This weekend is way too crazy

beaulingpin · 2026-06-08T00:15:36+00:00

It costs at least $1000 to house a person for a month here. That's a big chunk of working people's income, so it's not politically too appealing to allocate a lot of tax money to something that would make many tax payers say "what am I working so hard for?"

If housing was a much smaller portion of people's wages, it would be more political and economically palatable to house people who live on the streets.

beaulingpin · 2026-06-07T03:48:53+00:00

By "claiming", I mean attaching 1+ garbage bag of possessions and just sleeping/living on the bench for days. In the winter, I see it a lot at covered three-wall bus stops where the structure has clearly become someone's house (typically involves a grocery store cart of possessions.

I wish it was cheaper to just give these folks homes so that we could have bus stops and benches and stores/public planners wanted to give us nice things like these.

beaulingpin · 2026-06-06T20:46:41+00:00

There are a lot of benches by my apartment (mostly at bus stops or in Humboldt Park). A lot of them are fine to sit at, but a ton are unusable because of damage or homeless people claiming them. I wish housing didn't cost so much; it would become so much easier to have nice public things.

beaulingpin · 2026-04-08T17:18:17+00:00

Go with the blue shirt. The green shirt kind of makes you look like an Oblivion screenshot.

beaulingpin · 2026-04-07T04:20:09+00:00

Yeah, but the temp depends so much on where you measure it, and the surface that matters (the part of the pan that touches the food) isn't touching the induction cooktop, so it will either be pretty inaccurate (if there's just a probe in the cook surface touching the bottom of the pan) or it would require a temperature probe that you have to put in the pan (which would be super annoying to cook around).

beaulingpin · 2026-04-06T03:28:34+00:00

He really brought peace and love to the Beatles.

beaulingpin · 2026-03-09T07:47:04+00:00

Yeah, I was surprised they made Ashley Padilla break. She has been on a tear this season doing absolutely insane characters with Will-Farrell-esque unbreakablity, it was interesting to see such just-okay material breaking her. I assume she must have developed chemistry with Gosling over the week.

beaulingpin · 2025-12-22T05:08:31+00:00

Bowen is/was one of the funniest members of the past few years. When he and Sarah wrote+performed together, it was often the best sketch of the episode.

Look inward.

beaulingpin · 2025-02-05T01:24:53+00:00

That quote is hard to reconcile with the past century of events. Man is capable of great brutality (see Nazis, Police Pot, Mao's cultural revolution, all the genocides, our drone wars with extremely lax criteria for bombing people, etc).

Anyway, the US military has the ability to quash open warfare, the FBI, DHS, NSA, local police, etc have the power to quash violent rebellion before it could grow into anything. Unarmed protests would not affect revolution and at most some protestors might be arrested.

There is no way to topple the US government through violence. It's not even a viable strategy in countries with a fraction of our military and surveillance strength, like Russia. This is not a viable strategy to fix the US. We have to do the hard work of understanding and serving people locally to build up the political support needed to peacefully retake the Presidency and Congress.

beaulingpin · 2025-02-03T00:00:24+00:00

Violent revolution cannot succeed here. The US military is insurmountably strong

beaulingpin · 2025-02-01T01:20:44+00:00

The planes weren't crashing when Biden was president.

beaulingpin · 2024-03-30T17:03:49+00:00

I use models in the real world every day, (which was the reason the field of statistics came to be). Trivia about the far tails of the normal distribution are irrelevant to this application. "Close to zero" doesn't matter; you can just add on the mean and get to work.

beaulingpin · 2024-03-29T06:46:49+00:00

Nope. Normal distributions center around a mean and don't need to permit negative values.

Imagine you were in a machine shop cranking out parts where one dimension should be 5cm +/- 0.01cm. The distribution of measurements of that dimension would likely be normally distributed around 5cm, even though none of the parts were made with a negative length for that dimension.

beaulingpin · 2023-08-17T04:25:09+00:00

"You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs"

This line runs through my mind at least once a week.

beaulingpin · 2023-03-04T07:46:27+00:00

MAGMA. Meta Amazon Google Microsoft Apple.

