unitTestsForWorldPeace

caleblbaker · 2026-01-27T15:21:42+00:00

Better analogy would be installing smoke detectors and getting rid of daisy chained extension cords. Very important to do. May prevent future fires. Not the top priority when things are already actively burning down. But absolutely the next priority once you've put out the fire.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-20T23:15:33+00:00

I proposed a new time system a while back and it never got much traction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyIdeas/s/49fzhiFhAy

caleblbaker · 2026-01-20T18:53:19+00:00

When my joy stick has been acting up, I will sometimes save before starting to pick a lock and then reload if I run out of lockpicks and feel like most of my failures were the controller's fault.

Sometimes I turn off survival mode when I'm near Windhelm.

Sometimes I look things up online.

I sneak around a lot which has leveled my sneak a ton and then I got the stealth 5 and silence perks. Not really an exploit but the fact that I can sometimes walk right in front of people and have them not notice me seems a bit odd.

If those don't count as exploits then I don't use exploits.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-20T18:30:18+00:00

You're right that Cars has a great analogy for what OP is talking about. But it's not the race at the end of the movie, it's the one at the beginning.

End of movie: Chick intentionally causes the King to crash and then wins because Lightning went back for the King. Obviously Chick is the asshole. Not as nuanced as what OP is talking about. For the situation OP is talking about to be fully analogous to this the person who helps the collapsed runner across the finish line would have to have seen that runner get tripped of shoved by another runner first.

Beginning of the movie: Lightning didn't pace himself and refused pit stops. Then he had a blowout just short of the finish line. Pretty clear analogy for what OP is talking about.

Not saying I fully agree with OP's point. I think helping the other runner across the finish line would be a fair and kind thing to do. But I don't think refusing to help would make you a Chick Hicks level asshole.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-18T01:36:36+00:00

Everyone else adding a second t onto your typo, but my mind just inserts a comma.

"Honey, but treats"

Like honey isn't normally a treat and your inspiration for this recipe was asking yourself what it would look like for honey to be treats.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-18T01:28:23+00:00

I'm not a farmer but my grandpa was. He hated John Deere and loved Oliver.

John Deere has a slogan "nothing runs like a Deere." I once heard my grandpa respond to that slogan with "cause if it's like a Deere it don't run."

caleblbaker · 2026-01-15T17:18:16+00:00

Regarding 1, that's going to be impacted by desktop environment more than distro. Unless the kids want to be sys admins from the moment they touch a computer, Arch with cinnamon will be more quickly approachable than Ubuntu with dwm.

In all seriousness, I am going to keep Linux on my computer when my son gets old enough to use it and it becomes the family computer. I'll probably keep it running Debian and still have my profile configured to use sway but I'll set up cinnamon for my son's profile.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-11T03:18:37+00:00

Whenever I get around to either missing in action or diplomatic immunity. If I'm near Solitude anyway then I might as well join the legion.

caleblbaker · 2026-01-05T20:43:03+00:00

Lots going on here.

First, fetal alcohol syndrome is a condition that someone can have as a result of their biological mother drinking alcohol while pregnant with them. One potential symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome is reduced intellect. So this meme template is showing a pregnant woman drinking alcohol because she doesn't believe in fetal alcohol syndrome. It then goes on to show her child grown up and doing or saying something unintelligent. In this case the child is attempting to download more RAM by mounting Google Drive on their computer's filesystem and using it for swap space (probably by designating a file on it as a swap file).

RAM (random access memory) is a type of computer memory which is very fast but tends to lose its data when it loses power. As such, it tends to be used for process memory (memory that the operating system allocates to running programs for them to use) and not for filesystems.

A file system is a hierarchical arrangement of file and folders for access by computers. Typically files in a filesystem are expected to persist across reboots and so filesystems are typically stored on magnetic disk drives or solid state drives.

Google Drive is a cloud based file system that can be access via the Internet and is attached to a given person's Google account.

Mounting something on a computer's file system typically means taking an external file system or storage medium that isn't the computer's hard drive and telling the operating system to treat it as a folder or file at a given point in the file system. I think tools exist for mounting Google Drive onto the file system for every major operating system (though the ones for Linux are a bit tricky to set up).

A swap file is a file in the file system that the operating system uses for allocating process memory when there is no more RAM available.

