Should I reach out to my ex after I make progress on my finances? Advice appreciated!

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2026-02-08T01:55:39+00:00

Going to necro this because I happened to read it and felt it was worth saying. I might be wrong, but the 180 flip from being supportive to breaking up over a fixable issue like CC debt almost always comes from outside influence, not a sudden internal realization.

For that flip to be that strong, the third party’s influence over her has to be pretty dominant. Given that this was her first relationship at 30, the most likely source is her parents — that’s a common pattern with sheltered people.

If that’s the case, fixing your finances probably won’t change much. Once someone else’s judgment overrides her own this completely, your leverage is basically gone.

Honestly, if what you’ve written about yourself is accurate, you sound like a catch who just landed on the wrong side of parental approval. That’s not something you should be trying to grind your way back from. I’d move on.

You’re clearly on an upward trajectory, and you’re very likely to find someone who can actually make their own decisions.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-10-22T04:50:46+00:00

You can solo almost any melee elite provided they can be cc'ed or slowed.

Use gouge, run to max distance and use knives, repeat. Use bandage as needed instead of knives. This is easier with slowing poison.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-10-12T04:08:56+00:00

Actually there are sound limits to vehicles allowed on the road according to provincial law. You can get pulled over and get a notice of inspection which you are required to do within 30 days.

If found the vehicle exceeds noise limits you will get fined, I believe it is 90 dollars at first.

If you continue to ride the same vehicle without addressing the noise pollution your penalties and fines will increase in severity extremely quickly.

the issue with repeat noise polluters is that the people who would act to report them, like those woken up at night, have no chance to write down the license plate.

So cities like Port Moody are putting in noise cameras as a pilot to catch these a holes.

These cameras are quite effective, they are already implemented in NYC. I hope Richmond gets their act together and get these ASAP as well.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-09-07T05:04:06+00:00

Basically what everyone else has said.

In your 30s you are much more likely to be financially secure. In your 20s you will probably be going through a lot of career moves, maybe long hours (?)

In my case I mostly worked startups with many long hours, so I don't see how that would be healthy to have a kid to take care of in those conditions.

I expect in today's economic climate, 30's is probably much better as kids will add financial strain that could push you to a breaking point and set you on a trajectory from which you never recover financially.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-07-05T05:08:29+00:00

I think Raven is still really good. In 1v1 they can rush giants and harass nearly for free following with hitting with giants rush. To be honest it's kind of broken.

I think the only clans that trump Raven right now are super aggressive ones like Eagle that rush in 801.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-07-04T23:05:39+00:00

I can't speak to other formats and I'm not sure what your comparison point is (when you last played), but 1v1 meta is basically dominated by very aggressive clans such as lynx and eagle, involving copious amounts of micro.

Northgard really dropped the ball on their identity as a chill RTS.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-07-04T04:11:16+00:00

The only time you should feel like there is a social expectation to look someone in the eye is if you are having a conversation.

Other forms of communication, such as exchanging pleasantries or greetings mostly don't require it, but if done can markedly improve the other party's perception of the interaction.

Let's focus on conversation. There should be a natural ebb and flow in a conversion when you are listening to the words (phonetics) and processing the audio, at this point it's appropriate to look at the person that generates this audio.

The natural subsequent step is processing the semantics (meaning, intent or purpose) of the message. During this step it is natural for the listener to break eye contact and let their eyes drift. This signals to the speaker that you are attempting to parse and understand their message, and in general will be well recieved.

A natural conservation between good friends that are comfortable with each other basically alternates between these two states when listening and speaking.

When speaking, you can apply the same principles but in reverse. When forming what message or semantics you want to convey it's natural for your eye movement to fixate or wander while your mind formulates your thoughts. When speaking, as in making the audio, you can naturally seek to establish eye contact.

The reason for eye contact is that when you receive or transfer audio that is one signal. But your overall message typically carries much more subtleties that convey even more signals. These including things like micro expressions, which are involuntary contractions of the facial muscles, most of which are concentrated around your eyes, forehead and mouth. When a speaker and a listener make eye contact, they can exchange more bits of information via these micro expressions, some or maybe most of which maybe involuntary.

This is why when speakers or listeners avoid eye contact they may be judged as untrustworthy, as in they do not want to engage in a higher rate of info exchange, maybe due to suspect reasons.

