HexesofVexes

We won’t have kids because, despite doing everything right, despite working hard, we’re struggling with finances. Kids wouldn’t be affordable without an extra job, and most of work two already!

Badger on the left just saw his healthcare bill. Badger on the right ate some bad beans and is contemplating the nature of regret.

Beat me to it!

I dunno about a fun game to play, but it’s a really neat way to explore Markov chains!

Well, next time I need to fart while lecturing I know what I’m doing…

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s down the mine you go.

Not toilet trained, and no wages gained!

Hihohiho hi ho, hi ho, it’s back down the hole you’ll go.

Now swing that pick you little di-

I think that’s enough Disney today

Really neat post, I’d not heard of a few of these (never knew libre office draw could edit pdfs!).

Couple of extra ones:

Note taking and pdf annotation: Xournal++ is amazing, it’s also great to use on larger whiteboard screens. Plug and play support for scribe tablets on both windows and Linux.

Emulation (up to ps1): Mednafen is lightweight and comes with a gui. It also supports recording, though not netplay.

Ebook management/reading: Calibre - allows easy importing and exporting of ebooks to devices, also has a great built in search letting you find DRM free versions of a book.

Yes and no; I’ve met some people who were great to date but hell to live with.

A good relationship starts with both people knowing what they want - and continual contact helps determine if the other person is being honest about what they want. Post 35/30, this process is often a lot faster, and dating skill matters less than ability not to annoy the person you’re suddenly around 24/7.

If it matches from the start, or a compromise grows, you’re in for a winner. Otherwise, back to the sea of the undead you go, no matter how good your dating skill!

Intention and reality are two different things - although I can’t say I ever managed casual dating for 2 years! Usually most folks are in a relationship after 1.

I think it goes further than that - post 35 (post 30 really) there is a lot more pressure to shift from casual dating to a relationship at a faster pace.

Life experience talking here too, it isn’t just “being upfront”, it’s also being willing to move at a faster pace.

The real secret to dating after 35 - don’t.

Folks are not looking to “date”: they’re after long term commitment OR quick hook ups. The middle ground really vanishes when you get older!

Fun UK fact - we use a different ranking system for lecturers:

Lecturer Senior Lecturer Reader Professor

That means, at some point, someone has been a “Reader in X at Reading”.

Exactly - if you don’t want to date a trans person don’t. If someone conceals it, that’s not an issue with them being trans, that’s an issue with them being dishonest. It’s ok to dislike dishonest people.

The use of the word cis has its roots in an obscure Usenet group; it’s genesis (apparently) rooted in a desire for more inclusive language for trans folks (the notion that “gender” Vs “transgender” was too othering).

It hit Tumblr like a train in the 2010s, and became a symbolic phrase in trans counterculture. “Cisgender” was less than popular with non-trans people, as it robbed them of the illusion of normality and turned the word “gender” into a social trap.

It later found derogatory use in the phrase “cissy” (a counter for the popular derogatory term “tranny”).

It’s a fun word with an interesting history, and it has helped contribute to the wider acceptance of trans folks.

To be entirely unbiased here, this covers user friendly distros that pretty much blow windows away for “default experience”.

Windows has adware and scareware - more so it has config-cluster-fuckification (I believe this is the academic term for it?). This is where windows lost me - when it started bundling basic config options together to force you to relinquish your privacy. Now it’s “edit the registry or gtfo”…

Yup, Google are launching their yearly attempt to convince folks YouTube premium is worth it.

Think of this time not as an annoyance, but as a time to reflect on how shitty Google has become.

Never really worked with them (we never made them).

I think they’re lower prize threshold cat Bs.

In the UK, slot machines fall into 4 main categories. Of particular interest are category C machines, as these can remember a fixed number of previous games. I.e. the “myth” that a machine is “about to pay out” because “someone lost a lot to it” can hold for these games.

Cat A and B machines are completely random, previous games can have no impact on probabilities of winning (though pots can climb).

Online games have different rules, not always fair ones!

Oh, and ALL games (in a physical location) must (by law) show “RTP” (return to player) somewhere. It usually gets stuck it in a block of text in the manual since no-one reads them. (If it’s below 97.3% just go play roulette as it offers better returns).

The best thing for a vegan to do is to keep being a vegan. Seriously, just keep on doing it.

It doesn’t mean evangelise, it doesn’t mean denigrate, it means just carry on doing what works for you.

If you’re insulting other folks, or trying to push a lifestyle, odds are folks don’t dislike you because you’re vegan.

I would say mathematics is a consequence of, or branch of philosophy in its own right. The name intuitionism derives from the source of this branch of mathematics - “2 primal intuitions”.

1. Twoity - we are able to perceived time, and are thus able to split the universe into two, three, four etc parts. Counting is not something we just learn, it is something built into us as humans.

2. Repetition - we can repeat operations and not stop, just as we can never stop counting.

From these two (heavily paraphrased) ideas we can derive all of mathematics.

The first is actually enough to give us everything up to the rationals, the second grants us the reals and beyond.

While we lose excluded middle, we gain things such as “all total real functions are uniformly continuous on the unit interval” (Brouwer), the removal of the information paradox in physics (someone used Posey’s take on intuitionism to rewrite all physics to see where it led), and the wonder of lawless sequences (objects we cannot predict entirely, but still work with).

The intuitionist is very very formal “you are either alive or not alive” is a very nice statement to make, but entirely worthless if one cannot tell which you are! Excluded middle is not universally false in intuitionism; it is true for decidable statements, of which having an apple or not does seem to fall within (though here we can question how “apple-like” must something be to be considered an apple if we wish to be peverse). However, to argue it is true for any statement means your disjunct (or) must be very weak indeed - the classical mathematician is happy with this, the intuitionist demands that a disjunct not only present two options, but provide a way of determining which if the two applies on a case to case basis (hence excluded middle applying for decidable things).

Simplifying your example of an apple, you can think of it as a Platonist just having the statement that everything is either and apple or not. Meanwhile, the Intuitionist also demands there be a guide on how to sort everything into “apple” or “not apple” before they make that statement.

Classical mathematics does also have a huge unintuitive step - mathematics must exist independently of humanity. Every theorem ever proved, and ever to be proved, exists somewhere. Where you ask? The platonic plane of ideal forms beckons, with all the madness it entails!