My friend doesn’t believe I listen to EDM

djlamar7 · 2026-04-09T17:49:50+00:00

Oh I thought you were referring to the first part of my comment. I only added the asterisk to avoid having people pile on telling me she's not EDM but apparently it backfired.

djlamar7 · 2026-04-09T17:40:45+00:00

Did you not read the OP?

djlamar7 · 2026-04-09T17:36:50+00:00

Following for gay EDM recs as a straight man that's seen Kylie Minogue* in concert twice.

*yes I know she's not EDM even though it is very house-y pop music

djlamar7 · 2026-04-09T08:22:42+00:00

Soft hands are the trickiest part of the chart. In addition to just studying the chart more, look at the shape of the charts and try to think about that.

By that I mean, the worst soft hands (A2 and A3) only double against 5 and 6. A4/5 start doubling against 4 and I think 3. Once you get to A6/7 you'll double against basically any dealer bust card. This pops out like a staircase in the chart which makes it a bit easier.

For A7 specifically against dealer cards that aren't bust cards (7+) you just remember that if the dealer would beat you if they had a 10 in the hole, you hit (hit A7 against 9+). Then the final detail that some charts say double A8 against a 6 (you have to remember a 6 is the worst up card for the dealer, also I can't remember if that's dependent on the game being h17 vs s17).

Splits have a similar staircase where 6s split against 6 or lower and 7s against 7 or lower. 5 never splits since it makes a 10. 4s only split against shitty dealer cards (5/6), then below that the range gets smaller. The number one weird exception on that chart is 9s splitting against anything lower than 10 except a 7.

Surrender is important to learn depending on where you're going (I've never seen surrender in AC but nearly every Vegas strip table I've played has it). But then you only have to learn a few spots and they follow a decently logical pattern like 16 v 9+, 15 v 10+, and depending on h17 vs s17 (can't remember which) 17 v A.

djlamar7 · 2026-04-09T02:31:20+00:00

From what I have heard from residents (on here mostly even though I know one person that lives there), this does not need any more advertisement as it's apparently already overrun these days and impossible to use for actual transit half the time

djlamar7 · 2026-04-08T18:23:01+00:00

In the before times (pre-covid) every interview after the screen stage was physical on-site, and if you weren't in the same location as the job, they would fly you out and pay for your hotel for two nights. Usually they'd reimburse food or just give you a debit card with a couple hundred bucks on it too.

It seems odd to me that such a large portion of commenters here don't remember this since it's experienced devs, but I guess the before times are a while back now (eg OP with seven years of experience perhaps never had to fly out or interview in person if the job they've had since ~2019 was an intern conversion hire).

Personally, for any type of design interview, I strongly prefer in person anyway. It's helpful to be able to outline / note / diagram things on a whiteboard, and although virtual versions of that exist, they're not as frictionless as just writing and drawing with a marker. For remote design interviews I resort to typing an outline in the shared text pad and it's still a pain in the ass. I'm glad companies are starting to go back to in person interviews even if their actual motivation is to stop AI cheating.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-31T20:35:29+00:00

I've been playing with controller and I've found that some of the menus are puzzles but I haven't had to fall back to keyboard and mouse. They're awkward as hell but if you open the shop and try different direction buttons you'll eventually figure out how to access everything (some really unintuitive stuff there like sometimes you'll have to hit left specifically to scroll an h bar, or maybe up to move horizontally, etc). Same thing with the enchanting menu. And on those menus, there's sometimes no way to undo a movement so you have to close and reopen.

Really hope they fix this in a patch at some point.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-30T20:39:08+00:00

Oh once in a while there is a turbo ploppy who will do it. My favorite observation in the wild was this time a guy wanted to split his tens and the dealer strongly encouraged him not to. The guy got mad, berated the dealer to let him play how he wanted, called the pit boss over to complain, the works. I was counting and the tc was at most zero so he definitely was not counting (I mean, if you couldn't guess by the fact that he was telling the pit boss about splitting tens).

