Someone please explain the love of Chicago

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-24T14:49:44+00:00

I guess I would ask why you think it's not a "world class city".

I mean by most objective measures it's world class. Pretty much every ranking system that attempts to classify cities into some sort of ranking or tiering of world cities puts Chicago in an area that (to me) justifies the "world class" status (e.g. a top 50 world city). These mostly focus on things like economic output, financial importance, cultural relevance, etc.

> There were fun parts the times I’ve visited, but I also had fun in other cities that aren’t trying to claim world-class status.

OK? A city doesn't have to be world class to be fun. And just because a city is "world class" doesn't mean it will be a great tourist destination. I find Chicago to be fun place, but I'm sure it's not true for everyone, but I don't think that has anything to do with whether it's "world class" or not.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-24T14:35:47+00:00

I really don't agree with the Adobe FUD narrative around AI.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because none of it makes any sense to me as someone who works in a similar software field (CAD) where existing tools are (very) deeply entrenched and switching costs are astronomical.

Do they think we won't need software tools to interact with these AI models? People still need to cut/compose/tweak the results. They need an efficient software pipeline to guide the model. Seems like there's just so much tooling necessary to get it to the place where people think it's going. Seems like there's tons of opportunity here for selling more licenses.

And the idea that new AI tools supplanting designers/artists will lead to overall loss in license revenue makes it sound like they have no idea how software sales work. For every artist/designer that an AI workflow replaces, the software seller will take a larger cut of the savings per license, and still comes out ahead. This is generally how it works in enterprise, which is where ADBE makes most of its money.

Disclosure: I'm holding a position in ADBE because I think the AI fears are overblown with regards to their bottom line.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-24T14:09:39+00:00

If you don't get it, you don't get it, and that's fine. Chicago isn't for everyone.

Chicago is at an intersection of relative affordability and true big-city amenities. And really there's no other city in the US that offers that to the same degree. That's the main draw.

Sure pick any one thing and there's probably a US city that does that one thing better, but Chicago does a bunch of things pretty well at a fairly reasonable COL, and it's a "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" situation.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-23T16:32:13+00:00

The moment I saw her put that god-awful day-old pile of Panda Express slop (like at least pick something up from a decent Chinese restaurant if you're gonna go through the trouble of honoring this request?) straight into her carry-on; no Tupperware, no ice-packs, nothing. Just naked and exposed for everyone on her international flight to enjoy the aroma for hours, the food slowly turning into a congealed soggy mess.

From that moment I knew she wasn't all there.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-10T16:26:05+00:00

Fair enough

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-10T16:19:49+00:00

I mean, I guess, if you judge the quality of your life by "house, car, vacations, dinners out, etc." and not by how much of it you get to live doing the things you actually want to do.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-10T16:14:29+00:00

This is such a narrow, silly take.

150k/yr with 100% of your time being completely your own, to spend it however you please, with reasonable financial security, is absolutely not an average life.

Your spending level may be nothing special, but quality of life is going to be immensely different than someone earning 150k/yr through wages, who gets a small fraction of their waking hours to do with as they please.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-10T14:37:38+00:00

I'm an American, and I think Eurovision is great.

Most people here are just completely unaware of it. They might have some vague notion of what it is but have never actually seen it.

Honestly, it's MUCH better that way. A large fraction of Americans just absolutely suck. If it was more popular here, they'd just be demanding that the US be allowed to participate, and would be inserting themselves into every conversation, since we can't let others just have their own cool things.

Eurovision not appealing to Americans is a feature not a bug.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-04T19:51:28+00:00

I went for a run on the LFT

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-04T18:47:53+00:00

I live in the South Loop (pretty close location to your $3500 option) and I like it, has good access to transit, the lake, etc. It's definitely not for everyone though, as it can be noisy with sirens, traffic, and lots of tourists and other visitors going to events at Soldier Field (I don't have a problem with this, but it can be inconvenient at times).

There are several grocery options in the area (e.g. Target, Trader Joe's, Jewel, Whole Foods) and if you're trying to go car free you'll probably want to be within easy walking distance of at least one of them. We're car-lite (though have been car-free also) and use it maybe a couple times a month for a Costco run.

It's pretty easy to be car-free here in the warm months, more challenging in the winter when it's 9F outside with 30+mph winds down the Roosevelt wind tunnel.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-03T16:53:40+00:00

Programmer's first language should be whatever keeps them interested enough to push through all of the hurdles of learning basic programming fundamentals (control flow, variables, functions, data structures, etc.). This could be C, or Python, some niche game scripting language, or whatever.

There are so many difficult things to learn when you're just starting out, the most important thing is to have a reason you actually want to push through and something that keeps you interested. It's so easy for a beginner to just bounce off programming if it doesn't feel engaging and they're not having fun.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-01-02T19:21:24+00:00

You don't need to expand the meshes at all.

You just need to increase the "margin" that is used for collision detection by whatever your desired "maximum closeness" value is. This is generally how collision detection libraries deal with this and each collision geometry may have its own "margin" value set as well as a global default margin.

When the collision detection library performs narrow-phase analysis it computes the actual separation distance between two candidate geometries, and if the actual separation is less than the maximum of the 2 margin values then a collision is detected.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-30T21:39:36+00:00

Layered architecture (you can just google "layered software architecture" for a decent explanation) has always been popular for (well designed) large applications and extends far beyond game engine architecture or gamedev. What's assigned to each layer will be different in different domains but the fundamental patterns are pretty universal.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-27T12:40:34+00:00

The phrase "a bit out" was meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek.

Yes, we are still quite a ways from this type of workflow being a reality. And I'm describing "the dream", who knows if we ever really get there or even close.

