The occasional bike/car zooming through the streets and the associated noise are still alleviated by the fan. White noise works because it makes your brain “turn down the volume” on the sensory pathway between your ears and your brain (Gain control is a much better comparison if youre familiar with it, but I went with the volume one because its more accessible). The car/bike might even be loud enough to hear over the fan, but you should hear it less/be less bothered by it because your brain already set your ears’ volume on low to tune out the fan. There are white noise apps you can get on your phone if you want to try it for free; an app playing fan sounds through my phone speaker is the only way I manage to sleep when I’m traveling

Get yourself a standing fan. You specifically want the gnarliest, loudest, most industrial looking fan you can find. The idea is that the fan in your room is loud/close enough to drown out most other sounds, but since it’s constant noise with no information your brain will fade it to background processing and you’ll effectively stop hearing it. The only downside is that this requires a bit of willingness to learn how to take apart and fix a fan; if the oscillation starts to precess it ruins the white noise and the fan needs to be cleaned or sometimes the blades rebalanced. I really like “Blizzard” brand fans for being cheap plastic pieces of shit that are easy to take apart to clean/fix and are loud as fuck.

Barbarian has the most slur energy of any word I’ll type out in it’s entirety. The romaboo fascination with racism that gets a pass because because the targets of said racism don’t exist anymore low key disgusts me. Low key because as far as I can tell nobody is actually harmed by it anymore, but it’s used in the same contexts and with the same energy as I heard the term “sand n*” tossed around when I worked for the air force and it makes my skin crawl in exactly the same way.

I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit

YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program

Ooh. Is there any chance this post comes in response to the corndogs and doritos post that had people’s panties in a twist a few days ago? Not for any important reason, just nosy and looking for some tea

Rule of thumb; if the job asks you to pay a dime for anything before you’ve gotten your first paycheck, it’s a scam. Even if they ask you to buy something and they’ll pay you back

Witchy witchy witchy,

Can’t you see?

Sometimes your brews just hypnotize me

And I just love your stance on gays,

Guess thats why they hate your witchy ways

That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.

Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her

This is the kind I got

That’s actually how I found pixel dungeon, haha. I was looking for another game that hit like powder. Powder is like Pixel dungeon if you removed all of the code meant to ensure seeds are beatable during level generation then added a bunch of gods that will do things like upgrade your weapons if they like you or straight up flamestrike your ass if they dislike you. It also has more intricate item interactions. For instance, one of the stronger things you can do in Powder is as follows.

1. Dig a hole in the ground

2. Fill with holy water

3. Drop a mace in the holy water pool

4. Freeze the pool

5. Unfreeze/dig out the pool again

6. Holy ice mace. Go forth and conquer

Why not?

There is no intrinsic meaning to life, we are a random chemical reaction that is really, really good at propagating itself, and we’ve evolved to be so good at pattern recognition that we psychologically need to see patterns like meaning where none exist.

My response to that state of affairs is that I get to define the point of life for myself. Some days the point is to advance human knowledge. Some days it’s to protect people I care about. Some days it’s smoking enough weed to make a cloud visible from space. None of those have to sound even remotely reasonable to you because they are things that I’ve seen as the point of my life at various points in the past. Yours can be different, but I bet if you spend some time analyzing your values and what you believe in as a person you can probably identify a few things you find important enough to consider the point of life, even if only temporarily

Powder by Jeff Lait was my first roguelike. I still think it’s one of the better ones I’ve tried. It’s lightweight enough that you could probably run it on a potato with a few LEDs jammed into it, and it’s intricate enough that you probably won’t get your first win for months unless you’re already very good at the style of game

Cast iron pizza is the shit, the only other pizza that comes close is a well made Sicilian. I like to stuff a bit of shredded cheddar between the edge of the dough and the side of the pan right before baking; makes it slightly more work to get the pizza out when it’s done but it makes a perfect cheese crisp on the crust

I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss

I know perogi are eastern European in origin, but the name feels like a Welsh prank to me. I’ve seen like 8 or 9 distinct correct ways to spell pierogi, none of which I’d pronounce correctly if I didnt already know how to pronounce the word pierogue. Your piroghi pizza fills me with the jealousy of a man who loves potato and cheese but the rage of a man who hates being made to consider the word pirogi.

The crossbow is what really makes the darts good. Many of my duelist champion runs end up being crossbow dart runs because all of the enemies die before they can get in range of my other weapons. Iirc a +8 crossbow makes untipped darts shoot for like 10-50, and being able to do that with up to 8 infinite durability ammo is cracked

How will this work with the troll blacksmith and reforge upgrades? I’ll occasionally get the blacksmith to turn a stack of 3 boomerangs into a single +2 boomerang, will I need to find 9 boomerangs to do the same after the update?

Yep! To both I think? I remember back in like 2021 there was a paper where some team used lasers to induce radiation pressure in a beam of hydrogen and got it to cool down significantly, but I don’t remember if they reached or were shooting for absolute 0. My napkin plan was thinking more along the lines of “optical vortex --> optical tweezers --> OAM molecules in the trajectory out of the way” rather than cooling them down. I’m pretty sure optical tweezers have only been achieved in close range lab conditions manipulating a very small number of particles, so the idea of doing it on enough particles to create a flight path and also at the distance you’d want to fire a projectile is probably unhinged