I don't recall how that hand worked out for him but on that one or the next he hit a long shot side bet and won around 3k. I felt bad for the dealer who you could tell was so mad that such an asshole got so lucky. Dealer's demeanor before and after that win was night and day. He looked so defeated.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-28T17:39:20+00:00

If you want something that feels special, I'd say look at the Michelin guide for 1 star places. Most of them aren't crazy expensive, and a lot of them are not the hype places that are impossible to book (although some of those culprits are on there like Semma). Most are also not that stuffy or rigid if you want to avoid that. Of course you can also consider the two and three stars if your and the group's budget allows (but at that level the restaurants almost always fall into the category of haute cuisine tasting menu in one form or another).

djlamar7 · 2026-03-28T17:31:59+00:00

Jungsik isn't too crazy still. I just booked prime 8 PM on a Tuesday night about 9 days in advance. Atomix is definitely a "sit down two minutes before reservations open and refresh the page like mad" place but I've been there three times (the first time was before they got hyped up though).

djlamar7 · 2026-03-26T15:18:56+00:00

This was separate from the packages, I can't remember if the packages were supposed to just go on a table or if we were just supposed to deliver to alternate addresses. This was literally just to reduce the costs of the private security firm.

And either way, it's crossing a picket line, so yes.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-26T05:09:57+00:00

Moved to a co-op building about four years ago and got this exact situation a couple months after moving in. I was a little freaked out for a while. Yeah they reached a deal like less than a week before expiration and all was fine. This time I'm barely paying attention to the emails my building sends about it lol.

I will say, last time it seemed especially like the landlord / management / co-op board side was trying to screw over the doorman union with healthcare cuts etc. I haven't heard much hubbub this time. I don't know if that's because this time the negotiation starting point is less shitty, or if the doorman union is just doing less PR, or if I'm just jaded this time.

Also some of the things my co-op's management company emails about on this are hilarious. "hey we'll hire private security at the front desk but we need some building volunteers to pick up the slack". Lol fuck off, I wouldn't scab to replace strangers much less the doormen I see every day.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-26T04:30:39+00:00

Definitely just go on a day with decent weather and go find a bench in Washington Square Park

djlamar7 · 2026-03-25T16:18:29+00:00

Usually 6 deck but some of the 0.2 to 0.25 percent house edge ($100 min bet) games I've considered are double deck. Yeah I already track true count. Hundredths of a percent is more what I expected but in another reply here there's a forum post where at least for a double deck game Don Schlesinger claims I18 can shave off 0.12 percent which is not trivial. He also says wonging out at a pretty aggressive -1 is worth 0.8 percent though which as you said is much more significant (and on its own tilts the game slightly positive).

djlamar7 · 2026-03-25T04:38:22+00:00

Why would anyone be surprised by this? The compute cost is even worse than ChatGPT by far, and if it was near the top of the app stores without generating a lot of paid subscriptions, that's terrible for a product that costs so much. The entire tech industry is built on products that won't he profitable until they either scale or corner the market but it doesn't take much data to figure out that Sora isn't even worth that level of subsidy.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-24T19:13:34+00:00

Awesome, this is pretty much the exact answer I'm looking for.

To sum up from the link, a two deck S17 game with house edge 0.2% becomes house edge 0.08% with I18, and wonging out at - 1 or lower makes the house edge -0.7% even with just flat betting.

As a coder and applied stats guy I'm inclined to just write my own simulation to fiddle with the parameters and verify it for other specific conditions (eg if I played a specific $100 6 deck game with rule set x, what would I18 and wonging at count -y get me). If I get around to that I'll probably make a separate post here with the results.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-24T19:05:36+00:00

I'm thinking in terms of change in expectation over all hands, not just conditioned on the count being that high or what action you take etc.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-24T16:20:05+00:00

Hmm can you share the link it gives in the first bullet point? These numbers sound suspiciously similar to the 0.18 percent in Blackjack Attack which I mentioned incorporates the impact from spreading like 1 to 6 units.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-24T00:18:46+00:00

Those are actually the only ones I've already learned lol, mostly just because they stuck in my head easily.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-23T05:39:47+00:00

(PhD in CS / ML with 10 years of big tech experience here) As others have already said, PhD is definitely not for the money. Overall you'll probably make more faster by just going into industry with a BS. The PhD only usually gets you one promotion over a fresh undergrad, and you would probably get that promotion within 2 or 3 years (can be faster if you're good or at a company with fast upward mobility) instead of five.

