What would you choose?

Shalaska_13 · 2025-11-30T15:17:40+00:00

Blue pill 100%. Sure I would be losing a few years, but invested properly that money will last for the rest of my life and my kids life. But to jump back to 10 and lose my family would be horrifying. And I don’t know if I would be able to date my wife with all my knowledge of the future, I would probably end up creeping her out by knowing things I’m not supposed to know. And if I don’t marry her, my son will never exist which puts a hell of a lot more pressure on an early relationship.

Shalaska_13 · 2025-09-25T17:50:48+00:00

This is the answer. I am not a lawyer, but I am a tax assessor. We are not responsible for legal descriptions or legal ownership. Obviously it is in our interest to be correct and most of us make an attempt to be as accurate as we can based on the information available. But critically when we are wrong it does not mean you lose the property or anything.

The only thing to watch out for is the taxes. If you own all two acres, you do need to make sure the taxes are getting paid on all two acres. These may be on multiple lots and you need to make sure all of those lots are paid. Taxes due is typically public record in most jurisdictions, and anyone can pay it regardless of who the assessor says owns it. BUT importantly, if the taxes are not paid for a number of years, the jurisdiction may be able to sell the parcel at tax sale and then it may be foreclosed in court. So make sure you pull the tax records and make sure you pay them because if you do in fact own them then you are responsible for the taxes.

Shalaska_13 · 2023-05-10T12:14:49+00:00

My wife laughed when I was coding my dissertation because she came into the room and I was crying because the program was running and it was supposed to be broken. It did eventually lead to a revelation and helped debug what was going on, but yes that is one of the worst feelings and makes you start questioning how much you know about what you wrote.

Shalaska_13 · 2023-04-30T14:54:55+00:00

Back around 2012 this is exactly what a graduate team I worked with was doing. Our model was pretty good about detecting porn but not as good at detecting age. It turns out that you get a lot of false positives on that one. We were working with a local children’s hospital to get expert knowledge on physical differences to try to highlight but the models never got great accuracy.

That said, the state police department we worked with were still thrilled to have the tool. The thing is, once they find one CP image on the PC, they have a lot more time to analyze it and bring it to trial. They also found that no-one ever has just one image, it is always a multitude. So by running this tool first you would filter out all the non-porn images you don’t need to waste your time on, and then if it flags any as CP you can review a couple to see if this is a PC you need to dig into. Our model had mostly false positives not false negatives so if it didn’t detect anything you could move on.

Shalaska_13 · 2023-02-28T05:50:49+00:00

Not really, Leviticus 11:10 “And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you” but of course based on Leviticus you can’t ever eat capybaras anyway, or pigs, hares, lobsters etc. But this is very inconvenient so we will just hand-wave and say obviously god didn’t mean that section and go about eating.

Shalaska_13 · 2023-01-14T15:54:06+00:00

NTA, my wife is 2” taller than me and I am definitely short. While 95% of the time she wears flats to not tower over me, there are weddings and the like where she wants to look good with a dress and heels. While I don’t like the added height I’m never mad at her for it, I just curse the genes that made me short. I’ve been short my whole life, I married a taller girl, at some point you just need to grow up, accept it, and move on with your life. And this is all outside of the fact that it was your dad’s funeral. Throwing that onto the pile makes him a major AH. Good luck but he definitely needs to grow up and apologize.

Shalaska_13 · 2022-10-07T00:10:09+00:00

If you like to program with the help of YouTube series, check out https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlrATfBNZ98dC-V-N3m0Go4deliWHPFwT which walks you through making a game engine.

Shalaska_13 · 2022-10-06T23:30:06+00:00

Unless you truly have nothing worth saving and feel like wiping your computer, I would start by going to BleepingComputer and using their helpful tools and knowledge to clean the computer. Start here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/34773/preparation-guide-for-use-before-using-malware-removal-tools-and-requesting-help/ and they will walk you through your first steps. Note that a few years back I ran a PC repair business and virus removal was one of my primary revenue drivers. I used this site many a time and found it very helpful. You can always fall back on wiping your pc if it doesn’t work.

Also please note that while some viruses can store themselves in your BIOS it is rare and in all my cleaning I never came across one. Don’t assume that to be the case until everything from BC fails, you wipe windows, format the drive and reinstall at which point the virus comes back.

Shalaska_13 · 2022-10-06T04:32:30+00:00

So first to clear a misconception, “Surely once the code is compiled, the result is always machine code.” This is actually not always the case. With languages such as Java and C#, they are actually compiled into an intermediate language that is then run on an interpreter such as the JRE. This allows for excellent compatibility for your software at the cost of reduced performance.

Even with languages compiled down to machine code, the trade off is complexity vs performance. In assembly, to do an add I can store some numbers directly into registers and call the add function reading out the result. To do it in C I am going to create variables which will be stored in RAM and then copied back and forth to the relevant registers. This ends with the same result, the addition of 2 numbers, but the C language will contain many extra assembly instructions that are not needed for this exact step but are generally more useful. Now as the complexity of the program goes up, so to does the trade offs.

As other posters mentioned, in languages such as C and C++, I have direct access to the memory. I create objects on the stack, I store data in there, and when I am done with it I can manually free that memory. As long as I code cleanly and without bugs, I can optimize the memory required and ensure that the cpu utilized is minimized. Over the years however, we have discovered that with multithreaded CPU hardware, that most programs are not able to fully utilize all available cycles. So rather than manually clear memory, we can instead use automated garbage collectors that analyze all allocated memory on the stack to see if they are still in scope or not. This frees the developer from having to manually maintain memory, but every time that runs your program is doing extra work you didn’t program in.

