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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • My most frequent breakfasts are just coffee, or 2 eggs over medium, some kind of meat (spam, bacon, sausage, or steak in that order of prevalence), and some kind of bread (toast, English muffin, biscuit) with coffee. Those options account for perhaps 85% of my breakfasts.

    Sometimes (1-3 times per month?) I have cereal and milk. Very rarely, I’ll have fruit and salami.

    During the summer, I sometimes substitute iced tea for coffee. During winter, I sometimes have leftovers from dinner the night before. Any time of year, if there’s leftover pizza, I’ll have that for breakfast, cold, with salt and red pepper flakes added.

    About twice a year I pull out my waffle maker, and make waffles on a weekend. Every time I tell myself I should do it more often, but every time it seems to sate my craving for ~6 months.



  • Two sets with infinitely many things are the same size when you can describe a one to one mapping from one set to the other.

    For example, the counting numbers are the same size as the counting numbers except for 7. To go from the former set to the latter set, we can map 1-6 to themselves, and then for every counting number 7 or larger, add one. To reverse, just do the opposite.

    Likewise, we can map the counting numbers to only the even counting numbers by doubling the value or each one as our mapping. There is a first even number, and a 73rd even number, and a 123,456,789,012th even number.

    By contrast, imagine I claim to have a map from the counting numbers to all the real numbers between 0 and 1 (including 0 but not 1). You can find a number that isn’t in my mapping. Line all the numbers in my mapping up in the order they map from the counting numbers, so there’s a first real number, a second, a third, and so on. To find a number that doesn’t appear in my mapping anywhere, take the first digit to the right of the decimal from the first number, the second digit from the second number, the third digit from the third number, and so on. Once you have assembled this new (infinitely long) number, change every single digit to something different. You could add 1 to each digit, or change them at random, or anything else.

    This new number can’t be the first number in my mapping because the first digit won’t match anymore. Nor can it be the second number, because the second digit doesn’t match the second number. It can’t be the third or the fourth, or any of them, because it is always different somewhere. You may also notice that this isn’t just one number you’ve constructed that isn’t anywhere in the mapping - in fact it’s a whole infinite family of numbers that are still missing, no matter what order I put any of the numbers in, and no matter how clever my mapping seems.

    The set of real numbers between 0 and 1 truly is bigger than the set of counting numbers, and it isn’t close, despite both being infinitely large.


  • In order to meet a rising global demand for cheese, farmers must produce more cheese than they have in previous years. As a society, we have done fairly well at using the best/easiest land to raise cows on for raising cows. Additional cows to produce more milk require either working the same lands harder, which requires bringing in feed, water, and minerals, as well as increasing the risk of diseases, and thereby increases the price of the milk for making cheese, or else raising cows on new, typically less favorable lands.

    Some industries can offset this rising cost with improvements to technology, or finding areas of the world with lower labor costs, and some governments support agriculture through tax policy, or subsidies to help keep prices low. From 1949 until 2014, the US government ran a program to buy cheese when the price fell too low, and sell cheese when the price ran too high, in an effort to stabilize prices.



  • “AAA” gaming began as a reference to the “AAA” creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) “certain to repay the loan” // “certain to earn more than the development costs” (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

    High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there’s kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

    Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce “fun”, and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That’s where you get the wild “no one (in the know) would expect this to work” ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won’t go after the same concept under most conditions.


  • It’s not just about slavery. There was also state’s rights (to slavery), and the economic disparity (turns out free men work harder than slaves?!), and a clash of religious ideals (people that interpret the Bible as pro-slavery vs people that believe benevolence requires abolition). There were even one or two spots where water usage rights and federal funding were in controversy.



  • Healthcare costs grow rapidly as you age, and have been outpacing inflation in the US. If your remaining money is only keeping up with inflation over time, you are very likely to fall behind later in life, when job opportunities are more scarce, and less lucrative.

    If you can make changes to live more frugally now, and work a year or two more while your money is growing in the background, you will be much better off long term.

    I have numerous family members that have lived a long time, and eventually faced severe health issues, so I expect that in my future. I will work until my retirement savings are more than I need for my current lifestyle, and then cut back on certain things to do my best to prepare for that eventuality.



  • I flew to an industry event on a Southwest flight full of many people roughly my age, who worked my job, or related jobs. Deplaning was extremely fast once the door opened.

    Maybe part of that is everyone being able bodied, and traveling without children, but I also didn’t see anyone that waited to get their items in order until the last minute, anyone that had to travel towards the back of the plane to get their carry on, or anyone who halfway entered the aisle, blocking it just enough that people couldn’t move past - which are all things I have seen on most other flights I’ve taken.





  • I’m not in this business, but I have purchased prints from a print farm before. There are already at least 4 large, high quality printing companies that offer to print any model in any material. I think most of the competition is now on speed and price. There are also many smaller printers I have purchased from. Most offer ~10 products, have them already printed, and sell those items to fulfill a specific need. As far as I can tell, those smaller printers either design their own models, or paid for models that are not readily available. Once model files are available, the general purpose printing companies can deliver the same part.

    Unless you have ideas for models no one has made before, and you want to try to profit as much as possible off those, I don’t see the upside to a small print farm.