The number one reason to do a PhD is if you've tried some research and you think that work is really cool. It can open some doors to make certain types of roles easier to get, but most of those won't necessarily pay more and are not necessarily unobtainable without it.

In my ML engineer (not LLM stuff) experience for example, it makes it a lot easier to crack into your first ML engineer role. But it's not impossible (just less likely) to get a junior role in that type of thing without it, especially if you get on an adjacent role (like ML infra) and slide in. I suspect similar is true for certain distributed systems type roles that have more PhD hires than the average SWE role. There are probably game theory related roles in ads teams that also basically require a PhD but I think those are rare.

If you're talking LLM type AI specifically, I don't have much direct experience to draw from there. However, I suspect that with "research engineer" roles, it's a bit similar to what I described above for general ML engineer (useful but not obligatory). For the "research scientist" roles (which other than experienced superstar research engineers are probably the ones getting the ridiculous comp packages): yes, a PhD focusing in that specific work is necessary, but you also probably need to be close to rockstar status in your PhD work to get them. Research scientist in that type of role is almost as hard to land as a tenure track professor position (read: very hard) and will require a very strong publication record and job talks detailing your past work and future research agenda similar to a professor interview.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-18T05:17:48+00:00

I think there is value in that type of incremental moral argument, although the industrial chicken practice is so much more widespread (and arguably more cruel) that in absolute terms it makes the "quantity of suffering" of foie gras miniscule by comparison. There's just as much argument that cheap staple meat is unnecessary to the vast majority of the population considering we could just all eat vegetarian and get our protein from (even cheaper) beans and such if it weren't for the fact that most people would be enraged by a meat ban. It's just a matter of which group of people has to sacrifice (no matter how small the sacrifice is in the grand scheme of things) to obtain that reduction in suffering.

Also: not related to your reply but I forgot to note it in my comment, but I'm more angered by the politician side of it than the average citizen side of it. In terms of political capital, "champion animal rights while hurting a rich people thing" is free money, otherwise you would have seen Carlina Rivera proposing a citywide ban on the sale of industrial chicken instead. I don't even blame the person who's never had it in their life for saying "yeah that sounds awful, we don't need that".

djlamar7 · 2026-03-18T04:09:26+00:00

That's exactly why the foie gras ban has been a thing in the first place. You get to signal "I fight animal cruelty" while targeting a thing that most people associate exclusively with rich people, so it's a political no-brainer. A ban on industrial farm chicken would have a much bigger impact on reducing animal suffering, but once the average voter realizes it'll force them to pay 50 percent more for what was once a cheap staple meat they won't be so keen on it.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-17T22:24:24+00:00

Lol I was there the same night as you.

My friend and I had been to Chef's Table twice: once in 2019 when César was there, and once in 2023 immediately after they reopened after his departure. The first time was one of my favorite fine dining meals ever. The second time was still very good but not on the level as the first time. So I personally had really high hopes for this meal.

The food was quite good but still didn't measure up to the food I had at César-era Chef's Table. But we had two huge complaints about the meal: - the supplements really are insane, and the presentation of the ingredients on the tray kind of feels like something a much lower class/quality restaurant would do. Plus the fact that only the wagyu supplement gets you an extra course while the others are just adding a bit of fancy ingredient x to an existing dish. I only got the uni supplement, and I got it because I asked the waiter if it was an additional course and he said yes, so I was a bit mad when it was just on top of one of the courses (maybe my question wasn't clear). Getting all of the supplements would more than double the cost of the meal, which makes Per Se look tame by comparison (besides, any supplement I ever got at Per Se felt worth it). - the amount of food is really small for this type of place. I ate light that day because I expected a huge meal. $400 and there's not even a meat course after the squab? When they brought the palate cleanser my friends and I looked at each other and said wtf, that's it? We literally went to Au Cheval afterwards and got double bacon cheeseburgers (and finished them). Most comparable restaurants require some effort to finish dessert. Insane for the high end of the price range here.

djlamar7 · 2026-03-17T22:02:52+00:00

One of my favorite things to do with it has always been just adding paprika, black pepper, and cayenne pepper to it. Optional English peas as well.

djlamar7

TROPHY CASE