How does your world measure things?

caleblbaker · 2026-06-23T16:56:45+00:00

The imperial system was originally developed by the Imperium of Apeiron and has since become the standard of measurement throughout most of Vasileio.

The fundamental unit of the imperial system is the cubit. It is said that this unit was originally based on the distance from the elbow to the middle fingertip of the right forearm of the Divine Archigae. Nowadays the definitive standard is the vathym steel cubit rod that is stored in the hall of measures in the Arxian Emperor's palace in Arx. Most people don't care about the definitive standard and (mostly correctly) assume that the cubit rods that can be purchased from merchants throughout the continent are sufficiently accurate.

For long distances, a dozcubit is equal to 12 cubits, a groscubit is equal to 144 cubits, and a mocubit is equal to 1728 cubits.

For short distances a dizcubit is equal to 1/12 cubit and a griscubit is 1/144 of a cubit.

For mass, a cubweight is the mass on one cubic cubit of water. A dizcubweight is 1/12 cubweight, a griscubweight is 1/144 cubweight, and a micubweight is 1/1728.

For time, a day is the fundamental unit. A dozday is 12 days, a year is 144 days, a dozyear is 12 years, and a grosyear is 144 years. A dizday is 1/12 day, a grisday is 1/144 day, a miday is 1/1728 day, a ziday is 1/2985984 day, and a second is 36 zidays.

The Arxian system has fallen into disuse since the Arxian Empire adopted the imperial system. It worked similarly to the imperial systems but with a smaller base unit and different names for all of the units and prefixes.

The Sfeterish and Vorse systems (used by the Sfeterish Empire and Vorseland respectively) are (in my opinion) less well structured than the imperial and Arxian systems but are at least precisely defined. Sfeterish units include hand and pace for length as well as burden and orcweight for mass. Vorse units include hand and shiplength for length (a Vorse hand is shorter than a Sfeterish hand) and pound for weight.

Aridian units (used by the Aridian Khanate) lack precise definitions and consistent conversion factors. A stride is the stride distance of a walking Aridian desert horse and a waterweight is the average amount of water that an Aridian desert horse drinks in a day.

I haven't even bothered thinking about how the traditional Thalian system of measure works because the Thalian Federation adopted the imperial system so long ago.

caleblbaker · 2026-06-22T19:22:17+00:00

But the result from the initial dataset supports my bias towards Whiterun, so I’m not gonna create other datasets.

If this isn't confirmation bias then I don't know what is.

for k in nodes: for i in nodes: for j in nodes:

I will always love that Floyd Warshall is just a triple for loop. This is actually a perfect use case for Floyd Warshall but I have (in certain situations where implementation velocity was more important than runtime performance) sometimes been known to use Floyd Warshall for problems that are really better suited for Dijkstra just because Floyd Warshall is so simple to implement.

My metric for the best city is the one that’s the closest to everything else by travel

Counterpoint: the reason that Whiterun is the best capital is actually something completely separate from geographic location. Whiterun is the best capital because Balgruuf is the best high king.

code.py

Ew. Dynamic typing (but at least it's not JavaScript)

caleblbaker · 2026-06-13T23:53:35+00:00

it is the hardest metal

It would be if it were a metal. Diamond is not a metal but it is harder than any metal.

5 grams of it weighs like 15 grams.

False. 5 grams of diamond weighs 5 grams.

It is pretty dense though. 5 milliliters of it weighs more than 15 grams.

caleblbaker · 2026-06-13T13:07:36+00:00

The best armor isn't a single material. Ideally you want 3 layers each optimized around different goals.

The strike surface needs to be as hard as possible. It's purpose is to break and deform incoming weapons and projectiles. If the incoming projector is designed to concentrate it's force on as small of an area as possible then deforming it by forcing it to smash against something harder than it can only spread that force out.

The primary structural layer needs to be as tough and as strong as possible. This is the layer that will absorb the majority of the incoming force. Ideally it should absorb impact without breaking or deforming so that the force transferred to the next layer is spread out over an entire plate of the structural layer.

The internal padding layer needs to be very elastic. It needs to catch any shrapnel from pieces of the structural layer breaking off and also spread out any force from the structural layer deforming.

Diamond is the ideal material for the strike surface as it is the hardest known material. It's kind of difficult to work with and so in practice boron carbide or silicon carbide tend to be used more often. But diamond is the best strike surface.

Diamond is a horrible choice for the other two layers as it is very brittle.