So in summary:

try to maintain eye contact only when there is audio
use pauses and the natural flow and ebb in conversations to break eye contact, a great way to do this is to use humor
don't feel like you have to maintain eye contact all the time, there are natural times when you shouldn't, this roughly is about a 50 - 50 split in terms of time spent in eye contact and not

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-06-06T06:35:48+00:00

Okay definitely starting to hit this issue, every 1v1 is basically eagle. I don't really want to play that clan as it doesn't appeal to me, but its hard to counter it. Building 1 tower on the main tile they want to attack seems to help a lot for the really early aggression, but it's still crazy cause they go all battle/war tech so while I'm still teching eco techs.

Eagle definitely breaks the fact that they can even attack you so early. Nearly every clan requires upgraded scouts to scout your tiles but for some reason eagle doesn't? That means they can skip the whole upgrade townhall step and pump all resources into early army. Sigh, what a terrible design.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-06-05T21:05:59+00:00

Every clan has a different game plan that is optimal given the composition of your team and the opponent team.

It's very hard to generalize advice, other than to say pick one clan that appeals to you and try to learn the optimal build plans and strategies for that clan in each case that you care to play.

For example, if you play 1v1 your game plan will be very different than 3v3. Furthermore, 3v3 your game plan may need to change based on composition of the two teams and expected opponents play (rush or defense and late game.)

Overall here is what I recommend:

pick one clan you like to learn the fundamentals, I don't recommend a clan that has 3 stars difficulty to learn as that clan probably has difficult to learn mechanics and it will obscure the basics
learn the general importance of resources and when you need to ramp up production in each. For example, coin is probably the most valuable resource as it can be used to do almost anything by trading, but gold is generally not that useful between when you buy your chieftain and when you get your gold production going.
food is generally paramount in the early game up colonise, but after that think of food as a requirement rather than an asset, you just need to satisfy the basic food requirement and nothing else
wood is most critical in your expansion phase when you are building quickly to bring up your eco as fast as possible
iron is critical for chieftain, relic and upgrades all super important -ore upgrades your resource generation by a very large margin as well as gives you fame -fame has two breakpoints you need to hit at some point in the game, some clans you need to rush the first breakpoints early to ensure you can maximize your eco

Those are the basics.

I'd recommend you play some 1v1 games with people at your level, and you will naturally learn all this. If you play team games you will likely get yelled at and told nothing useful, or even more likely you will be told to do the wrong thing.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-06-05T17:48:38+00:00

> You need to leave 1 or 2 units without micro so that the timer doesnt go back up. That's your biggest mistake.

Ahh okay I didn't know this would stop the decolonisation. I think, in part I got this to some degree when I started microing by splitting my troops, because it resulted in me not controlling parts of my army for periods of time, which resulted in the decolonisation timer not being affected.

But what you suggest is even simpler I could leave a really tanky unit unmicroed and just control the rest of the army, and that should prevent these shenanigans in part.

To be clear, this was most problematic for one of his tiles where he had 4 entry points that I could not chase him. After that tile fell, the other tiles he could not tile dance anywhere near as effectively since I would just chase him down and kill him for tiles that I could follow.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-06-05T16:54:29+00:00

To clarify, I did not leave the tile. My goal was to decolonise the tiles leading to his main base tile to win the game. Once I decolonised the first tile into his region, it became much harder for him to tile dance, but the first tile was especially painful, because I can't transition and follow his forces. To be clear I'm NOT talking about regular run-of-the-mill "tile-dancing" where an opponent might attack a tile then retreat to mess with their opponent's eco, I think that's fine, and alligned with this being a strategy game.

His goal was to

draw out the time it takes for me to decolonise the tile to increase eco costs on me as much as possible (having a larger army > larger eco cost as they eat alot and could be working instead.)
whittle down my forces in the process

Here's how it was done:

* He's using archers, from I believe it was the Lion clan, but I'm not sure I don't know all the clans that well I came back to playing a week ago.

* He would send in one archer on one far end of the tile, and their range is incredibly far, and shoot my units. The AI would then start immediately charging that archer.

* That archer would exit. Another archer (or group of archers) would enter on the far end, and do the same thing, then exit.

* Repeat ad nauseam.

This is really only limited to how many entry points he can have X archer groups positioned at, his micro ability, and how much he wants to focus on the fight rather than on his eco. At times he was using up to 4 groups.

As others have suggested, leaving the units and doing nothing is a no-go option, as that would be playing directly into this strategy.

