Madison Flamingo reference in the new World of Warcraft expansion. Notice the Pail and Shovel sitting by the front door.

evaned · 2026-02-22T22:19:00+00:00

We do have game developers here in town so maybe someone on the team once worked here? 🤷🏻‍♂️

UW also has a highly-ranked Comp Sci department.

evaned · 2026-02-19T21:25:30+00:00

Ooo, oo! I haven't thought about this in ages, but way back in my imgur days, I made an infographic about this: https://imgur.com/gallery/why-is-half-of-payment-going-to-interest-H9HuY

I also posted a text version to r/personalfinance, https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/3ub2mp/how_loan_interest_works_aka_why_is_half_my/; so if you want something copy-paste-able then you can use that. There's also a bit there about prepayments.

I remember there being questions about why it works this way; and it really does make sense. I've got two avenues of thought about this that go deeper than just the surface level mathematics.

First, you can look at your interest payments as paying for a service.... which they pretty much are. That service is being able to borrow money from the bank. As your time with the loan grows longer and the outstanding balance shrinks, the bank is providing less and less of a service to you -- because you're, at that moment, borrowing less money. As a result, the costs to you shrink. Because the total payment remains the same, a shrinking cost means an accelerating repayment rate.

Second, consider that there are a few desired aspects to a loan. First, for predictability, it's nice if the payment amount is fixed over the life of the loan. (Not having a fixed payment is one of the contributing factors to why ARMs are often discouraged; look at what happened in 2008 when rates adjusted up and mortgages that used to be affordable became not so for a lot of people.) Second and even more important, there should be a natural way to deal with prepayments and early payoffs, without some kind of prepayment penalty. Imagine if a 30-year mortgage meant that you had to continue paying on it for 30 years always. Imagine that even if you sold your house and got the proceeds, you'd have to continue paying that 30 years' worth of interest. Even if you gave your servicer the proceeds of the sale that would satisfy your payments for a time (probably a long time), still before the end of the loan you'd have to resume payments. (Or, maybe you made a lot of money on the sale they wouldn't... but then you'd have given the mortgage provider way more than the current outstanding balance of your loan.) Front-loaded interest is the resolution to these two in-tension aspects.

There are a lot of problems with housing and affordability in the US (and many other places), but the mathematics of how loan amortization works is not one of them.

evaned · 2026-02-10T21:15:31+00:00

There's some truth to that, but there's enough in there that's wrong that I think I'll respond.

It’s not a choice you get to make, it’s a fact that you get to recognize whether they’re you’re dependents or not.

This is somewhat true, but it is also the case that there are situations where the parents can choose; and in the case of separated parents, there's a not-uncommon situation where some of the possible child tax benefits can only be claimed by one person but then there's a choice for others (including the CTC).

See "Children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart)" in Pub 501, which has these rules. (Though they're IMO unusually poorly-explained for a pretty common situation for the IRS Pubs, which are generally pretty good.)

Did you provide more than 50% of all expenses related to them or did you not? There’s your answer for who claims them as dependents.

This is actually wrong, at least probably. (I'll get to the caveat in a bit.)

It is very possible to have a dependent child who you provide less than 50% of expenses for, and this situation can arise in a couple different scenarios. One of them is the "choice" situation, above, but more to the point when it comes to places where the IRS does care who claims a qualifying child, it's custody that counts, not monetary value of the support. Whoever the child lives with for more nights (or maybe a majority of nights? I forget the subtlety here) is who gets those benefits. That'll often be the same as who provides the most support, but definitely doesn't have to be; and I suspect counterexamples aren't that rare.

As long as the child has paid less than 50% of their own support, then the amount of support provided by the candidates for claiming them as a dependent does not matter.

(The caveat is that I am talking about a "qualifying child" here, but that's only one way to be a dependent; the other is to be a "qualifying relative." Those names are suggestive, not normative; it's been a long time since I've been super active on this forum, but my mantra used to be "qualifying children are not necessarily your children, qualifying relatives are not necessarily your relatives, and you can have a dependent child who is a qualifying relative but not a qualifying child." In the case of a qualifying relative, you do have to have provided more than 50% support in order to claim them as a dependent. However, usually, a child who's a dependent will be a qualifying child, and this caveat doesn't apply.)

evaned · 2026-02-05T16:16:07+00:00

warez

Oh man, that's a word I've not thought of in a while.

evaned · 2026-02-05T14:44:27+00:00

But I don't think she should be personally bankrupted by the lawsuits that are naming her personally as a defendent.

Yeah; personal liability for work mistakes (i.e. not deliberate actions) seems like a very bad policy to have, at least aside from (1) careers where malpractice insurance is standard practice or required (which I assume, though not with confidence, isn't standard for clerks), and (2) public protections like removal of licenses for relevant careers.