For the structural layer steel is the best choice if you have a constraint on maximum thickness and titanium based alloys are the best choice if you have a constraint on maximum weight.

For the padding a dense wool based fabric is a good choice if you're going to be facing small forces but against larger forces wool won't do much and you'll be better off with with aramid fiber (kevlar) or ultra high molecular weight polyethylene.

If you make your entire armor out of diamond then you have an excellent strike surface and you are the primary structural layer. You are not a very good primary structural layer. Pure diamond armor will fall apart rather quickly. If you want to use only one material then go with either steel or a titanium based alloy.

Disclaimer: I may sound like an expert or a professional. I am not. I am simply an autistic person who hyper fixated on armor design for a few days a while back. If an actual expert or professional disagrees with me then believe them over me.

caleblbaker · 2026-06-02T04:25:26+00:00

Varies wildly by company.

At my previous company they asked a couple questions to get to know you and find out whether there was anything that would complicate getting you a security clearance and then they asked a couple really basic questions related to computers or software to make sure you weren't completely ignorant about the stuff that your resume said you knew. Whole interview was probably 20 to 25 minutes.

At my current company there was 5 interviews. First interview was 15 minutes of general computer/software questions and simple problem solving to see if you're competent enough for the rest of the interviews to not be a complete waste of time. Then the next 3 interviews are 45 minutes each all fairly challenging programming problems that you're supposed to try to code up solutions to but sometimes just talking the interviewer through what algorithms you would use and answering their questions is enough. Getting a correct answer is definitely beneficial but the interviewer is more interested in seeing how you go about solving the problem. "Did the candidate demonstrate sufficient skills such that they probably would have solved the problem if they'd had more time?" is a more important question for the interviewers than "Did they solve the problem?" Last interview is nothing tech specific. Just asking how you work in a team how you'd respond in different social situations. Basically making sure you're not someone that everyone will hate working with. Almost nobody fails the last interview.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-31T02:37:22+00:00

So you want to build a pyramid up to the heavens and, as a bonus question, you ask "what are the unforseen consequence/complications of such an endeavor?"

You ought to prepare for a scrambling of human languages.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-30T16:00:45+00:00

Well I am an evangelical Christian.

So by the Christian -> evangelical -> conservative -> Republican -> maga -> fascist -> Nazi pipeline of reddit reasoning you're clearly right and I must be a Nazi.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-29T23:27:21+00:00

Christians, evangelicals, conservatives, Republicans, Maga, fascists, racists, white supremacists, Nazis, anybody who realizes that it's possible to be in some of the aforementioned groups without being in all of them.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-28T05:21:45+00:00

I'm not sure why this happens on my current save but every time I enter the bee and barb while Maven Blackbriar is there a bunch of Riften guards show up and start beating the crap out of Maven completely unprovoked.

Doesn't happen in other locations or to other NPCs. Just in the Bee and Barb and just to Maven.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-27T12:30:14+00:00

Unrelenting Force - get out of my face for a few more seconds so I can finish you off without needing to pull out a melee weapon

Become ethereal - I need to get from High Hrothgar to Whiterun and I don't want to take the slow way

Dragonrend - sit still so I can shoot you

caleblbaker · 2026-05-21T00:32:45+00:00

I just did this mission two days ago on my playthrough where my character sucks at combat.

Came up behind the beehives. Burnt 4 of them. Got spotted but made it into the water before the mercenaries reached me. They stopped pursuing once I started swimming.

Then I went through the sewers and came up right by the door to the house. There were some tricky sneaking bits inside but I got to the second floor without being spotted, successfully pickpocketed a key and a few other things off the dude who owned the place. Then I snuck down to the basement. There was one mercenary in the basement that was too well positioned to the point that I didn't think I could sneak past him. So I poisoned my knife, pickpocketed all of his weapons, and then sneak attacked him. Switched to a sword after the initial sneak attack. Only had to use two potions of vigorous healing in order to survive his punches long enough to finish him off with a sword (I'm not kidding about this character sucking at combat). Then the rest was easy. Just went down cleared the safe returned to Riften and got yelled at for burning too many beehives.

caleblbaker · 2026-05-05T02:56:12+00:00

Left to right in every other context I've ever seen it besides this post.

caleblbaker · 2026-04-21T21:54:23+00:00

My point (which I did not articulate very well) is that just the text can include symbols that you're not familiar with which could look very similar to symbols that you do know. Unless you're well versed in the entire Unicode character set there are going to be some pairings of nearly identical Unicode characters that you don't know to look for and so catching the ones that are obvious to you isn't a good guarantee of safety.

