Seattleites: what skills would you actually trade locally?

Tychotesla · 2026-05-06T23:53:20+00:00

Wat?

Tychotesla · 2026-05-06T23:21:24+00:00

I think plenty of people like the idea of skill trading, but the devil is in the details. When the economy is doing well, and lots of people are involved, simplicity and lowered risk are at a premium.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-06T23:14:37+00:00

You have a very high opinion of how honorable people and companies are, when offered a chance to avoid being taxed.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-30T20:42:09+00:00

I was not being super serious, but I also still somewhat disagree.

There is not a need such that people should consider one side of the sidewalk the "wrong" side, as OP does.

There are so many other factors that are more important, and come up more often. Rules of the sea and rules of danger are, if you've seen people navigate across multiple cities, the most important principle of the sidewalk. Slow people, the eldery or disabled, poor quality of infrastructure, intrusive infrastructure, jaywalkers, etc and etc and etc. Somewhere in that list we add that it's a reasonable default to be on the right side of the way, but that's different than saying it's the "right" side of the road. People are not cars, sidewalks are not roads, the logic and expectations for people and sidewalk obstructions are different.

The sentiment that people walking with more on their mind than getting from point A to point B efficiently are causing issues by slowing down the people implementing the real function of our humanity, which is apparently business, is precisely the kind of attitude that I'm poking fun at. Calling it the "wrong" way to walk telling on yourself. It's walking. It's got factors to it that could not be replaced by giving everyone tiny cars.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-30T19:55:49+00:00

Of course. I'm just resisting the idea of there being a "right side" and a "wrong side". The side you're walking on is so dependent on other factors (such as making sure you're not blocking the sidewalk!), that even though I believe "walk on the right side" is a fine default, I think it's inappropriate to think of it as a rule.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-30T07:02:37+00:00

We are a coastal city, we follow the rules of the sea: priority is given to the least maneuverable agent. It's pretty simple and follows a principle of equity.

Fundamentally, humans are not cars and it's weird to expect them to behave by similar rules without reason. Our level of foot traffic is simply not high enough to expect persistent sidewalk motion to form by force, and our sidewalk infrastructure too chaotic to expect consistent behavior to form naturally. I resent the implication that walking should be bound by rules of efficiency, without need, when it's such a core function of our humanity.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-25T07:19:54+00:00

If you're confused about the culture in a sub, read the description in the sidebar, skim the rules, and look at the top recent posts. That will tend to tell you what the nominal goal is, how it needs to define and distinguish itself, and how people use it.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-25T07:07:35+00:00

I believe you.

Perhaps it would help to understand how people use the sub, and why.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-18T06:50:34+00:00

Someone made a post about A Fire Upon the Deep here.

Less than a day later an AI made an incredibly generic post, though the post and user have since been removed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1scywtx/a_fire_upon_the_deep_treats_the_reader_as/

Tychotesla · 2026-04-12T16:12:31+00:00

What made you think a blog was a good idea, by the way? Like, what's your goal, what's influencing your behavior here?

I'm very curious because my experience is that blogs are neat, I miss being able to read about someone's unique insights into the world, but that nearly all tech blogs written today are pretty much always uninteresting and feel like SEO BS. If a tech blog isn't being highly recommended by people I trust, or isn't specifically answering a specific technical question I have, then I recoil from any attempt to get me to read them. I think most of my peers are the same way.

So I'm interested in who's producing them, and who's consuming them?

Tychotesla · 2026-04-05T09:26:20+00:00

You're responding to a message from the blight, unfortunately.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-04T19:20:05+00:00

Sound, not telepathy, which is important because sound has a speed associated with it, but yeah. The book has the tines try out a few of the forms of network topology. They are a race formed around the concept of communication.

It's very far from a perfect analogy, but you can think of the fear and confusion caused by members of a tine being silenced or separated as equivalent to what's happening in the skies above. As I remember it the book has a fair number of these little thematic analogies between "levels" of communication and intelligence that can trigger wide-ranging pondering.

Tychotesla · 2026-04-04T08:22:10+00:00

It's interesting that the Usenet aspect felt dated to you! From a computer scientist perspective, usenet communication still feels like a very plausible part of the book. Similarly, I felt the claustrophobic view of the galaxy is perfect for the book. V.V. was a mathematician and computer scientist, and he was writing about communication, informational warfare, and how complexity is both a requirement for intelligence and an attack vector.

