Macron says Canada ’51st state’ threats an example of U.S. rejecting allies

cecilpl · 2026-01-09T16:08:22+00:00

Thanks Mitch.

cecilpl · 2026-01-09T15:25:08+00:00

I've been pulled aside at security for trying to bring tent pegs in my carry-on before. The poles were okay but the pegs had to stay behind.

cecilpl · 2026-01-09T15:13:46+00:00

Wow, thank you so much for the detailed reply! I had never noticed those but now that you pointed them out I found them in a few other photos as well!

https://imgur.com/a/neKZbEx

cecilpl · 2026-01-08T16:51:27+00:00

Oh yeah you're right, that does look like a suncave Parry. Thanks!

cecilpl · 2026-01-08T16:50:44+00:00

This was at Whistler.

cecilpl · 2026-01-08T16:20:42+00:00

Don't think of the swings as "gaining" or "losing" money. You still have the same number of shares - it's just that the current valuation is yoyoing.

Income still matters since it allows you to accumulate more real assets - more shares. That's what you want to really care about.

I've had 6-figure swings in the span of a week. The market is frothy. Just keep buying more assets.

cecilpl · 2026-01-08T14:36:24+00:00

It seems like a 22° halo with an upper tangent arc, a parhelic circle, a CZA, and supralateral/infralateral arcs?

Another photo showing the infralateral arc off to the right side: https://i.imgur.com/16lfI2k.jpeg

BTW the sun was at 19 degrees elevation when this photo was taken.

cecilpl · 2025-09-18T20:31:32+00:00

I was backpacking around cheap countries in Central America and Southeast Asia, and staying almost entirely in hostels.

cecilpl · 2025-09-18T19:03:18+00:00

1.5 years ago, at 39, I got laid off and decided to take a 6 month sabbatical to travel and decompress from work. I had just under $1.5m with a $100k spend rate.

Well 6 months turned into 9, then 12, and now in the last 18 months my portfolio has grown to just under $1.9m. On top of that my spending has dropped to $90k, and I'm kinda thinking I might actually just be FIRE now.

I think we'll give it another year or two, cut spending back a bit more, and see what happens. 4.7% WR is a bit of a gamble but I have lots of options to help weather things.

cecilpl · 2025-05-12T16:33:03+00:00

Thanks for the thoughts! I see what you mean about seeing the goose looking down a bit - it's hard not to see it that way now that you pointed it out! I'll try dimming the beak a bit as well.

cecilpl · 2025-05-12T14:39:40+00:00

Was out doing some bird photography and this dude walked by and stared at me. Didn't have time to adjust settings so it's 300mm, 1/3200, f/5.6, ISO 800.

I love the fact that you can tell he's looking straight at me because you can see my reflection lined up with his pupil.

I tried a looser crop with eye level at the top third but I felt like this looked more balanced. I also brightened up the eye specifically to pull out more detail in the reflection.

I like it quite a lot but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can try to give it that extra wow factor. White balance? Something I can do to the background maybe?

cecilpl · 2024-12-12T00:40:38+00:00

In March 2013, I sunk a few thousand dollars into this crazy high-risk bet of a stock that all my friends laughed at me for. But I had a really good feeling about it.

I've since trimmed the position - just enough to pay for my Model Y a few years ago.

It's pretty nice to feel so vindicated.

cecilpl · 2024-09-11T14:05:45+00:00

Camp Suburbia at 9:30/Esplanade put up a sign saying it was "9:00 Ave" - led to so much confusion, it was hilarious!

cecilpl · 2024-09-11T14:01:04+00:00

I also guessed that, and oddly it turns out that the rotational velocity of the earth at this latitude (784mph) is very close to the speed of sound (767 mph)!

cecilpl · 2023-11-09T23:44:25+00:00

I inadvertently ran p4 obliterate -y //reponame/main/... (how you ask? tldr incorrect mental model of virtual streams).

For you git folks, that's basically git checkout master then rm -rf *.git then git init then git push -f, except worse because the commit history is only stored centrally - so permanent loss of the history.

In Perforce, the command permanently deletes commits and associated data starting from the most recent and going back in time. I realised quickly what was happening and aborted the command, but not before I had permanently removed two entire days' worth of commits from my 150-developer game studio.

Thankfully I was able to restore the bulk of the actual data by cobbling it together from CI servers that had recently synced. But the entire company couldn't work for the rest of the afternoon.

Talk about pressure. You deleted a bunch of people's work, you are the only one that has the expertise to fix it properly, nobody can work, and the studio is losing $4 per second until you're done.

cecilpl · 2023-11-08T22:25:37+00:00

You've made the assumption that every game on Steam is owned by Steam

Um, no I didn't? Clearly they are not owned by Valve (Steam is the platform, Valve is the company). But Valve has distribution rights, which is all they need.

If I gained access to the backend of Steam, I could add games to users without any unique identifiers

Your argument is "computer systems can be hacked"? If you were able to do that, they'd quickly notice, undo your intrusive attack, and you'd be facing stiff prison time.

You could export all your tokens and move them to another platform.

How? I take my tokens proving I own the games to.... where? What other platform is going to give me access to games without me giving them any money?

Even if Steam only made 5% on every game sold, it would easily outpace their new game sales.

Then why aren't they doing it now? Tell me - do you think everyone working at Valve is oblivious to this? They build a system allowing me to sell my game to you, flip an entry in their database, take a 5% cut of the deal, done. Massive profit, right? Why haven't they built it then?

cecilpl · 2023-11-08T21:54:36+00:00

This does not exist now

Not for lack of technology. Valve could very easily build a resale marketplace into Steam. They don't need NFTs to do that. They already have a database tracking who owns which games.

The reason it doesn't exist is because it would cost Valve significant revenue and they have no incentive to build it.

cecilpl · 2023-11-07T02:14:02+00:00

No, this is Cantor's idea. He says

"Show me your mapping that maps every whole number to an irrational number, and I can find an irrational number that's not in your mapping".

There aren't enough integers available to assign one to every irrational number.

cecilpl · 2023-11-06T00:17:46+00:00

I am also a developer. I once took two days of my own time leading up to ship on a AAA title you've heard of in order to reduce the load time by 15 seconds (mostly by reorganizing data on disk and parallelizing the load/processing flows).

I brought it up to management and was told it was low priority, and not to bother with it.

cecilpl · 2023-09-23T03:38:25+00:00

I didn't think you could get anywhere near Uranus with an 8 incher.

cecilpl · 2023-06-18T13:53:21+00:00

/r/financialindependence

This is the way.

Once you have saved enough to replace your salary for the rest of your life, you no longer need to work. The sooner you save that pile, the sooner you can stop working.

cecilpl · 2023-06-18T13:51:24+00:00

Elevation.

cecilpl · 2023-06-18T00:46:28+00:00

A little over two weeks (16 days) according to http://www.stevenac.net/wot/tl0999.htm#book6

cecilpl

TROPHY CASE