ago.

I installed solar panels in my backyard, and then texted my dad that my basement is now powered by fusion with a roughly eight minute delay.

He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.

Antirez definitely knows how to write efficient code given that he's the dude who made Redis and many other things, so I'm skeptical that you could "easily" get 100x performance, though it does seem like he used Claude to assist with this so there probably is some low hanging fruit fixes.

I remember Byuu (RIP) wrote an article around ~10 years ago talking about why BSNES/Higan was "slow", explaining that it's really not slow given what it's trying to do. The more accurately you simulate the chips, there is simply more over overhead involved with synchronization and whatnot.

I remember in that article they mentioned a Pong circuit simulation like this that was getting something along the lines of 10FPS of gameplay, which astonished me. You don't get a lot simpler of a game than Pong and even on amazing hardware it was still unplayable if you want the truest form of emulation.

I actually ran this experiment recently since I ran out and forgot to renew for a bit.

It took about three days for my appetite to become "normal" AKA unhealthy.

I have the same reaction to strawberry ice cream. Not actual strawberries, those are still good, but the flavor that candy companies think strawberries taste like.

I got very sick fairly shortly after eating a bunch of strawberry ice cream when I was a kid. 25 years later and I still can't stand the stuff.

In my case metformin makes it so I just have no appetite, and certain foods are outright kind of revolting to me now. I can't do fried chicken while I'm on it.

Three month supply of metformin is on the order of ~$17 from Amazon pharmacy, without insurance, though obviously depends on the dosage: https://pharmacy.amazon.com/METFORMIN-850-MG-TAB/dp/B0842996...

I felt like Mavericks had just the right amount of skeuomorphism. Not enough to be annoying but just enough to be aesthetic.

I was never a fan of the Metro flat design that took over, though admittedly my desktop now is a purposefully unsexy Sway desktop that is completely flat and I do like that.

I shouldn't have to suffer through this alone.

I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.

I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.

I'm not on GLP-1s, but I am on metformin [1] which my wife says has similar food aversion properties to the GLPs, and for me I've noticed virtually anything with peanut butter I can still eat a nearly infinite quantity of. One of the worst things that has ever happened to me was finding out that peanut butter fudge is ridiculously easy to make.

[1] Off label for weight loss. My insurance wouldn't cover GLP-1s, and metformin is out of patent and super cheap, and I read that at least some people have had good success using it for weight loss. I am fortunately one of those happy few.

I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.

Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.

Same. I want to be positive but today is off to a pretty lousy start.

I mean, maybe?

I am generally not someone who is afraid to call out bullshit, but with medicine I am pretty much at their mercy. I kind of have to assume that they are telling the truth because I don’t know anything about medicine.

It’s hard to call bullshit on someone if you’re not sure what they are saying is bullshit.