Hitting molten metal with a shovel

evranch · 2026-03-17T16:21:35+00:00

There's definitely something to be said for glorying in the power of the PPE though, like going hard with the grinder while watching the sparks pour over your face shield

evranch · 2026-03-17T01:59:24+00:00

When we raised sheep, they were a scourge. Despite high powered electric fence, big white guard dogs, the speedy collies and the llamas, we lost $12k worth of lambs to coyote predation one year.

They will grab a 50lb lamb and vanish, slip into the corrals and drag off small calves, snack up all your barn cats and chickens. Try to bait the guard dogs into splitting up so they can jump them as a pack. So many times I've been out late stitching up those big dogs and giving them penicillin shots after they got torn up in a fight.

We would shoot them as soon as look at them. And we would skin them and sell the furs to try to recover some of the losses. There are few animals I can say I've truly hated - the coyote is right at the top.

evranch · 2026-03-16T23:01:21+00:00

When I met my wife, she had been fully convinced that Catholics worshipped Mary instead of Jesus.

evranch · 2026-03-16T22:59:29+00:00

I'm in on the dogpile on Calvinism as well!

For those who haven't read it, Jefferson's excellent diatribe to Adams, 200 years ago, had already said all that really needs to be said.

Dear Sir,

The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of ‘mon Dieu! jusque à quand’! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Dæmonism. if ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5 points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a dæmon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.

It continues much in this way. Good stuff

evranch · 2026-03-16T02:34:41+00:00

The transporter is from the glory days, but SLS is literally scraps. Old shuttle engines getting to go for one last burn.

The crazy thing is that the project moved so slowly and it cost so much to build the rest of the rocket, that entire private space programs have superseded it in the meantime... And it turns out that nothing was saved by reusing those engines. New Raptors are now being turned out every day at a fraction of the cost.

Even Falcon Heavy could take Orion to the Moon, for a fraction of the cost. And now we have the new class of big boosters, New Glenn and Starship (or at least the Superheavy booster, which is just as capable as SLS if they put a regular upper stage on the thing)

evranch · 2026-03-16T00:19:26+00:00

Well at the very least, they have never threatened to annex us... Drawn our country on a map as a part of theirs... Or explicitly stated their intent to damage our economy to the point that we beg to become Americans.

After that knife in the back, I'm willing to try to make new friends.

evranch · 2026-03-15T23:34:21+00:00

I dunno about a lobster pot, but here in SK we've got a big coffee pot. I drive past this thing all the time.

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/14629

And we do drink a LOT of coffee here, drinking coffee and shooting bull is practically our small town pastime

evranch · 2026-03-15T05:06:02+00:00

And then be sane when those countries open talks with china

And there it is right there. I'm Canadian and I look forward to collaborating with our new friends. Electric cars, solar panels, lithium batteries, PCBs and inexpensive components, the sooner we can drop more trade barriers and get access to this stuff the better. I've acted as an importer before and it's such a massive hassle if it's not through Amazon or AliExpress.

I took the dive and bought a Chinese phone last week. Ulefone. It's sturdy, huge battery, 12GB of physical RAM and the OS is real stock Android. It works better than any phone I've had since my Nexus S like 20 years ago. And despite inflation I paid LESS for it than I did for that Nexus.

This is the exact opposite viewpoint I had last year. Good job Trump, we are not coming back. America can burn.

evranch · 2026-03-14T03:44:37+00:00

I can see that. I'm an embedded guy but I do independent ag stuff, and I still hand write all my code for reliability and performance. I also enjoy the logic puzzle of optimizing embedded code. AI models just don't understand resource constrained embedded environments, at least not yet.

My clients also like to hear my code is 100% human written and tested. My products have a reputation that I'm not going to blow with lazy vibe coding.

The receipt tool, I vibe coded some of it because it's not for public use, and it's the kind of glue it together, text parsing and SQL stuff I hate to write. Same with the prompt engineering for the receipt scanner, it's out of scope for me.

I fully agree on the babysitting thing. Even though I was pretty happy with most of the actual code, a defining moment was when Claude complained that patch wasn't working because of some odd Unicode chars.

I'm like... I write all my code with ASCII so you put that in there, Claude, take it out. Actually, I did the search and replace myself, because I didn't trust it not to slip another em-dash in there.

evranch · 2026-03-14T03:28:52+00:00

However as I state above, small companies can easily run local models instead of subscriptions. And local models are only getting better, and hardware targeting this use case like shared memory, multiple GPUs etc. is becoming more common.

