Quite happy. I’ve made some bad decisions, like hanging myself, but I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t, so I don’t regret them. I’m just happy to have learned, and come out OK. If I hadn’t done that I’d have graduated university a year earlier, gotten a different job than the one I have now, never met the woman I’m married to, etc. My life might have been better, but it would certainly have been different. And I very much like the life I have now, so even though I’ve made some objectively bad decisions I don’t regret them. I cannot change the past, and doing so would not be worth the cost, so I have no regrets. I am content.

Were you not in the age group to watch Mr. Rogers? Because he turned out to be exactly what he appeared to be: kind.

A lot of his works are still good. I just won’t buy new ones, I won’t give him any profits.

None of them, really. Mr. Rogers was genuinely as awesome as he seemed. As a young adult, John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, and Claude Shannon became my heroes. None have anything particularly bad that I’ve seen.

There are some people whose work I admire whom I don’t like, e.g. Harlan Ellison was famously an asshat. But they’re not my heroes, and the work is not the creator.

And the ability to schedule deliveries to happen on a day of the week when you’re likely to be present. And the notifications that your delivery is near, so you can be ready to pick it up (important for expensive items).

Notably Death Cap mushrooms aren’t present worldwide. A number of the poisonings are from people who learned about mushroom foraging in one area, then moved to California and didn’t learn that the safe mushrooms from their home have deadly lookalikes in California.

With lentils, I like to use stock instead of water for cooking them. That also works for potatoes, beans, and quite a few other boiled foods.

People always point to email as a decentralized system that works. They forget that originally nearly everyone got email through their ISP, and now nearly everyone gets their email through their OS vendor (Google, Apple, or Microsoft), or for businesses one of the few commercial mass mail services like mailchimp that don’t get blocked by spam filters. Self-hosting email is likely to result in a major hassle with undelivered emails due to anti-spam measures these days.

Blue lights suck. Yellow lights suck. White lights (6000K full-spectrum) are good, but more expensive and harder to find.

You wouldn’t write a letter that’s just “Hi <name>” and then no body. You’d have the greeting, the content, and the signoff. The same applies to Slack, Teams, and the like. You can omit the greeting & signoff or keep them in, but you can’t omit the content!

If you do, I’ll wait until the next day or so, and if I remember I’ll reply that they seem to have forgotten to include a message before hitting “send”.

The best time to start fighting was 2015. The second best time is now.

Decently readable, though some of the letter forms you’ve chosen could be confused for others (‘a’ is quite similar to ‘o’, ‘f’ could be confused for ‘t’). When I’m lettering for engineering/math I use engineering gothic letterforms which avoid these ambiguities, among others (I vs l vs ι vs 1 vs 7, a vs α vs o vs ο, O vs 0, q vs g, k vs κ, v vs ν, u vs μ, B vs 8). When I’m handwriting I just write chickenscratch unreadable to anyone else including my future self after a year or so.

Settings (long press blank space on home screen) -> Home screen -> Infinite scrolling toggle.

L E G U M E S!

Not exactly a datastructure alone, but bitslicing is a neat trick to turn some variable-time operations into constant-time operations. Used in cryptography for “substitution box” (S-box) operations, which can otherwise leak secrets via data-dependent timing variations.

The datastructure side of it is breaking up n words into bits and interleaving them within n variables (usually machine registers), so that the first variable contains the first bit from each word, the second variable the second bit, etc. It’s also called “SIMD within a register”.

LLMs are perfectly suited to make propaganda. That (and advertising, which is just corporate propaganda instead of government propaganda) is their best use. It doesn’t matter that they’re bullshit generators when the goal is to generate bullshit.

Hymen means membrane. -ptera is wing. They have membranous wings, and no carapace like beetles. Not named due to virginity.

Different etymology of “tit”, that one is from “teat”.

“Tit” and “mouse” in English both come from words that mean “small”. “Titmouse” is “smallsmall”.

Chesterton’s Fence applies to some gatekeeping. Not all, but for life-safety thegatekeeping tends to be for sadly good reason.