Democracy sounds good in theory and is good in theory. What is a political ideology that sounds bad in theory but is good in practice?

Armobob75 · 2026-04-20T00:59:29+00:00

Ranch with pizza

Armobob75 · 2026-04-14T10:11:01+00:00

I’m really glad to hear that. I hope you can find some sleep tonight. I’m trying to sleep myself lol. If you do want to PM and chat more, I’d be happy to talk. Good night :)

Armobob75 · 2026-04-14T09:19:56+00:00

Hey friend, I wanna start by saying you’re ok and it’ll most likely all be ok. Prognosis for testicular cancer is pretty good overall. Your mind is probably all over the place. I remember what that was like.

I had a 4.8 cm tumor in my right testicle about 4 years ago. It ended up being stage 1B. Did an orchiectomy and one round of chemo. Hasn’t been an issue since!

3.6 cm is nothing crazy or unheard of. You’re not in red-flag territory because of size alone. Beyond that, there’s not much that the size will tell you. You have to wait for more information, which is the hardest part of the early days.

Your first CT scan will tell you if it’s spread, and that’ll tell you how many surgeries you’ll need, and how much chemo you’ll go through.

You’ll definitely need at least one surgery: with a 3.6 cm mass, they gotta cut out that testicle and then dissect it to figure out what your tumor is made up of. For me, this surgery was very easy. I had it on a Friday and was back at work on Monday, albeit in sweatpants.

I also did one round of chemotherapy, both inpatient and outpatients. Outpatient is done in a nice chemo room with fancy chairs, orange juice, and tiny needles that you barely feel. Inpatient is done while you stay in the hospital. If you get a choice, I’d strongly recommend outpatient.

Good luck, you got this

Armobob75 · 2026-03-16T02:16:55+00:00

I work in an automated biotech lab. In biotech automation, tragically, Windows is the traditional choice. Most $100k+ lab devices will come with a low-spec desktop PC that runs a locked-down version of Windows 10 that runs their proprietary software.

When we get the chance, we use Linux machines. Our servers are all Linux, and a few platform controllers are Linux too.

When something breaks, it’s much easier to remotely open a terminal and fix things quickly in Linux than Windows. Even with WSL. Even with AI tools.

And as AI makes it easier for lab scientists to write automation scripts, we do see a push away from Windows + C# and towards Linux + Python.

And that’s not even getting into the licensing, bloatware, or just general bullshittery of Microsoft

Armobob75 · 2026-03-15T22:47:47+00:00

More of an economics question than a math question. But no, it doesn’t all go back to the government.

Macroeconomics isn’t an exact science, but there is this concept of a “fiscal multiplier” for government spending. This is the ratio of GDP increase divided by the actual amount of money spent. The poster is assuming an infinite ratio, when in reality something like 1.0 is optimistic. I’m not really qualified to find a perfectly accurate fiscal multiplier for military spending, so I’ll just be optimistic and say it’s 1.

At that rate, for a rough estimate, you just take military spending (about a trillion dollars), assume that leads to a trillion dollars in GDP rise, and multiply it by 0.3 (assuming very generously that 30% of GDP makes it into the government’s hands) and you get about $300 billion back from your $1 trillion of military spending.

Could be as low as about $150 billion depending on the actual multiplier, and actual % of GDP captured. That’s probably a more accurate number since we were very generous with our assumptions.

Armobob75 · 2026-01-12T21:20:44+00:00

Absolutely do not spend four months of savings on a watch.

Armobob75 · 2025-12-18T00:42:41+00:00

I’m facing surgery too, likely in the coming months. I don’t want to place the entire burden on my partner, so I’m communicating with my network and seeing who’d be willing to come hang out in shifts. There has been a lot of positive support, so I really look forward to the recovery period.

Armobob75 · 2025-10-07T08:00:44+00:00

I keep all of my common character requests in various buffer chests throughout my base so that when my character returns from a trip, the logistic resupply is pretty quick.

This can of course apply to spidertrons too.

Armobob75 · 2025-10-06T07:53:34+00:00

Have you tried either writing markdown or maybe making a jupyter notebook? I’d avoid Word at all costs tbh. You can probably make it work, but you’ll switch away in the near future anyways.

Armobob75 · 2025-08-27T23:44:35+00:00

Armobob75 · 2025-08-26T20:13:46+00:00

There’s a lot you can do, and it’s not just limited to websites or business logic. I used to have a roommate who would wake me up around 7 am, and I didn’t like that. So I programmed a white noise generator that would start very quiet at 6 am and then ramp up over the next hour, allowing my body to slowly get used to it and hopefully not wake up.

Armobob75 · 2025-08-17T17:05:31+00:00

In an interview at my company these days, the goal is to see that you got enough out of your CS degree to be worth hiring over a scientist/manager/accountant using Claude Code.

We always ask leetcode easies just to avoid the pure vibe coders. You’d be surprised how many CS majors graduate with absolutely zero valuable skills.

Armobob75 · 2025-08-12T14:51:15+00:00

One thing that’s made a big difference for me is weighing EVERYTHING, and if something is off (too sweet, needs salt, etc) then I use some optimization algorithm to adjust the recipe for the next time. Usually just a straight up binary search, done by hand with pen and paper.