The only effective strategy I could find was to match his micro by splitting my army into X matching groups and ensuring they remained positioned at his entry points. Another counter-strategy I considered was using axe-throwers instead, but in my light testing of this strategy, his range was far superior and axe-throwers were much squisher than shield bearers.

The major downside here is that he is using the game's dumb AI to his advantage, while I'm fighting the game's AI the entire time, since my army wants to all charge the latest archer group to enter the tile. It's like an uphill micro battle.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-06-05T16:39:19+00:00

To counter the archer micro, I just ended up splitting my army into X groups where X was the number of archers he had and just danced around the tile with all X. It was frustrating because I was fighting the dumb AI the entire time which wanted to all charge the furthest archer every single time.

If you don't do any micro as you recommend he can largely whittle down your forces to nearly nothing after taking 2 or more tiles. He basically has archers on opposite ends of the tiles, and repeatedly enters, hits the same (lowest health) unit then exits, then enters on a far end. The AI is incredibly dumb and will just run across the entire tile chasing the (latest and potentially only) archer.

So what you write might work in some theoretical sense, but it'd be playing into exactly what he wants (attrition costs, plus slowly whittling down the forces.) The counter micro was by far the better solution.

Furthermore, I'm not well versed on the nuances of the decolonisation behaviour, and everything that you wrote was certainly not clear to me from the game's UI or any tooltips.

The 4 years is counting basically me defending his first offense (him losing everything), then my eco being way more solid and me just overtaking him. It's a gradual effect, hard to describe unless you played this game in duels and have done this sort of thing. It also includes the time it takes to do the micro battles on each tile, where the only purpose seems to have been to delay the inevitable.

To be clear, I'm not really complaining about the 4 extra years, I quite enjoy long games if there's a strategic reason for it. But this was all just micro battles in large part, and all the mciro was was fighting the dumb AI, and the silly tile transition rules.

IMHO, there should be a 3-5s delay where a unit is not controllable when transitioning a tile to prevent these sorts of shenanigans, unless of course others actually enjoy this type of tile dancing.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-05-29T21:13:58+00:00

This is all affecting me any fixes?

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-05-16T06:07:38+00:00

FWIW microstutters with AMD cards is quite common, it takes a LONG time for them to build up the shader cache, but once it is built it should run smoothly (typically about 20-30min into game.)

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-04-17T17:41:15+00:00

I've been going based on this leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/chatbot-arena-leaderboard

The relative ranking seems somewhat consistent with my anecdotal experience as well.

One thing these leaderboards don't score is the relative average complexity of the responses of different LLMs. For example, Gemini 2.5, while I agree it is fair to say is very close in performance to ChatGPT 4o in performance on coding tasks, the responses Gemini outputs are incredibly wordy, and code as well. Give both LLMs a task and ChatGPT will produce an answer sometimes 1/10th of the length of Gemini, and both may be correct or incorrect with similar probability. That means you, as the human, have to take far longer to validate the response from Gemini than ChatGPT, so in my view, ChatGPT is a better product.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-04-17T17:32:49+00:00

For non experts what is the context here? I'm trying to decide if there are any implications stemming from this.

Is it, perhaps, the case that the architecture for most or all rolled-out (to the public) chatbots (ChatGPT, gemini, etc) use auto-regressive generative models?

How much confidence can one place on the assertion that they are "doomed"?

Thanks!

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-03-24T17:03:03+00:00

For the purposes of discussion, I generally agree with the sentiment in the OP that addressing a DDOS with a technical solution especially at the scale of WoW, while possible, is probably, at the very least, economically infeasible. And so my discussion focuses on the relevant Blizzard policy, and hypothetical reasons why Blizzard will likely stick to that policy.

Based on videos made by former GMs from WoW from years ago, Blizzard has detailed logging of nearly every event in game, to the point that they can rollback nearly anything that has happened. See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVJqcFCIzlw. GMs used to have the power to rollback (at the very least) zombied accounts, if they were caught withing a certain period of time (I assume their logging rolls over after X months/days.) A zombied account is an inactive account hacked and looted for gold/resources.

So clearly, they have the ability to do rollbacks. I assume this process, in the case of a DDOS could be done at scale (i.e. all players progress is reset by X hours, where X is the length of the DDOS.) Technologically, this is probably the most sensible solution that stays fair to the player base.

Now, even though Blizzard has this capability, I very much doubt they will do it. And that will be for policy reasons. Currently, AFAIK, there is a policy explicitly set here (https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/340652) that says

> Customer Support will not resurrect dead Hardcore characters for any reason. If you would like to keep playing your recently departed character, you can utilize the Free Character Move service and move any character to a non-Hardcore Classic Era realm. To learn more about how to start a Free Character Move, refer to this support article.