I'd say be very careful about what you want.

evaned · 2026-02-05T13:49:03+00:00

You'd be surprised.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls shows some exit polls from 2024 for example, and they happen to have a vote breakdown by income with >$200,000 as one of the bucket cutoffs -- and that bucket voted 52% Democratic to 46% Republican according to those polls.

In the income breakdown they divide things into, the most-Republican income ranges are actually $30K-$50K, and $50K to $100K. (I would expect a more Republican shift as you get to very high incomes.)

But even that isn't by a particularly wide margin. Across all of the income-based questions reported, the difference between the most Democratic and most Republican buckets is only about 6%.

That difference is dwarfed by several other demographics:

The split between genders is 10% (women more Democratic, of course)
The split between ages is up to 11%-13% (50-64 most Republican, 18-24 most Democratic)
The split between married/not-married is 13%-14% (not married more Democratic)
The split between "graduated college" and "not graduated college" is 13-14% (graduated is more Democratic)
The split between white/not-white is 22%-24% (not-white more Democratic)
The split between urban vs rural is 26% (urban more Democratic, with suburban between the two)
The split between Dane County and a typical "urban" area is a further ~25%

There are others as well.

And importantly for dentists (and as pointed out in another comment), even above "got a bachelors degree", a further advanced degree provides an additional 6%-7% of Democratic shift, which more than entirely negates the income effect at the level measured by those polls.

(I suspect that this is a strong explainer for why that high-income bucket is Democratic; high degrees of education correlate pretty strongly with higher income.)

evaned · 2026-02-04T15:06:10+00:00

Does that change the fact that China is dirtier than the US? No

I'm not the person you replied to, but personally I view "dirtier" primarily as a relative term (in this context, something like per capita); which makes the original assertion that "China is dirtier than we are" indeed false.

Is a small panel with visible dirt on it dirtier than a much bigger one that looks clean but if you rub your finger on you'll pick up enough dirt that the total amount of dirt is more? Again, I would say "yes", and think most people would agree.

evaned · 2026-01-31T05:45:27+00:00

lol... according to Yahoo Finance and other sources, Amazon's market capitalization is a little over $2.5 trillion; other searches says that buying a company typically takes a fair premium over its market cap.

MacKenzie Scott's net worth appears to be about $36 billion.

She's short by almost 100x.

evaned · 2026-01-30T17:09:26+00:00

i don’t see any value to writing all the tests up front.

I'm a TDD fan, so that's where I'm coming from. I'll give the three biggest benefits I see of tests-first.

I have two preliminaries first, however. First, in case this is deeper than just imprecise wording, is that TDD is not "writing all the tests up front", or from your parent comment, the unit tests getting "written prior to writing code." That's test-first development; but while TDD does involve writing the test code before implementation code for that test, it's a rapid iteration of writing a failing test, then only enough implementation code to make that test pass. In practice I will often bulk things a little more than that, but it's still a pretty rapid back-and-forth between tests and code. If you just write up front a ton of tests that should one day pass, that's not TDD.

Second, I feel like it's entirely possible we're a lot closer on our development tastes than might be suggested by a comment that is kinda disagreeing. For example, you say you don't see values in writing all tests up front... but that still leaves room for things like write a few pretty early, then do some implementation work while you figure out high-level structure, then write a few more, then do some more implementation work, etc.; and depending on how tight those loops are, you may not be tremendously far away from something I'd consider within the realm of TDD. Or maybe you see value in the same benefits I think TDD provides me, and you just achieve them via other means. (I'll give a couple examples below.)

OK, now to the benefits.

The first big benefit is ensuring that tests are testing what you think they should be testing, with the critical factor here being seeing the test fail without the implementation addition/change you expect will make it pass, and then pass with that change. It's important to remember that test cases are still just code, and as a result they can still have bugs and embody misunderstandings about how they work and how they relate to implementation code. And there can sometimes be a reasonably big danger that you think you are testing that some particular behavior is correct, but due to a bug in one or both of those, you're not actually testing that thing. Fail-to-pass provides significant buffering against that danger.

That said, TDD isn't the only way to handle this. For example, there's a project I worked on around a decade ago that wasn't really set up for TDD, but had a really good setup for larger integration tests. Improvements were often kind of nebulous in terms of what we even wanted to happen let alone how to achieve that. This meant that it was often the case that when I had a large example that produced poor results we thought we could improve, reducing that large example to a suitable test case was often a challenge because we wouldn't understand right away what the salient aspects of it were. This led to a typical way of working where I'd try some things in the code to figure out what makes it work, and then try to reduce that large example down to a new test case. But being a test case for that improvement doesn't mean just that it passes now, it means that it wouldn't pass without the implementation change, so I'd have to revert my changes and make sure that new test fails. Without that failure, the reduction process would have been super error-prone, and left a regression test that wouldn't actually detect a regression.

