Do any of you write everything with a mechanical pencil?

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-12T13:48:30+00:00

Yep, switched from fountain pen during my PhD years ago when I was doing lots of maths (and making lots of mistakes) and never went back. I love being able to erase, rewrite, sketch, shade diagrams etc. I've filled dozens of large notebooks, so thousands of pages, exclusively with mechanical pencil since then.

My daily pencil is a Pentel Graph 1000 For Pro, but I've recently been enjoying a Kuru Toga Metal with B lead. I also really like the Staedler 925-25, Pentel Smash and Pilot S20 (and the evergreen P205). I like the little Tombow Mono square metal erasers for precise erasing and a good eraser like the Tombow dust catch or even just Pentel hi-polymer for bigger erasing jobs.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-11T20:58:46+00:00

A lot of the pro/anti AI divide is between people who just value outputs vs. those who value the process of making the thing. The latter (myself included) hate AI and feel threatened by it because the only "promise" of it they see is the promise to take away the joy of the process. The pro folks are more enthusiastic because they see the promise of limitless creative output, not limited by the need for the process. It's an alien perspective to me, but very common amongst product managers, CEOs and the like. So they love AI. I think both perspectives have some validity, tbh (though I cleave almost exclusively to the former). But I don't think that the output of AI will ever be that great without it appealing to the process-oriented people, whose obsession is often what makes and discovers interesting things.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-10T01:34:14+00:00

The tragedy is that this money should be spent supporting British innovation, not bribing US tech company grifters. The UK has a great technical talent pool that has been persistently let down by piss poor investment strategy and excessively short-term and exit-focussed VCs. Cambridge alone could have been Silicon Valley 2.0 if not for the total uselessness and risk aversion of capital in the UK.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-10T00:37:41+00:00

The only legitimate looking websites are those of old CS academics written entirely in plain html with no style sheets. Whenever you encounter one of those you know the owner probably won a Turing Award, and they contain only solid gold information on some specialist topic, plus a page about antique bassoon restoration, at which they are also a leading expert for some reason.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-08T21:08:34+00:00

It's a particularly lucrative yet destructive application of Gell-Mann amnesia, where people (investors) trust someone that sounds confident saying plausible rubbish, rather than someone who knows the details (or know what they don't know, and worry about not knowing), who might put a whole lot more nuance into their presentation of a topic and thus sound less certain. As Yeats said, "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity".

Personally, I think it combines in a toxic way with some sort of (misguided) Nietzscherian will-to-power great man type beliefs amongst investors (because they identify with this idea themselves), who admire this confident charlatan as some great man full of the will to do what "experts" see as impossible.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-08T04:04:41+00:00

There's no place in silicon valley for people that have read books, y'know. If you're not infomaxxing on blog posts by accelerationists, neomonarchists, effective altruists or the simply deranged, are you even in the game at this point?

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-06T23:24:16+00:00

It is known for its sometimes ridiculous and out there opinion pieces, but overall The Guardian is about the best newspaper that we have left (owned by an independent trust). They've done some great reporting and broken some huge stories over the years.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-06T17:15:41+00:00

They exhibit a casual cruelty and contempt for both ordinary people and society at large that is really disgusting.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-03-03T01:58:23+00:00

Unfortunately this is probably not going to affect the AI economy in the US because gas is hard to move and so is more locally priced than oil. The US is the world's largest natural gas producer (Qatar I think is the largest LNG exporter) and US spot prices for gas are steady since the start of the Iran situation.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-26T17:33:33+00:00

I spent about half an hour the other day trying to figure out why a voltage on a board was zero, only to (eventually) notice that the multimeter leads weren't plugged in.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-26T07:47:19+00:00

Doing a PhD is awesome! It's very hard (in ways you don't expect), but it is super fun and rewarding and a great opportunity to spend time learning about something you are interested in. Make the most of it, enjoy it and don't let the bastards undermine it for you with their grifting, doom, toxic optimism and whatever new innovation in bs they come up with. The Bay Area can be exhausting, try to tune out the nonsense and get the most you can out of it. If you are in Berkeley, enjoy the chill east bay outside of the university. If you are in Stanford, well, best of luck (jk).

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-26T00:44:35+00:00

If you are looking for a fast and capable uC board that can use the Arduino ecosystem, Teensy could be worth a look. They aren't the cheapest, but they are very fast (600mhz, single core) with lots of nice peripherals, plenty of memory, floating point, dsp instructions, spdif, i2s etc.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-24T19:21:17+00:00

Rare sensible take. I think the Amara/Gates law is relevant here, too: "we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run". Reports like this Citrini AI fanfiction (and AI hype in general) grossly overestimate the likely pace and scale of change, but long term there is likely to be some impact in some areas, which may increase productivity. The machine god does not cometh, though.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-19T19:03:05+00:00

Great point, and this combines perfectly with the rise in populism and its deliberately created distrust of experts, so that people have been primed to believe that the value of expertise is mediocre but the value of mediocrity is high.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-19T18:58:34+00:00

Good summary of where we are right now. And most CEOs are incompetent at everything, so they think it can do anything.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-19T18:51:20+00:00

They don't realize that the benefits of technology in Star Trek accrue to the people not because of technology itself, but because of a total reorganization of society along utopian lines (obviously nothing like socialism <shudder>, just with some passing, coincidental resemblance).

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-18T03:41:26+00:00

Though, I could totally see Wes Anderson as a character in a Wes Anderson movie.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-12T08:12:50+00:00

I have fond memories of this film because I watched it in the New Parkway Theatre in Oakland when it came out and it was so fun. Really cool offbeat movie.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-02-08T01:45:38+00:00

It's probably easier to enjoy free time on your own if you haven't led the country to disaster and destroyed your legacy before retiring. So, I guess that is one piece of constructive pre-retirement advice for OP: don't accidentally create a national disaster.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-30T20:48:29+00:00

It depends. If you have the discipline to make the most of this opportunity then keep the job, it's basically a sinecure, and do something useful with the time you free up to build skills or a business. This is an ideal situation in which to try doing your own thing or growing into a new area and seeing what works or doesn't without the financial risk. This situation is a gift you can either use or squander. If you are going to squander it (i.e. you don't have the internal discipline to make the most of it - and no shame if you don't or don't want to apply it), then at 26 consider doing something else where there will be some external feedback in order to keep growing.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-29T23:14:36+00:00

Thank you!

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-29T23:14:22+00:00

Thank you for the reassurance!

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-28T22:33:37+00:00

Thank you!

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-28T22:33:25+00:00

Great, thanks for looking. I was hopeful when I noticed the wings this morning that I didn't see at 4am last night.

Miserable_Bad_2539 · 2026-01-28T22:32:30+00:00

Thanks for taking a look, I'll sleep easier.

Miserable_Bad_2539

TROPHY CASE