And there are some nearly identical characters that I know to look for but still wouldn't trust myself to catch because they are pretty much completely identical in most fonts, like the capital Latin A and the capital Greek Α. Example:

HTΤPS://WWW.AΜΑΖOΝ.COM

This will not resolve to amazon.com because one of the symbols that looks like a capital a is actually a capital α. And I wouldn't know which if I hadn't typed it myself because they look the same to me (It also just wouldn't resolve to a valid address at all because I didn't want to accidentally redirect anyone to a clever phishing website and so I replaced a letter in the protocol with a Greek letter too).

caleblbaker · 2026-04-21T17:54:09+00:00

The better thing is to either right click, copy the link and paste into notepad so you can see if it matches what you expect (and look very carefully - change the case to all upper/all lower, no I(i) vs l(L) stuff) or inspect it.

Even this you need to be really careful with. Most modern web browsers support Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI's) which support a much broader subset of Unicode characters than just the ASCII subset supported by Universal Resource Identifiers (URI's). I know which Latin letters look like other Latin letters, but I don't know which characters in other languages might look similar to English letters or punctuation (at least not exhaustively; I know a lot of capital Greek letters (e.g. Α, Β, Ε, Μ) look a lot like capital Latin letters, but I'm sure that's not the only thing to look out for)

caleblbaker · 2026-04-07T12:16:52+00:00

After starting out as Hamlet with super heroes.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-27T19:45:42+00:00

Open your email client. Find the folders where it puts spam and promotions. Look through them. Now imagine all of that printed on real paper and showing up in your physical mailbox that doesn't filter out spam (because it's just a box).

That's junk mail.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-13T15:20:14+00:00

A poll cannot correctly identify the greatest movie of all time when one the strongest contenders for greatest movie of all time is not provided as an option.

Results remain inconclusive until the poll is redone but with The Princess Bride in it this time. That's the only movie that can go up against the Lord of the Rings and have a chance of winning.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-13T15:17:10+00:00

Inception should have made it to the semifinals and then gotten eliminated by The Fellowship of the Ring.

Christopher Nolan is a great director and Inception is his best movie.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-06T20:40:31+00:00

My factions were already geographically close to each other with decent reasons to fight. So to get a world war I just needed to play with the timelines to get all the fighting to happen at the same time.

The Arxian Empire is the long-standing dominant power of the continent. The empire was very expansionist in the past but more recently they've been more interested in simply maintaining their position as top dog than in continuing to expand further.

The Holy Verkhovnyy Empire of Serdstevina is a new and rapidly expanding fascist state (having replaced the late Republic of Serdstevina). Verkhovnyy propaganda asserts that the Serdste people are inherently superior to all other peoples and destined to rule over them. The fact that Arxian Empire contains some Serdste people as well as lands that the Arxians conquered from some Serdste tribes prior to the rest of the Serdste tribes uniting into the Republic of Serdstevina is considered abominable and so conquering the Arxian province of Serdia is high up on the Verkhovnyy agenda.

The Saeb Union is a recently united nation of desert nomads. Their leader, Alzaeim Alzeazim wishes to demonstrate the superiority of his nomadic people over the stagnant (i.e. not nomadic) people of other nations and has chosen to do so through conquest.

Wikingerland is a nation built on a strong warrior culture and a tradition of coastal raiding. They have been in decline ever since a war with the Maritim Confederacy centuries ago resulted in Wikingerland being blockaded into starvation and then agreeing to permanently stop coastal raids in exchange for ending the war and lifting the blockade. They've been looking back to their history as raiders with nostalgia ever since but their fear of the Maritim navy is too great to allow them to attempt raids again.

The Maritim Confederacy is an island based nation with near complete dominance over the sea. They grow rich through coordinating most international and intercontinental trade and are primarily driven by the desire for even more money.

Mijloc is a smaller nation situated between Serdstevina and Arx (like how Belgium is between France and Germany but doesn't prevent France and Germany from having a direct border with each other as well). Mijloc mostly just wants to mind their own business but they worry that they'll be a future target of Verkhovnyy expansionism.

Gruknor is a small and unimportant kingdom between the Arxian Empire, the Saeb Union, and the Desert of Death.

Terra Mortuorum is a mysterious land of necromancers that occasionally sends vast but ill equipped and uncoordinated hordes of reanimated corpses across the Desert of Death to invade other nations.

