Me reading about nonlinear dynamical systems 💀

Tbh if you just want to get started making music, you can hack it without theory. Theory will make you a more creative composer, but IMO don’t make it a strict prerequisite.

Broke: Saying ‘completely turned my life around’

Woke: Saying ‘completely turned my life around 360°’

Bespoke: Saying ‘completely turned my life around 2π radians’

9.8 Staging currently. I’m on Debian, but I get WINE from the WineHQ repo.

Not the ideal way to do it, but I literally just pirated the game [1] and installed it as a Windows application with stock WINE-staging. I then installed Vortex as a Windows application with stock WINE, installed some mods, and played some modded FNV on Linux. It played just as well on Linux as it did on Windows even with all the mods.

Point being, the way that worked best for me was to just treat it and all its mods as a Windows application and let stock WINE handle it for me.

[1] I purchased the game on Steam but I couldn’t be arsed to find the Windows executables or get it to work with Steam and Proton.

• cops

Look closely at the map: the water is in the country labeled Atlantic Ocean.

Stop funding a genocide

Abolish the police

Abolish prisons

Abolish the military

Reverse course on climate change

Open up the borders

Drop all student loans, pay back previous loans with interest

Free college

Drop the TikTok ban and replace it with a data privacy law

Cancel all defense contracts

Do any one of these for real and I’ll vote for him. But I have my doubts…

Thanks for replying. It sounds like you basically get two (or some number well below one keys per character) keys and the set of possible characters gets somehow distributed between the two “real” keys, then the keyboard uses a predictive algorithm based on previous input to guess which keys were meant to be pressed.

IMO I’d be willing to try out an implementation of such an idea so long as I could run the predictive algorithm locally on my phone. I do think that current autocorrect + predicting which keys were pressed would require a lot more training data than just a generic autocorrect to get it working sensibly, and I think it would take a lot longer to converge to the user’s “style” if it ever does.

What is a QAZWSX keyboard (couldn’t figure it out by web search), and what does keyboard layout have to do with machine learning? I’m genuinely curious.

N

Gore video, do not open

I don’t think there was any one event that got me started, just the integrated effect of reading history, reading contemporary news, personal experience, and later reading anarchist theory over my lifetime.

Well I just tried #define int void in C and C++ before a “hello world” program. C++ catches it because main() has to be an int, but C doesn’t care. I think it is because C just treats main() as an int by default; older books on C don’t even include the “int” part of “int main()” because it’s not strictly necessary.

#define int void replaces all ints with type void, which is typically used to write functions with no return value.

Running #define ; anything yields error: macro names must be identifiers for both C and C++ in an online compiler. So I don’t think the compiler will let you redefine the semicolon.

F

Reddit --> Lemmy

Facebook --> fucking nothing lmao

YouTube --> FreeTube + Invidious [1]

Windows --> Debian [2] with KDE Plasma

Word --> LyX

Microsoft Office --> LibreOffice

Built-in phone music player --> Odyssey [3]

Firefox --> LibreWolf [4]

Adobe Reader --> Okular + Librera on Android

Default phone launcher --> KISS Launcher

[1] I prefer FreeTube on computers where I have it installed, but one of my family’s jank 10-year-old work PCs can’t handle it, so I’ll typically watch videos in Invidious in LibreWolf on that computer.

[2] I can’t recommend Debian for absolutely everyone since it prioritizes stability and predictability over new features and ease of use, but it’s great for most of my use cases. I typically recommend Linux Mint for complete beginners.

[3] It handles extremely large music libraries (>100 GB of .mp3 files) without constantly taking forever to reload when I add a single new album.

[4] Firefox is pretty good and FOSS, but LibreWolf comes with better defaults and I’m a lazy fucker.

RIP in spaghetti, never forgetti

C

Thank you for the advice, but I want to do a desk job where I design stuff. I don’t like going outside and working with my hands or on my feet. I can build prototypes and solder, but I’m not great at it. I’m interested in coming up with a cool thing and then having someone who’s actually talented at crafting to build it on my behalf. I have mad respect for trade workers, but that kind of work is simply a bad fit for me.

Actually, a design job is really a compromise in the direction of more “practical” with respect to what I’m really interested in doing: original research. For example, I’m really interested in the control of nonlinear dynamical systems, specifically stabilization (read: I want to prevent systems from exploding themselves). While there’s no generic framework to control nonlinear systems, and it’s pretty unlikely there will be, there are lots of subclasses of nonlinear systems that need to be controlled, like robotic limbs, medical exoskeletons, commercial jets, machine learning, etc. It just involves a bit of creativity and a shit-ton of math (even compared to linear control theory). And I’d like to be one of the people doing the math and testing it out on important systems.

But unfortunately, industry isn’t typically interested in paying people to do research. And I need to eat. Those few companies who are interested in new ideas are already closely connected to academia. So it makes sense to me to continue my education.

To be honest, I’m kind of the opposite personality of the typical engineer. I.e. I’m super interested in “theoretical” details and how math, physics, and computer science actually works, and I’m not too interested in implementation details (any more than what is necessary to complete projects) because that kind of information is usually not portable to other projects. For that reason, I’m super pedantic, and engineering people usually don’t like pedants.

Additionally, I’ve already applied to a bunch of field engineering jobs out of desperation and during each interview they basically figured out in real time that I’m not interested in field work like at all, so they ghosted me. Plus, a lot of those job require me to climb up a ladder, which isn’t happening for at least a year because I weigh like a truck (too much for standard ladders; I checked). Plus, what I gathered from those interviews is that those jobs don’t lead to design jobs, just more field work. I’m just not a good fit.

Also the reason I stayed at my pizza delivery job so long was because I got to spend most of my time in the car with the AC on in a quiet place. I left that job because the company laid off almost all the drivers and outsourced the work to Doordash, and while I was given a job inside, I was absolutely losing my shit not being able to be in a climate controlled, quiet environment like my car. So uncomfortable jobs like trade jobs and field engineering jobs will not work for me. I need to be comfortable.

Cookie-cutter work that never ends

That’s the nightmare scenario for me, lol.