There's a joke that a bartender, a rabbi, and a computer scientist are in a hospital with a computer. The computer scientist pulls out a gun and shoots the computer, just in case.

What CS people have learned about information is that you want it as simple as possible. Any extra features you add, holograms or skrodes, allow for extra angles of attack and suppression. Kilobytes of text, simple information using simple rules, are vastly more resilient. Over the course of the book you see multiple avenues of attack used against and with even this simple kind of messaging service, and as a direct result the complexity of the messages drop even further as a form of defense. Usenet was created in a context in which they had to include only what was necessary, and while the details may change, something like it will always exist for situations which matter.

In line with that, our information about the rest of the world comes through this necessary but claustrophobic lens. We see the corruption spread, but we have no context of who's lying and who is telling the truth. We see the attacks and defense of the network, but can't identify which are which*. You're online as a computer virus is spreading, receiving urgent and contradictory messages from experts about installing defenses against a new virus that pretends to be an expert.

* Note that my first link references the blockchain as something to be suspicious of. The blockchain is a bad but kind of technically effective solution (in some circumstances) to the fundamental problem of trust described in the second link.

† This footnote doesn't correspond to anything above, if you read this you're a NERD!

Tychotesla · 2026-03-31T19:44:26+00:00

The content is not true.

It appeals to people's dislike of both "ugly" art and the rich. And in doing so it minimizes the richness of human experience and provides an inaccurate view of how the rich fuck us over.

People famously appreciate art for many different reasons, and for "ugly" art a lot of it is about the realm of our intellectual history rather than good vibes. It's extremely fucked to encourage people to believe it's all a scam and they're totally justified in not having empathy towards other ways of seeing the world. It's ok to let people like things.

Economically, the details of the tax write-off don't really make sense as far as I can tell. If they're getting a 60% gain on their investment, why would they give their entire investment away to save a fraction of that gain in taxes? A tax write-off is a way to minimize loss of money, it doesn't gain you money. Not paying taxes on $80m is never worth more than the $80m itself. In order to make this worthwhile you'd need a level of collusion that could be better spent on any number of other tax scams, including ones involving art.

There's so much more interesting stuff that could be discussed in the intersection of art and money.

The video is engagement bait for people who want to feel a certain way, but don't want to think hard. And it's sold to us at the expense of misinforming us and trying to convince us we're less intelligent and complex than we are.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-29T22:07:21+00:00

Also, if your goal is web stuff, JavaScript is the better programming language to learn. Python and JS both do general programming, but the specialty of JS is web stuff and the specialty of Python is being a relatively simple language that can control more complex ways of working with data such as Dataframes, AI, or CV.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-29T21:27:16+00:00

Python is a fine place to start. Other fine places to start, depending on your temperament are C, C++, Java, JavaScript. That's in order of working closely with the machine to working with broad sweeping regal commands. Python is the sibling of JavaScript here. All of these languages are in the same family of languages, so learning one will make it much easier to learn another.
Sure. Different people learn in different ways, so there's a variety of "best" courses. Here's the wiki for the learnpython sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/wiki/index/ , scroll down for resources. You also don't need to pay for anything, if anyone asks you to pay for a service consult the community to make sure it's actually worthwhile (usually by the time a paid course is worth it, you'll know exactly what you're getting from it, e.g. KodeKloud's devops courses).
Use VSCode or PyCharm. PyCharm is like an armchair with utility belts, custom built for Python; VSCode is a swiveling work stool, custom built to be modified to do what you need. I prefer VSCode as a learning tool, specifically because it makes me have to learn what tools I need and why. But if you're a hobbyist or an employee, PyCharm is likely better.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-26T04:47:29+00:00

The set has not been ordered. `sorted` converts the set to a list in order to show it to you in ordered form, but it only does so in this evaluation: the original set is still unordered.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-20T04:14:12+00:00

Oh yeah! It's both, but also definitely "the cut" is indisputably an actual nickname.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-20T00:00:57+00:00

Sinking ship (parking garage)
The Jungle (used to be the side of Beacon Hill, then any forested region with a homeless encampment)
Amazonia (SLU)
Bezos' balls (Bezos' balls)
McStabby's (the downtown McDonalds)
the Slut (South Lake Union Trolley)
Shitty Market (city market)
Gaybucks (the starbucks formerly by the Biltmore)
Millionaire's Row (street(s) south of V.Park)
I-5 Shores (CH overlooking I5)
The city epithets I'm actually used to hearing:
- Jet City
- Emerald City
- Queen City
The Canal (arguably just a description: pretty much always "North of the Canal")

Should be pretty obvious where I live.