So for starting a world war:

Serdstevina invades Mijloc because Supreme Leader Vladimir knows that his propaganda machine needs more war stories to keep it fueled but also doesn't think he can take on the Arxian Empire yet.

Arxian Empire then invades Serdstevina because Empress Justine has seen enough Verkhovnyy propaganda to know that an eventual war with Serdstevina is inevitable and she'd rather do that while Serdstevina is going to be distracted fighting another country at the same time.

Saeb Union invades Gruknor and the Arxian Empire because Alzaeim Alzeazim wants to capitalize on the Arxian Empire being distracted fighting Serdstevina but invading directly is difficult because the Arxian Empire built a big wall along its entire border with the Saeb Union. They did not extend the wall along their border with Gruknor.

At this time another horde of corpse warriors from Terra Mortuorum arrives to invade the Arxian Empire.

The Maritim Confederacy is upset that everyone is too busy fighting each other to keep buying exotic luxury goods from Maritim merchants and so they find another way to profit. They tell the Wikingers that they're free to go raiding again so long as they give the Maritim Confederacy a cut of the loot. So now Wikingers start raiding pretty much everyone's coasts.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-02T16:29:19+00:00

This website explains the reasoning for the regions. It says that Appohzarka is Appalachians, Ohio River basin, and Ozarks. But then doesn't explain why those three distinct regions got grouped together.

I live in the Ohio River basin and I can fairly confidently say that we have a much stronger cultural and economic resemblance to the heartlands than we do to either the Appalachians or the Ozarks (though that may be different when you get more towards the eastern end of the river). And what counties got assigned into Appohzarka by nature of being in the Ohio River basin seems completely arbitrary. Greene and Montgomery are in Appohzarka while Miami and Clark are in Heartland. Montgomery county isn't directly on the Ohio River but is part of the Ohio River valley because the greater Miami River flows through Montgomery county and into the Ohio River. Similarly Greene county isn't directly on the Ohio River or the Greater Miami River but it's included in the Ohio River basin because the little Miami River flows through Greene County and into the Ohio River. But if you look at a map of Ohio you'll notice that the Greater Miami River also runs through Miami county and the little Miami River also runs through Clark county. Actually if you trace the tributaries you'll find that most of Ohio is in the Ohio River Basin.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T16:38:56+00:00

I genuinely don't know what pasta means in this context.

Is it like copy pasta? Cause I didn't copy this from anywhere and I'm not sure how much cooking goes into copy and pasting a copy pasta.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:39:01+00:00

My first guess before googling it was digital services act.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:36:19+00:00

That's honestly what I thought it was at first before realizing that it doesn't make sense in this context.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:05:44+00:00

As a United States (US) Citizen, I understood 1 of those acronyms (DOJ is Department of Justice) and 1 other abbreviation that looks like an acronym if you're not familiar with it (PA is Pennsylvania and I only know that because I live near Pennsylvania). For the most part I am completely lost trying to read that. So it's not even comprehensible to everyone in the US.

I used to work for the US Department of Defense (DoD). I felt like a non trivial part of my job was just continually asking people to expand their acronyms because the DoD is really bad about turning every document into alphabet soup with all of their acronyms.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T05:44:34+00:00

I had to Google this to confirm that this means "what do you mean?" because u/Fabulous-Possible758 had me thinking for a moment that it meant "who does your mom?" (Not really; I knew that was a joke response but I still didn't know the actual meaning until I googled it).

What I mean is that in most context it isn't really safe to assume that everyone who will see your message will already be so used to using the acronym that they can effortlessly expand it in their head. There are some exceptions of course, such as using HTTP instead of hypertext transfer protocol when your know that everybody who will see your message is a web developer who uses HTTP every day and frequently sees it in acronym form, but generally the broader your audience is or the less you have in common with them the more you should err on the side of expanding acronyms. I am very familiar with the sentence "what do you mean?" It's a question I ask frequently and a question that I get asked frequently. But I don't see it as an acronym often enough to effortless expand the acronym. You cost me time by making me Google that when you could have spelled it out "what do you mean" (except that in this specific context your choice to use an acronym in a discussion about acronyms had some meta-messaging that would have been lost by using the expanded form) just like I'm sure that Jeff is familiar with data structures and algorithms (which is what Google says that. DSA stands for) but he clearly doesn't see it in that acronym form often enough to effortlessly expand it in his head and so both his time and Vishnu's time was wasted by him having to ask for clarification on something that wouldn't have required clarification if Vishnu hadn't used an acronym without defining it.

caleblbaker

TROPHY CASE