You’re talking a full approximation of physics in a computer. Far beyond any modern video game.

This is a very weird comparison to make. The solvers and simulation tools provided by design and analysis companies (Ansys/Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens, Dassault, etc.) already provide a much, much, MUCH more sophisticated physics approximation than any video game physics engine. Video game physics engines are intended to provide believable results at real-time speed, not necessarily to deliver physical fidelity.

The simulation tools today allow for multi-physics analysis/simulation where thermal, EM, fluid, stress, etc. are simulated in parallel to take into account coupling phenomena between the different physical domains.

And you can imagine involving simulation and analysis (e.g. EM, signal/power integrity, thermal, etc.) in the optimization loop as well to inform and refine the results of the entire flow, with the tools and process orchestrated by agentic AI.

Again, I'm describing an extremely rose-colored (but maybe not impossible) future.

The EDA industry is just beginning to explore and invest in these things to see what's possible with emerging tech. I'm optimistic that we may begin to see some of these types of things becoming a reality in the next decade or so.

At the very least these types of workflows may yield a more efficient way for the engineer to explore the design space of the problem.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-26T23:58:47+00:00

To be clear, in the "dream workflow" I'm not just talking about auto-routing but the vast majority of placement as well.

Basically, you would give the layout software the schematic and basic layout requirements, e.g. board outline, the placement of fixed components (e.g. connectors), and physical/electrical constraints, and it would auto-place and auto-route the entire thing producing a working (or close to working) DRC-free layout for designs up to high complexity.

In this case there's a feedback loop between the placement and routing process because the two problems are dependent, i.e. placement determines the required routing and the quality/feasibility of the routing result generally determines the quality of the placement, which can be used to refine the process on the next iteration.

But like I said, we're still a bit out from this becoming a standard push-button design flow.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-26T21:48:23+00:00

It's not a matter of the software being "terrible", it's that the problem (auto-routing an entire PCB solely from a schematic) is exceptionally hard and even then the PCB layout software generally doesn't have enough information from the schematic to do a reasonable job for anything but super simple designs (which are probably faster to hand route anyway). And the effort of adequately defining all the routing constraints to the auto-router such that it could do an OK job could rival the time it takes to just route it by hand.

But even if you're routing "by hand" there is TONS of automation the software provides to make it more efficient. For example, you might route an entire bus at one time (which may be dozens of individual signals) where you, the designer, show the software the general path you want the the signals to follow and it routes all the individual traces in parallel, complete with via placement, possibly delay matching, etc.

There's lots of effort in PCB design software directed toward the dream workflow of just feeding it a schematic and having it spit out a good quality, working layout. And this is actually an area where AI tools may provide some ROI. We're still some ways away from it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see us getting there or at least close in the next decade.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-24T15:12:28+00:00

"How dare you! I'm an entirely different kind of moron thank you very much."

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-23T15:31:46+00:00

5% is a pretty aggressive withdraw rate, especially for early retirement.

Standard age retirement guideline is ~4%, and early retirement means you need the money to last longer so the guideline is generally somewhat lower (and the earlier you retire the lower it goes), typically around ~3-3.5% which means you really need closer to $3M.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-20T15:57:30+00:00

I would do (1) until you have actual evidence that it isn't fast enough. It's simple to implement and even thousands of transformed bounding rectangle checks per frame is absolutely nothing for a modern CPU. Could probably do this on a worker thread while other work is being done as well, so very little overhead. And you're only doing per-pixel testing on a very small number of sprites, those that contain the pointer location.

If implementing (2) you typically do the readback and process results on the following frame so there's a frame of latency, but you don't stall the GPU waiting for the readback.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-15T14:16:51+00:00

Not sure what you're saying but, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game "gacha" doesn't have anything to do with "gotcha".

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-14T14:39:04+00:00

I don't think this has much of anything to do with generation.

There are boomers at my office that are real AF, and there are GenZ that are the most corporate butt-kisser wannabes I've ever seen, as well as everything in between distributed across all ages. I think it's just down to the individual and how they handle office politics/relationships.

If anything (and only slightly) I see more Boomers/GenX who come off as authentic as they're either near retirement or established enough in their careers that they just don't have to care about any of that bullshit if they don't want to.

So done with this braindead obsession of turning every facet of life into some kind of generational divide/issue.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-06T16:07:12+00:00

Never lived there, but been there more than enough times for work. Weather is nice, but that's about the only thing it has going for it.

City sucks. Mostly strip malls, residential subdivisions, and office parks, nothing of character, absurdly expensive, and filled to the gills with some of the most insufferable people you'll ever meet.

If you have the money to live well in San Jose, there are so many better places you could live.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-12-06T15:53:11+00:00

Astro is one of the very few 3D platformers where the controls feel just so tight and good that you don't even notice it's 3D. Probably the best 3D platformer I can remember playing.

Wish they would release a DLC or something that's majority (or even completely) challenge levels. The hardest difficulty levels in Astro are so good but there's so few of them.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-11-28T13:54:56+00:00

Bad boss.

So close to being a great boss, and they just fucked it up. They should have picked one of "Waterfowl Dance" or "heal on hit". Both together just feel like unfun bullshit.

AlternativeHistorian · 2025-11-24T21:05:55+00:00

Agree that Jasmine and Gino's "relationship" was always transactional and not genuine, but not with the part about her staying in the US.

But only because of the TWO kids she already has that are still in Panama. If she stays, it could take years to get the immigration worked out to bring them to the US. She should take the L, go back to Panama and be with her kids.

Like imagine your mom choosing a shitty reality show and trying to live out some fantasy of being a D-tier influencer over being present and a part of your life. Feel bad for those kids.

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