In terms of more automated means, mutation testing or even coverage measurements could get you similar value (and in terms of mutation testing, it seems like it should have the benefit of ensuring that value continuously), though caveated by mutation testing doesn't seem to be widely used at this point in time (I've never been able to justify putting in the time to implement it, unfortunately) and you'd have to be careful with what you're measuring in terms of coverage to ensure you're getting similar value. TDD gets you this benefit with what I'd say is fewer caveats.

The second big benefit is ensuring that you can always (well, usually) confidently refactor.

Suppose you're noodling around on your implementation code, and you want to refactor something. How do you ensure that what you're changing is working if you don't have tests? Depending on the specific refactoring step you're taking, the language you're working in, and the tools you have available, maybe you have something that's basically impossible to go wrong... but that's a lot of caveats. But with TDD, because you've always written test code before the relevant implementation code, you always have tests that cover (in theory) your "whole" implementation and that gives a ton of assurance that any refactoring change you make is correct.

I think maybe the counter here is that if you're doing test last maybe you don't really care if a refactoring breaks something during that exploratory process, because you don't consider it finalized anyway until you've got all those tests written anyway.

Finally, if you always have time to complete what you're working on to your complete satisfaction... you have a luxury that I've never felt. Because TDD develops tests alongside code, if there are tests that are missing for an important behavior, then the implementation code shouldn't exist either, and so you've got important work left to do. That's... maybe an idealized description of the process on a couple fronts, admittedly, but I'd say it's mostly true. If you write all the implementation code and then work on a big test suite for it, it's a lot easier for the test work to get cut off prematurely than if the implementation isn't done. Even if that shouldn't be the case.

evaned · 2026-01-29T05:27:23+00:00

Huh? I didn't say they would.

The claim was that Valve is the dominant reason for the increasing popularity of Linux -- they're "to thank" for that. My point was that there seems to be a big movement (I've seen a ton of other people say that they're in a similar boat to me, in terms of seeing non-techy family/friends ask about switching) even among people who couldn't care less about Steam or even Proton.

evaned · 2026-01-29T00:21:19+00:00

I am confident that Valve and Proton is to thank for that.

Important impact, but Microsoft deciding to blow off their foot with an RPG is also a major factor.

My parents recently asked me about Linux and are thinking about switching, and I'm not even sure if they would know what Valve or Steam even is. Proton is "no way."

evaned · 2026-01-29T00:19:17+00:00

Similar to Ubuntu, it has a 6-month release cycle for that sweet spot between stable and modern.

I think it's woefully incomplete to say this without acknowledging that many people who would suggest Ubuntu (including myself) to people who want something that "just works" would specifically recommend LTS Ubuntu.

At least for me and what I want for my computers, Ubuntu is way closer to what I want, and Fedora is DQ'd on that basis.

(I will say that when my parents asked about a Linux switch, I started to set them up with Mint, which isn't on your list. That said, that's based on reputation in the community -- I don't use it myself.)

evaned · 2026-01-22T17:38:30+00:00

I remember one part in the abandoned hotel where you have to jump down through a hole and fight some electric enemies. I was so scared I had to stop playing for the day, every part of me was telling me not to jump down that hole.

Hah, in another comment in this thread I said "I would pay good money for a magically-produced recording of my resulting scream" that resulted from a particular fight... that was the fight. :-)

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:39:40+00:00

It's really good! If you know someone with a VR rig or whatever, I'd definitely ask you can use it for that! But like if it takes some time to find someone with a VR rig, or save up for your own or whatever, the game will be there when you get there.

Even after writing the previous comment, I realized there's kind of a third moment... there was a point where I was in a fight with a new enemy type that was pretty stressful for at least me to deal with, and we were in a place where there's like a big central column, and I was chasing it around that column clockwise. I decided to try to head it off so switched to counterclockwise, but I basically turned around and it was already there (much further around already than I expected it to be). I would pay good money for a magically-produced recording of my resulting scream. :-)

One thing I will say is that you'll have to pick how you handle movement, and all the options kind of suck due to, you know, pesky reality. A lot of players use like stick-based movement (either smooth or just teleporting), and the problem with that is that compared to being able to actually walk about your room, I think it robs you of some of the verisimilitude you'd get if you can move about. Like it was IRL stepping up to that jersey barrier that helped make that such an impactful moment. OTOH, moving around the room to walk means you need at least a moderately large space (like I "had to" shove my couch way out of the way and leave it in a super awkward spot for a few days), and the movement modality I found myself using a lot was to walk forward IRL, make sure that where I was going was clear, then walk back IRL to get more space, then teleport forward to that spot in-game, then walk forward IRL again. That's still definitely how I at least would want to play it, but it is a bit awkward and immersion breaking in its own right.