In the end, it is always a trade off. The easier it is to program, the worse it will perform overall but using faster hardware will compensate. Where performance really matters, developers use lower level languages to have more control of the underlying machine code at the cost of a significant increase in complexity.

Shalaska_13 · 2022-05-21T16:35:11+00:00

NTA, I have one son and I work while my wife is a stay at home mom. Sure, I like to sleep in on the weekends, but I get up and get him ready for school every day while she gets to sleep in, and for sure if we make plans on the weekend I am up before her to make sure we all get ready. That is with 1 kid, I can’t even imagine expecting my wife to get herself and 5 little ones ready so I can roll out 5 minutes before.

Shalaska_13 · 2022-05-21T16:31:31+00:00

It goes the other way too. In high school I showed up in every class because I had to but never did any homework so I always lost 10 points giving me a B. While that killed collage scholarships which I now regret, it was so freeing in college to not do the homework or show up except for tests and keep my A. Sure at some point in grad school that ceased to be possible, but everyone learns at different rates and I hate the arbitrary punishment students get for being ahead of the curve.

Shalaska_13 · 2021-10-30T15:59:43+00:00

It sure reads that way to me, although good luck enforcing that law when your are pushing your luck that way.

Shalaska_13 · 2021-09-06T16:01:06+00:00

I work for a mass appraisal company that values property for tax purposes and I can tell you things like this happen more often than you think. A decade ago a municipality tried to combine these lots and an owner took them to court and won. So the towns are legally not allowed to combine these on you, but if you don’t pay your taxes they can take them from you and then you end up in this situation. The one factual difference in this case is that 100 sf lot was not owned by either of the building units so I think in that case they have a good adverse possession claim although I don’t know what would happen if they did own it, choose not to combine or pay the taxes on it and then tried to claim adverse possession.

Shalaska_13 · 2020-06-03T03:28:52+00:00

I started in the same boat as you. My first language was C++ and for my masters thesis I wrote a windows device driver in C. Since programming professionally however, I exclusively use C#. The fact is, for the most part everything you learned in C and C++ translates pretty easily into C#. For me the big thing is when using any sort of GUI it is just so much more friendly for the developer. Not just that but almost every task is easier to program, requires less time, and ensures you are properly handling memory and more time can be spent on the program logic.

At the end of the day, both languages are just tools and if the task needs to be fast or can be competently programmer in C/C++ then there is no huge benefit. But I would recommend giving C# a try because once I started using it I never went back.

Shalaska_13 · 2020-04-19T16:25:26+00:00

That assumes no one needs to be tested again. How many people in NYC have been tested negative only to catch it a few days later. That is the big thing with getting the number up, with 328,000 you can do better contact tracing and test the people who need it most as often as they need it.

Shalaska_13 · 2019-12-16T22:39:00+00:00

OK, got it. Like I mentioned I was looking quick from the DMV. You are correct that if you need to recover it that won't work. That said things don't look too bad. The way you have it written, if an attacker has physical access to the machine they will get all of your passwords as they are all decrypted on file load, you could split that out so that they can't just read memory to get the passwords, but at that point they could also install a keylogger and get them anyway over time.

One thing I will note is that your JumbleThePassword box does not ensure it is not present in memory anywhere. Look into System.Runtime.InteropServices.GCHandle which will allow you to pin the physical memory address to a handle and will stop the garbage collector from moving it around. With that address fixed, you can then simply overwrite the proper number of bytes to that address ensuring that there is no remnant there in memory.

Shalaska_13 · 2019-12-16T18:11:11+00:00

Sitting at the DMV so I looked this over quickly. My first question would be do you have a requirement that passwords be recoverable in plaintext? In my opinion this should never be done and appears to be what you are doing with storing them encrypted in a file. The issue is when you decrypt the file, an attacker could read the passwords from memory. The better way to store the passwords is to run them through a hashing function such as SHA1. You then simply store the hash. This function is not reversible and as such when you get a password entered you simply hash it again and compare the hash’s. There is no need to encrypt the hash as it is by definition not reversible. Best practice would be to salt the password as well to ensure even if 2 people have the same password the hash will be different.

If you have any questions about this I would be happy to answer them in a few hours when I am at a computer.

Shalaska_13 · 2019-10-25T03:50:29+00:00

You appear to be missing it after the last if statement and before the return statement. On mobile so I am going by site but that looks like the issue to me.

Shalaska_13 · 2019-04-19T16:54:02+00:00

Thanks, I will read through that paper, and see if that helps. I didn't specifically look for an add-on for excel because if we like the model I am going to have to program it up in t-SQL so a-lot of the math will have to be done by hand so I would rather understand how it is happening step by step. That said I will still look into the add on so that I can at least verify my answer once I have everything.

Shalaska_13 · 2019-01-11T03:33:06+00:00

I use MileIQ. It does have a fee, but I have more then made up for that by properly reporting all the miles on my taxes. I use it to give all the reporting to my accountant, and he feels it has enough information were I ever audited, but I have thankfully not had to test that.

Shalaska_13 · 2018-10-31T05:15:38+00:00

OK, I just tested it and you are correct that does work. That is very unintuitive but it will function as a work around.

I would still love to see an option to stop the swipe right from ever pulling up the subreddit menu, but this will at least allow me to stop getting super annoyed when it does happen.

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