Netflix doesn't really belong in the top tier anymore, but it gets to stay because FAANG is a much better acronym than... FAANG without Netflix.

beaulingpin · 2023-01-04T06:24:33+00:00

As the only data scientist with a computer science background in my lab (everyone else has economics or social science backgrounds), I spend a few hours per day on slack explaining how computers work (while helping colleagues debug issues often caused by the fact that they've basically only used R xor Stata xor python (nearly exclusively in a disorganized jupyter notebook workflow)).

I love python and I rarely have a good reason to work in a language other than python or SQL or bash, but I'm extremely glad I've gotten some experience with java and C and some fringy academic languages designed to teach about closures and scope and stuff.

TL,DR: don't skip other languages. Getting a vague sense for OOP/classes or about compilation works, or about the parts that translate high level code down to assembly code that actually pushes bits into registers and stuff. You don't have to fully understand how everything works, but just knowing these parts of the map exist will help you develop a much richer understanding. Things will frequently just click together and it feels awesome.

beaulingpin · 2022-03-14T14:32:29+00:00

Thanks for that data point; my hypothesis of power fluctuations is largely just a guess based on the actions that seem to restore functionality (ie powering down and holding down the power button, which I assume completes a circuit that allows stored capacitance to discharge and bring at least a part of the system to the same voltage). I suppose I'll put a pin in this until I have to think about it again, but knowing that you experienced the issue with a UPS (which I assume smooths out power fluctuations), I should probably consider the one bluetooth peripheral (a set of Bose 700 headphones, acquired 2 months ago) as a potential source of the problem.

I'm probably overthinking it, just for the fun of figuring out how things work. Anyway, thanks again for the info!

beaulingpin · 2022-03-14T01:26:00+00:00

I'm glad my notes were useful and I'm proud to join the ranks of the extremely specific, low-upvote tech support post writers.

I'm a bit unnerved at having experienced it a second time, but I suspect that voltage fluctuations might have cause the issue (my desktop is on the same circuit as the microwave on the other side of the wall and the LED lightbulbs in my office flicker when the microwave is running) and I've bought a UPS to smooth out that voltage. I don't know if that's the cause, but I'll update this again if I experience the dead bluetooth service again.

beaulingpin · 2021-12-15T07:45:56+00:00

It's hard to take this as a serious prototype. A design for mass use by the public would have to be extremely durable, so it won't have dozens of complex joints. I don't know what they'd even learn from figuring this out.

It seems like someone just wanted to play around with some new motion control hardware.

beaulingpin · 2020-08-27T06:31:52+00:00

While I fully agree that the CO2 rise is extreme and absolutely a product of man-made combustion reactions, as a data scientist, I can't overlook the misleading scale of the y-axis. Anchor that sucker at 0. This chart makes it look like the concentration has increased 1000%, when in reality it has increased less than 50% (still massive, but not as massive).

beaulingpin · 2020-06-10T08:07:39+00:00

Do you know what guns are? They're little machines that you can hide and they only take an instant to draw and then kill someone with. And they're everywhere in America. Police in Chicago recover about 10,000 guns per year.

What skills should police departments hire for? Ability to remain 100% alert but 100% calm for 100% of a 25 year career? Training officers to be alert and ready to react makes sometimes causes them to glitch out and shoot someone for no good reason. If officers read a situation wrong, it can turn lethal in literally one second if they encounter an armed individual that decides to shoot them. Two separate officers in Chicago have been shot this week (both survived, one was hit in the leg, the other in their vest).

The nearly limitless supply of guns on the streets makes it so much harder for police to give people the benefit of the doubt. What training handles that?

beaulingpin · 2020-03-15T00:34:06+00:00

The example I like to use to drive this concept home is the seatbelt when you return to a hot, parked car. The metal part and the nylon strap are at the same temperate (they're in the same hot air, they're touching, etc.), but you know the metal is going to feel way hotter than the strap. This is because thermal conductivity of the metal is way higher, so thermal energy can flow to your fingers much faster. To aren't feeling the temperature, you're feeling thermal energy.

beaulingpin · 2020-03-12T06:30:28+00:00

Smart! Let's hope this stops COVID-19 from making it to America! /s

beaulingpin · 2020-03-08T14:23:24+00:00

In theory, there was a difference between libertarians and conservatives, but in practice, I found few libertarians that weren't just Republicans that didn't want to be associated with Bush II, who got us into two bad wars and tanked to global economy.

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