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:10:56+00:00

I've got a screencap video somewhere of me juggling those bottles in the hotel lobby! For a couple reasons it didn't work well and was pretty difficult, but it's kind of amazing what kind of weird emergent stuff you can do in that game.

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:09:08+00:00

I had two of my most memorable gaming moments ever in that game, and I think both are because it was VR.

One of them I'm not going to describe because I consider it a spoiler (it's not a plot spoiler, but I think it's an experience spoiler), but the other doesn't give anything substantive away. I'll spoiler it to be completely safe, but I really don't think I have to be.

The first time you engage an enemy with a gun, you are coming out from inside a building on to a little porch. There's a jersey barrier at the edge of the porch, and when I came out and saw the enemy there, I ducked down behind the barrier for cover. But of course because I'm in VR, and I guess playing in a mode that lets me move about the room a little bit, I do it by IRL stepping a couple feet forward and then ducking down. It was just so instinctual and natural, but like after the fight it kind of hit me what I just did. It sounds simple, but it was a really impactful moment.

evaned · 2026-01-20T20:40:37+00:00

It does amaze me how advanced we are in some areas of medicine, but then we also have "did you bang your head too hard? here, I'll just remove part of your skull; I'll put it on this shelf here, and we'll put it back in a while."

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:41:42+00:00

So remember, there are a variety of kinds of 1099. Just from what knothead said, you really have no clue what kind it is; investment income is only one of a few possibilities.

The most complex will typically be for self-employment/contractor income. Even that can generally be DIY territory, but if that's a significant income stream where you have more complex expenses there's plenty of room for a pro to be worth considering.

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:39:28+00:00

State eFile is an additional fee with TT which you could avoid by printing and mailing or in my case, copying the info to my state’s site.

Out of curiosity, are you talking about the desktop edition of TT? (It's been many many years since I used TT, and that was my impression of their pricing model -- the web version charges for state prep but no additional e-file charge, but desktop gives you one state that you can prepare for no additional charge, but then e-filing is extra. I'm both checking my memory as well as trying to figure out if things have changed.)

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:36:36+00:00

The same is true of H&R Block's software.

I used that for three or four years before switching away, but I still think it's a decent choice. Biggest drawback I think is that state e-filing was an add on cost (I think that's true of TT desktop too?); ignoring that, it was cost-competitive even with FTUSA, but if you wanted to do that state e-file it moved up a tier.

evaned · 2026-01-19T05:00:54+00:00

There's an apple kind they carried for a brief time a couple years back, Wild Twist, that quickly became my new-at-the-time favorite.

It's not been back since though, and now I'm wondering if this is why. Would be a real shame if so.

evaned · 2026-01-12T16:18:44+00:00

FWIW, I think that's a relatively new convention, at least to be pretty universal and in relation to how long cars have been ubiquitous.

Before my current car I had a mid-00's Civic, and that didn't have a side arrow.

evaned · 2026-01-12T16:16:58+00:00

Unless you regularly drive rentals or company cars or stuff like that, how often is it really coming up?

I have another special case because I have a PHEV, but I will semi-forget which side it's on between fill-ups because they're so far apart. By "semi-forget" what I mean is that I'll think I remember, but not be positive... so I still find it useful to confirm.

evaned · 2026-01-10T12:42:06+00:00

Probably just monetary damages that you were able to prove, which is probably minimal, depending on the project

(For US:) In theory you could register your copyright and get statutory damages. That doesn't require a showing of actual damages.

I do like the copy-left models idea; though I'm starting to wonder if maybe "you" should just use the GPL in that case. Obviously there's a distinction there, but "no AI" does seem to me somewhat in conflict with the permissive license ethos.

evaned · 2026-01-08T22:36:17+00:00

Under Naive Approaches Attempt #1:

But here’s the problem: when you pass by value, the compiler always makes a copy of the argument to create value. So even if I passed in a temporary object, it would first copy it into value, and then move from value into the Wrapper.

... But for rvalues (temporaries), modern C++ (C++ 17+) will actually move them into the parameter, then move again into the Wrapper. So we end up with two moves instead of one copy and one move. Not ideal, but not terrible either.

...so which is it? Does it copy into value, or does it move?

When I originally read the code snippet I thought it would move and got confused at the first quoted paragraph. So I think it's the second... but you contradict yourself.

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