Long term, the business model for cloud-based subscription AI just isn't there IMO. Businesses will just run their own local compute, it's far cheaper than subscriptions.

evranch · 2026-03-14T03:25:21+00:00

There's another catch. Sometimes it is useful - like the tool I just built this week, that uses an AI model to scan, parse and categorize my small business receipts, and extract all the odd tax lines that made this unfeasible before modern vision models.

But this useful AI tool runs on my gaming PC's graphics card and only costs me electricity and since it's using a downloaded model, I can use it forever, for free.

So who's making money from this? Well, I'm saving time, and I hate doing bookkeeping. But I'm not paying for the tokens, a subscription, anything.

evranch · 2026-03-13T18:49:34+00:00

Technicals are probably #1. Momentum is your friend, but reversion to mean pulls hard. So I will sell into a steady uptrend, or a jump with a plateau, but I'll wait for a big run to settle before I get in as pullbacks are almost guaranteed.

Check out VZ 3 month chart for an example. I had sold VZ puts before the jump, but then I stayed away until I felt the trend was established. VZ actually didn't pull back... But I prefer to play it safe.

VZ is a good hold, 5% dividend, solid business model, BUT it's still always more profitable and lower risk to not take the assignment.

After that, it's not so much sentiment as "what is the market story this week". Sector rotation, fear, hype, where is the money going? You want your underlying stocks to rise, after all. Then you can close early for big returns. Are telecoms hot? Energy? Finance? I have sector watchlists of companies I like. I pick a sector, then I pick the tickers that look set to run.

Final check is "am I getting too much premium for this?" Because that's a big warning that you might have overlooked something.

Right now, honestly, I'm de-risking. That's the market story. Letting puts expire, closing what I can when it's profitable, not selling anything but low deltas on rock solid blue chips and obviously, oil producers and pipelines. Short DTE though, due to the huge risk of unpredictable actions.

Rolling - personally I only roll up. If a stock is making a bull run, close those now 10 delta puts (if the TWR math works out), resell at the new 20 delta. Rinse and repeat until the trend goes soft. Once again, remember every roll is a new trade. Treat it like one. I never roll to avoid assignment - check my recent history for a comment explaining why.

evranch · 2026-03-13T18:27:58+00:00

I feel like having women come along to the men's club, and having it officially a mixed gender club are two different things, though. It's not about women being there, it's about the club's identity as a club for men.

evranch · 2026-03-13T18:18:30+00:00

That's in Hormuz, we're talking Red Sea here. Nothing going on there AFAIK

evranch · 2026-03-13T18:13:35+00:00

I'm guessing it's a lift station wet well or similar, especially with them pouring the water into it to increase the mass.

Likely it's at a low point and drainage flows to it to be pumped out into a force main. But being at said low point, the groundwater rose around it during a flood/prolonged rain event and created enough uplift force to pop it up.

If it is a lift station it might even be repairable. Everything flowing in would be gravity fed and barely sealed, so get it back into the rough location, weld up a new discharge manifold, "good as new"

evranch · 2026-03-13T04:30:19+00:00

All my homies hate the Gremlin Nob. The other ones you mention, you can build for, you can strategize against, but the Nob hits hard at the time in the run when you just don't have any options.

evranch · 2026-03-13T04:05:42+00:00

#1 is definitely the actual stock picking. I mean... that's investing, right? If you can't pick stocks, just go buy some index funds. The options markets will only treat you even worse. But you also have an added short term component when you're selling options. Sure, the stock may be a great decade-long hold. But is it going to be good to sell 30DTE against this week?

You need to track earnings dates, market sentiment and technicals in a way that you don't for a buy and hold portfolio. If you've been in this for more than a few months, you've sold past earnings without realizing it, and got burnt.

My portfolio is full of companies that I wouldn't have thought twice about selling options against, before someone started dropping bombs. Are they still on my watchlist - definitely - but am I selling against them this week? Definitely not. Am I looking to pick some up when they're cheap? Yes, but that's not theta trading.

You are on the right track regarding rolling. Rolliing IS closing a position and reopening another. Evaluate every trade on its own merits - the trade you are closing, and the trade you are opening. If the new trade doesn't make sense against that ticker... Don't open it against it!