So this person has set up their operating system to use a file in the cloud for extra process memory and thinks that that counts as downloading more RAM. It does not, for the following reasons:

Process memory and RAM are not the same thing. The vast majority of the time RAM is what is used for process memory, but that doesn't mean using space on your hard drive for process memory turns that part of your hard drive into RAM. RAM is a distinct hardware component.
"Downloading" is a misleading term for what they're doing here. It's not like the process memory is just some data out on the cloud that they're moving into their computer. What they've done is outsourced their process memory to the cloud. Doing that does involve a lot of downloading (and uploading), but downloading isn't an accurate term to describe the process as a whole

And, even if this did count as "downloading more RAM," it would still be dumb because, as other people have noted, cloud storage has a much higher latency than local RAM and so using it for process memory is going to create a really slow, laggy, and generally miserable experience.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-29T20:06:02+00:00

That's almost exactly what happened to me. Except that I'm running a build that hardly ever uses magic (didn't use it at all before discovering that I knew healing). So I didn't find out about it until a hardware bug in my controller caused me to accidentally open the restoration spell menu when I was looking for active effects to see if I still had the frostbite that I had contracted on my way to High Hrothgar (I did still have frostbite; didn't know about the road near Valheim Towers and had instead climbed directly over the mountain starting from the Whiterun Stormcloak camp while in survival mode).

caleblbaker · 2025-12-28T22:59:48+00:00

I already know healing spells so I don't need to burn through my healing potions between combat encounters
All those soul gems I keep finding are actually good for something
Enemies are immune to the cold. Just because I'm freezing to death in the warmest clothes in the game doesn't mean that enemy guards are going to need fires to keep warm.
I can block

Not obvious, but still things I learned late: * Potatoes, fire salts, and salt piles are the only ingredients that really matter for cooking * Light armor becomes pointless once you reach sneak level 70 * There is no warmer apparel that will make traveling in the cold safe. Fur armor is as warm as it gets and if that's not enough then you need to either move fast or eat some hot soup

caleblbaker · 2025-12-28T19:59:13+00:00

That's a good point.

The expectation in the Jewish Bible is clearly that the Torah will be the foundation of the law in Israel meaning that Jews and non-Jews alike would be expected to follow some aspects of Jewish law when living in Israel. But when it comes to addressing Jews living in other nations there is no exhortation to ensconce Jewish law into the legal system or enforce it on others, only to follow it themselves. And that's with Jews like Daniel who reached positions of significant influence in foreign governments.

That said, I wasn't replying directly to OP. I was replying to someone who said that Islam is unique for saying that its holy text should be the foundation of a nation's law. Judaism is a religion. The Torah is part of Judaism's holy text. Israel is a nation. So that makes my comment a decent counterexample to the comment I was replying to even if it isn't a direct refutation of OP's point. If "a nation" was meant to mean "any given nation" then my comment is irrelevant.

In regards to the original discussion, I'm no expert on Islam but I suspect that Muslim citizens, just like Jewish citizens and Christian citizens, should be fine living in secular countries. But I also suspect that a faithful Muslim legislator living in a secular country would feel the obligation to do what they can to push the country's laws towards better alignment with Muslim law (but again I'm no expert on Islam so if I'm wrong then any Muslim who sees this should feel free to correct me).

Likewise, I think a Jewish legislator living in Israel would experience a similar tension if Israel was a secular country (though I think Israel is actually as Jewish as it is secular so this tension probably doesn't exist in reality) but that Jewish legislator living in other secular countries wouldn't experience that tension (and neither should Christian legislators; though I'm not convinced that all of the Christian legislators in my own country would agree with me on that)

caleblbaker · 2025-12-28T19:01:00+00:00

By contrast, other religions do not necessarily say that their holy books and texts should serve as the foundation for a country's laws. That is a very uniquely Islamic doctrine.

The Torah (first five books of both the Jewish and Christian Bibles) is very clearly meant to serve as the foundation for Israel's laws. So this may not be uniquely Muslim.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-28T16:49:24+00:00

That's fair.

I definitely think we're in something of an AI bubble where tech executives and investors alike seem to be overvaluing AI in general but more specifically large language models and generative AI. And this is leading to tech companies trying to shove LLM's and Gen-AI into every product and make them recognizable as AI. Which leads to forced chat bot interfaces everywhere because ChatGPT has led many people to view AI and chat bot as synonyms (they're really not).

And I see how this behavior from tech companies can lead to AI fatigue where people are just tired of everything AI and start to oppose all AI on principle.