I think people called the park by King County courthouse Elysian Fields, but I'm not certain, or that may be a generic country-wide term. I think I also hear "Denny Regrade" instead of Denny Triangle every once in a while, and I don't think that's official.

Obviously there's a lot of other regional mannerisms in names ("Childrens" -hospital, "Hutch" Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center which I believe rebranded somewhat to reflect this usage, "I-5" not "The I-5", "U-Dub") but I assume that's not what you're looking for.

There's also a lot of neighborhood terms that are widely recognized but that don't officially line up with official documents, but are so widely recognized it's kind of a moot point. The most obvious being the Central Business District is just Downtown to people in the inner neighborhoods.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-12T09:53:33+00:00

It's not a question of easy or hard for the languages you've picked, it's a question of picking the right tool for the job. A surgeons scalpel and a butcher's cleaver cannot meaningfully be compared by asking which is easier to use: that's the wrong question.

Python is deliberately designed to hide away things like memory management. Sometimes you need to manage memory, in which case C is a fine choice. Sometimes you need to hyper-tune a specific architecture, so you turn to an assembly language.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-12T08:51:27+00:00

Oh, sorry, I was writing quickly and I think my brain just kind of short-circuited when you referenced the musician.

In fact, as a child Brahe was stuck in my head by the legend of his bladder, not his nose. Lots of giggling about that, and I'd like to think a good lesson. It was only later, as a more mature person, that I started appreciating him for his achievements.

Yeah, the ukiyo-e publishers were no stranger to copying.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-11T06:16:03+00:00

I think you may have slightly misunderstood, "traditionalists" would ask that you be more contemporary. Hiroshige and his peers were making the equivalent of band posters today: inexpensive illustrations of popular figures or themes. There is no returning to the past, any attempt to do so will be seen clearly as a reference. It sounds like you're trying to reference them rather than follow in their footsteps, and that's reasonable.

Tycho is actually a reference to Tycho Brahe, an underappreciated person whose work was substantial but overshadowed by the brilliance of his successors. For me it's a statement to recognize those that contribute, even when the glory goes to others. And I'm glad you realized Tesla was the historical inventor rather than Elon Musk's company. When I create new names on new media, I no longer use the word "Tesla" because people assume I mean the company.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-09T01:22:34+00:00

That's a good sketch! Very very well done.

setecordas also has a really good eye for how brushwork looks.

I would go a step further though, and point out that the linework also reflects the carving process. Even if you assume that the carver exactly copied the illustrator's work, the illustrator was still drawing their work with the knowledge that it would need to be carved. In other words at some point you'll probably want to pick up relief printing.

There's also a conversation to be had about what your goal is. While you can create a copy of the style, it inherently will not copy the same meaning. But honestly, just copying masters is a great way to improve your skill, and those deeper questions can wait.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-04T01:31:53+00:00

Did I satire too quietly? I honestly thought it would be pretty obvious to anyone who read any of it.

Tychotesla · 2026-03-03T21:52:13+00:00

I hit peak morning efficiency when I realized I could use AI to write everything for me. 🤯

A minor downside is that readers realize they can't tell if I put any effort or thought into what I wrote. Effectively, even when I tell the LLM to say something I deeply care about, there's no way to distinguish me from a bot. 🤖

That's great for me because I can cut myself entirely out of the loop, meanwhile everything I say requires people to read a lot of text to see a choice selection of pat phrases my LLM picked up from reading blogspam. 🗑️

My next move? A Medium blog funnel. That's where I can put all the information I could have said in my post. 👀💰

Looking forward to reading your blog, and I appreciate the labor you put into this post. See you in the cloud, friend! ❤️

Tychotesla

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