• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • It hurt with fake money, because I thought I had discovered some big secret key. Like that movie Pi. And then it was gone. All the sucess, all the dreams of a 9-screen batcave-style computer station with financial tickers and shit. I realized that I had nothing, and I was foolish for thinking otherwise. Stung like a bitch.

    But you’re right, safe investments are the smarter long-term play. I did make an extra paycheck on dogecoin once on a moonshot. But otherwise, my boring retirement funds are all steadily beating inflation by a few percentage points. Why fight the tide?


  • Reminds me of the time I started learning about forex. I used a practice account to test an algorithm for recognizing short-term trends and trading on the activity. I ran a simulation for a few days to make sure it was working, and my fake $10,000 bankroll turned into $50,000 in less than a week. I was excited about the results, and went to explain it to someone with deeper pockets who might actually have $10k to invest, and in the time it took me to walk from my desk to his and back, it went to less than $600. Five minutes, $50k wiped out.

    Needless to say, he didn’t invest and I stopped daydreaming about owning a yacht. Forex is gambling.


  • Boring is fine. I don’t need my phone to be exciting.

    The headline should have been about reliability. The author had to replace the first demo device, and experienced stuttering on the replacement. Will HMD continue to support the device and outfits? Will the maker community adopt the device and start getting creative with the options? Or will this end up in the drawer of abandoned hardware with the minidisc player and active 3d glasses.

    Modularity and flexibility is great. Boring is acceptable. Unreliable is not OK.







  • What you’ve got there is a graph of testing. The slopes are all the same, because that’s when each country received tests, and that’s how quickly they ramped up testing. Covid 19 wasn’t even sequenced until 40 people were extremely ill from the virus. We know now that it is spread through the air, and carriers of the virus can be contagious without being symptomatic. Zero countries were wasting precious tests on deceased people who died in the previous weeks.

    China made for a convenient target for xenophobes and racists to blame. It spread quickly through dense populations, and their government was using (ineffective) draconian methods to contain the spread. Westerners spread the image of indigent communists eating bats and civets, ignoring the growing number of anomalous respiratory illnesses at home.

    Maybe it started in China. Maybe it didn’t. We cannot know for sure, because we deliberately did not collect the data. And anyone trying to convince you differently has an agenda.







  • If we’re going to get pedandic, blood infiltration of the heart is a medical condition, usually called infiltrative cardiomyopathy. So you’re correct that the metaphor is better, but the literal meaning could be confusing.

    I like the cereal bowl analogy because cereal is ostensibly its own thing. But practically speaking, you’d be silly to assume it won’t be consumed with milk. Like it could be, but the box advertises it with milk, and the commercials suggest adding milk, and everything about the cereal implies you’re going to add milk. Adding water would make you the weirdo, and assuming other people would add water would be absurd. Like suggesting Trump would make an attempt to build a bipartisan coalition. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’re not in touch with the reality we all share.

    Water to a sponge? That might have the same issue since infiltration is still a thing, so maybe we avoid fluids for the analogy. Fans infiltrating the stadium? Clothes infiltrating a laundry basket? Now I’m just saying things I see around me. Let’s workshop it independently and come back in a week with ideas. No rush, we will have four years of this bullshit.