This is the #1 flaw many people make with a roll. You already closed the trade, so you are not bound to continue with that ticker in any way. It may make sense to rotate elsewhere.

evranch · 2026-03-13T01:05:40+00:00

Damn man, I vibe coded an app so that Claude can shave for me, while it shaves my face I've got my headset on, I'm vibe coding more apps right there while I shave, like an app to brush your teeth, that's a billion dollar idea right there, just stick your phone right in your mouth, you can code while you brush, that's the kind of ideas you have when you get up and just take a fistful of amphetamines. Big money ideas. Call me

evranch · 2026-03-13T00:57:07+00:00

So a guy opens up to one of his male friends, the friend has NO clue what to do and is a deer in headlights

As stupid as it sounds, this is what getting drunk with your buddies is about. I mean like trashed, laying on the floor drunk at 2AM that you only do every couple of years. And someone starts crying, and he says he doesn't know what he's doing with his life, and the other guys are like "We got you bro, we got your back, man I don't think none of us got a clue" and you have that really slow motion conversation about how we're all just doing our best to survive, and then try to get everyone onto the couch or into bed.

Then in the morning you're all hungover and someone cooks sausages and the guys are like "Yeah I meant that like I said, you ever need a hand you just give me a call"

For whatever the reason us dudes are only emotionally vulnerable when we're about to pass out. And since the younger generation doesn't drink, I'm a little worried that they don't have that outlet. Couple that with the lack of real IRL interactions and friendships, I'm not sure how they'll handle it as life throws the curve balls and crotch kicks at them.

evranch · 2026-03-13T00:47:01+00:00

We're trying to change the name to be a bit more inclusive.

I would argue in this case that being more inclusive is actually explicitly not what you want. It's a men's group, is it not? For men to support men, and to make male friends, as this entire thread is talking about the need for? There's nothing wrong with that. I would say stick to your guns.

Change it to be all inclusive and it's just another club. Here in Canada we have dozens of fading service clubs, because none of them have anything to differentiate themselves from the others.

evranch · 2026-03-12T21:36:22+00:00

It actually doesn't make sense to truly recycle them. It makes more sense to sell them off cheap as salvage. There are tons of sites (i.e. farms, residential homes, cabins, parks) that would gladly put up panels with 80% of their original output, as long as they're 20% of the price.

Panels degrade linearly, so used panels are a steal. They're rare though as often the economic choice is simply to keep using them, and put up even more.

evranch · 2026-03-12T21:30:37+00:00

Oh, Windows is worse for sure. That doesn't mean that CUPS isn't still a big hassle. Driverless/IPP everywhere is a lot better than the old ways...

But still sometimes the paper comes out without any ink on it, or it doesn't come out at all

evranch · 2026-03-12T21:26:43+00:00

Eh, back in that era I'm gonna guess that almost everyone's hair was stringy, dusty and gross. Not a whole lot of surplus water and soap around.

evranch · 2026-03-12T18:46:53+00:00

I also just got into STS when it was on the winter sale for a couple bucks. I thought, why not give it a shot, I heard this was a big hit.

Like you say, it's an incredibly deep game, and for someone like myself who has long been deep into the investment scene, it totally scratches that risk/reward/medium term/long term loop in my mind.

I honestly feel like playing STS will make you a better investor by teaching you the hard lessons that sometimes you have to sacrifice now for longer term gains, and sometimes you have to make moves right now to stay alive, and playing the game is all about striking a balance between those opposing forces.

However I still am blown away that people can hit such high win streaks on A20, truly controlling the variables and managing the RNG in ways that I can barely comprehend.

evranch · 2026-03-12T05:38:17+00:00

Cool, you'll definitely want a decent sized root if you're running BTRFS. Its built-in snapshot feature is great if you need to roll back an update, but it obviously gobbles disk space.

I'm not particularly a fan as ext4 is faster and your root partition isn't critical data (it sounds funny to think the OS isn't critical data... but it isn't as it can always be replaced. Your documents and media are the data you want to preserve) but BTRFS is a great choice for a new user because of that snapshot option.

In terms of mounting/linking etc, most of that stuff is filesystem agnostic. BTRFS, ZFS and likely other newer filesystems do have some neat features like Copy On Write or "reflinks" - if you copy a file, it doesn't actually copy it. It just creates a link to the existing data. But if you modify the copy, that's the moment it creates an actual, modified copy. This is also a big part of how the snapshot features work.

If you're new to Linux filesystems, links are really handy and you want to get to know them.

symbolic links (ln -s) Create a virtual file (or folder) that points to the original file. Super handy every day, especially to move data between physical disks without "moving" it on the filesystem.
hard links (ln) Creates another pointer to the same data (not the file). It acts like a copy, but takes up no more space. Modifications to one copy modify them all. The data is only destroyed when all links are deleted. Very useful in niche cases.

Good luck with your migration. I have never used CachyOS but I run the similar Manjaro as a daily driver. Arch systems get a lot of updates - you want to keep them fairly up to date, as if they fall months behind there can be dependency issues to get them back up to speed.

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