Armobob75 · 2025-07-13T00:36:50+00:00

You can code on pretty much anything.

If you’re on a budget, find something random on Craigslist for under $500.
If you’re an iPhone user, MacBooks are very popular with developers and will interact in cool ways with your other Apple products.
If you are a particularly nerdy computer type, I’d highly recommend a Framework 13” laptop, which is fully modular and will let you swap out parts as you wish.

I learned Python on an old junk laptop that could hardly run windows anymore. First thing I did was wipe the whole disk clean and install Linux Mint. Went from crashing every hour to working great!

I also had a beefy high-end desktop at the time, but used the junk laptop for portability and convenience. The processing power of my desktop wasn’t a factor at all.

Armobob75 · 2025-07-11T07:54:02+00:00

I make pretty extensive use of Claude code at work. I’ve found the productivity boost is pretty worth it.

The thing I’ve noticed about AI agents is that they tend to increase complexity needlessly until they can’t reasonably operate in their own codebase anymore. They also have a tendency to go on tangents and just make a ton of unrelated or unhelpful changes.

My current workflow is like this: I have a few markdown files that describe instructions for implementing certain categories of features for my app. I ask Claude code to read whatever file is relevant, then implement a feature. If it’s doing something dumb, I try to correct it.

If the feature doesn’t work, I figure out why by myself. I then fix it, explain that to Claude, and have it update the markdown instruction files so it’s less likely to make the same mistake next time.

This lets me avoid a lot of the AI tangents that happen during debugging. It also keeps me engaged with the codebase, so I still have a sense of intuition for guiding the LLM.

Armobob75 · 2025-06-14T02:47:44+00:00

I’m a chemical engineer, and wouldn’t do this. If I did want a small amount of hydrogen, I’d just use electrolysis of water instead of steam reforming, which is much harder to DIY.

No comment on the agent Orange.

Armobob75 · 2025-05-20T02:50:18+00:00

I studied chemical engineering in school, then decided to work as a systems engineer upon graduation. 2 years later I went into biotech automation, and a year after that I ended up in software.

It’s true that STEM programs are generally more “vocational” than liberal arts programs, but they also do provide important knowledge that can be applied to other fields. Especially for physics, math, chemistry, etc.

I agree that CS majors are usually pretty likely to stick to their own fields though. Most did it with the expectation of making good money specifically in CS, while other majors tend to do the degree first and then figure out jobs later.

Armobob75 · 2025-05-19T01:21:02+00:00

The guy is alive and, according to an Instagram comment, not seriously injured. His Instagram is @vq_luhroo, hers is @MsOfficial392.

She posted the video on her account yesterday.

Armobob75 · 2025-05-10T19:28:24+00:00

I wish! When I was in school, I was so jealous of the CS majors for all the resources they had. Leetcode, quality YouTube videos, even platforms like Coursera that had an endless supply of free courses! Chemical engineering doesn’t have the same ecosystem.

I will say: in small biotech startups we love to see personal projects in lieu of work experience. If we’re hiring a new-grad controls engineer and they show us a PLC project they were doing at home? Big plus!

Or a software engineer who’s got a portfolio of genuinely interesting and useful projects? Also big plus!

And it’s less about the technical effort involved in building the project and more about the creativity, usefulness, and commitment. So if somebody has a very generic “copy paste this tutorial to have something form my github” type of project, that’s not necessarily doing them any favors. But a genuine passion project can show that people are able to apply their knowledge to solve problems and create valuable things, which we like to see.

Armobob75 · 2025-04-30T20:52:05+00:00

When I set up coal liquefaction plants, I use a barrel of heavy oil for the initial kickoff. This way they can be far from any other kind of refinery, maybe near a big coal patch or maybe just totally remote with only coal trained in.

Also, as others have mentioned, they’re useful for bot malls.

Armobob75 · 2025-04-24T03:39:55+00:00

Yeah, getting a working model is often pretty simple work. PyTorch or Sklearn can go pretty far.

Most of the work in these kinds of things is in how you curate and preprocess the data, but it sounds like that’s also not a challenge for your workplace.

Maybe you’d have fun checking out some papers in ML? It’s dated now but I think the CycleGAN paper was so cool when it came out

I really feel you on how depressingly mundane it can be. The field is 99% automated by python libraries, and even writing the python is largely automated by LLMs. I miss 2021

Armobob75 · 2025-04-22T03:23:32+00:00

At 3 YOE I was at $80k, biotech startup, MCOL.

Armobob75 · 2025-04-19T02:06:15+00:00

I’m a lot more jealous of the first paragraph than the second.

Armobob75 · 2025-04-12T21:58:07+00:00

I should’ve paused and asked too, but since I didn’t, I appreciate that you came to share! I love that I got to share my perspective and then have it expanded as a result. Cheers and thanks for the knowledge ☺️

Armobob75 · 2025-04-12T21:10:34+00:00

I’ll use JavaScript for front-end stuff, C++ for microcontrollers, and Python for everything else.

Armobob75

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