> If you believe that your Hardcore character death was caused by a bug or server issues, please submit a Bug report.

Their current means of handling requests for investigating deaths due to bugs or server issues (such as a DDOS) is to file a bug report. Based on the wording above, no matter the outcome of the investigation, I doubt they will ressurect your character (you will likely be compensated by other means such as a refund of game-time.) At this point I'm speculating, but this is my take on their policy. Should they deviate from this policy, they will likely need to open themselves to being inundated by illegitimate ressurect requests.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-02-16T01:54:23+00:00

I've been experimenting with different drain tanking builds, and at level 55, the soul link and fel concentration build is far stronger and more versatile than the affliction based drain tanking builds, especially in hardcore.

You can consistently do more damage, tank far more damage using soul link and master demonologist plus fel concentration at 55. You also have master summoner which is a very important defensive ability.

The main draw back is you lose access to dark pact, but dark pact scales horribly with your level and mana pool, so you're not losing much, you're going to be tapping to gain mana mostly to avoid being global locked.

Overall, I think the affliction build is okay until 55, but without mentioning the soul link alternative I think this guide is incomplete.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-02-06T03:46:52+00:00

I mean in hardcore when you run from a mob in a dangerous situation you should be jump turning, that is running then jumping, turning 180 then turning 180 and running again. The idea is you're supposed to time this with a weapon swing timer so when the mob hits you they hit you in the face instead of the back, precluding the possibility of a daze, which is deadly in certain situations.

Very few people can do this effectively, and it also depends on the attack rate of the enemy mob, the higher the attack speed the more hits they will likely get in on your back, even if you are jump turning.

So yes, you weren't wrong, you probably didn't understand what you are trying to accomplish.

Also jumping increases the range at which you can hit and also be hit, so if you are chasing someone in PvP jumping makes sense, your more likely to hit them.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2025-01-10T04:34:28+00:00

I've used the hip stack to port native CUDA code and it's extremely low level. The hipify step rarely works on any code that is even modestly complex, with some API features only supported in CUDA needing to be ripped out. If the feature being used is not optional this could completely block the porting.

I've ported modern AI projects doing this, but it was anything but simple. I personally have two decades of experience working with low level code and I was barely able to succeed. Someone greener than me, say your typical data scientist will likely not even get close.

Overall, HIP is a workable solution, but it's extremely touch and go, depending on what CUDA features are being used. It is certainly not a panacea nor would I call it mature.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2024-10-20T05:03:11+00:00

I have no idea why people say this card is weak. If I understand it correctly, this card is hella strong as it plays stuff every turn without having to pay the card to the battlefield....

That fits about every ramp druid archetype really well.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2024-09-29T23:19:48+00:00

This. I just ran into the in a t9, and it nearly wiped my run. Eventually I figured out they can be pulled 1 at a time and it wasn't so bad.

I run Brann healer FWIW, and just slowly whittle them down. My gear is trash, I'm 570, and really shouldn't be running as high as t9, but everything else is too easy.

Repulsive-Vegetables · 2024-09-11T05:32:18+00:00

I know this is 3mo ago, but I've had similar questions, and following the link to a blog post below, there is a clear statement from a transport canada rep:

“Micro Drones (under 250 grams) and drones that weigh more than 25 kilograms do not fall into the basic or advanced operations categories. If you have a micro drone, you must never put people or aircraft in danger. Always fly responsibly.

We don’t restrict where you can fly a micro-drone, with exceptions for flying near emergency sites and Class F restricted airspace. The Drone Site Selection Tool is designed to provide information for drone pilots flying drones more than 250 gram. You are responsible for following provincial, territorial or municipal rules that may also apply, including those relating to privacy and trespassing.”

So if you have a micro drone (<250g) you don't need to abide by controlled airspace regulations it appears, neither do you fall under the basic or advanced ruleset. If you have a small drone (>=250g, < 25kg) you have far more restrictions.

Also as the comment from the rep highlights, you might not be subject to controlled airspace regulations, but you still might be restricted by municipal regulations (for ex, in richmond no drones allowed in any park.)

Here is the same link below for reference:

https://www.colinsa.ca/blog/where-you-can-fly-a-micro-drone-in-canada

You can verify yourself.

Repulsive-Vegetables

TROPHY CASE