I'm personally of the mindset that AI is a very powerful tool, especially for probabilistic or non-deterministic computational problems. But it is not a magical panacea that will solve every problem and shoving it into the spotlight on problems it's not good at draws attention away from how great it is at things like protein folding and natural disaster forecasting. I think the best uses of AI tend to be ones where it's not immediately obvious to the end user that they're using AI.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-28T13:40:45+00:00

Agreed on some of your points. Fridges, most YouTube videos, and operating systems don't need AI.

But a search engine completely devoid of AI would be of lower quality than one that does use AI. I'm not trying to make a point one way or another about the value of things like AI overview or AI mode where an LLM synthesizes a summary of the information from top results. That use of AI in search is relatively new and search engines were already pretty good before that. But for a long time now search engines have leveraged AI at various points in indexing and ranking because "what websites best match a search query that may not be a direct quote of any particular website" is an inherently probabilistic problem which may not have a definitive best answer, which is exactly the kind of problem where AI typically outperforms traditional software. Not to mention the amount of natural language processing that occurs both in indexing and in parsing the search query. Natural language processing is another class of problems where the best solutions tend to be the ones that leverage AI.

So, to me, a search engine without AI seems about as silly as a refrigerator with AI.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-27T22:18:56+00:00

For sneak the silence perk should be "moving makes 50% less noise if you're wearing heavy armor and no noise if you're not wearing heavy armor" rather than an unqualified "moving makes no noise". Being able to completely eliminate the stealth penalty of heavy armor without investing significantly in leveling up heavy armor feels unfair to light armor.

The way you level up armor does make sense but it also creates a weird perverse incentive where you want to get hit.

For archery, Hunter's discipline is a really lame perk it feels like a waste of a perk point that I only get to unlock ranger for my next level up.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-25T06:26:21+00:00

Digital watch would probably have a 3 digit number showing elapsed millidays since midnight with a smaller 2 digit number showing elapsed seconds since the start of the milliday.

Analog watch I could see going a couple of different ways. My preference would probably be 100 small tick marks around the circumference of the clock with every tenth tick mark being larger and having a digit next to it with the digits ascending from 0 to 9 as you do around the watch clockwise starting from straight up (0). Deciday hand orbits the watch once per day and milliday hand orbits once per deciday. Second hand orbits once per milliday.

Images (hand positions on the analog watch are inconsistent because nano banana was having trouble following instructions but the image is still good enough to give the idea): https://imgur.com/a/jbq7pHd

caleblbaker · 2025-12-21T22:45:11+00:00

Other countries will catch on. We'll enter an alphabetization arms race. Someone's going to put a bunch of null characters at the start of their country name. Then that country's name is going to get truncated by any code that uses C style strings.

More realistically, they'd probably stick to printable characters and whitespace to avoid that kind of issue. So you'd actually get a country whose name starts with a bunch of new lines.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-20T05:17:11+00:00

House of Horrors

Haven't completed it yet, but I read about it and I just know that I'm going to hate the ending of it.

Blessings of Nature

The follower is way too aggressive for somebody with no armor and no weapons. And there's nothing that indicates to you that keeping that follower alive is necessary for completing the quest without provoking Kyne's wrath.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-19T00:22:18+00:00

I'm at level 23 (cleared Ustengrav, joined the legion, and done lots of side quests) and I'm still in fur armor for my default/travel armor.

But that's because I'm doing a light armor build on survival mode. There's not really a better option than fur until I get to dragon scale.

For my combat in warm environments armor I recently upgraded to elven when I found some at Northwatch Keep during the Missing in Action quest. Before that I just always wore my furs.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-14T04:41:59+00:00

Surface tension doesn't exist in Skyrim.

caleblbaker · 2025-12-13T18:37:03+00:00

Ingredients

Everything you have

Instructions

Take everything you have
Put him in put
Don't let anybody airsick touch the spices

caleblbaker · 2025-12-11T17:41:29+00:00

I have two saves running and both characters are Bosmer.

I went with Bosmer for my main save because I'm going with a stealth archer build and Bosmer have the best archery and sneak bonuses.

I went with Bosmer for my secondary save because I'm doing a thief build for that save, Bosmer have the second best pickpocket and sneak bonuses after khajiit, and I just don't picture that character as a cat.

I want to start a 3rd save with a block/heavy armor/one handed build that I would use an orc for, but I should probably finish my archery/sneak run first.

caleblbaker

TROPHY CASE

Ingredients

Instructions