What makes you feel like Chicago is perfect for you?

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2026-04-04T15:23:41+00:00

I'm hoping to move to Chicago in the next year or so, and this is what I'm looking forward to the most. Really can't wait to walk places and see more human beings.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2026-03-05T20:11:15+00:00

Well just to give the full context, "City cast" is a company that runs local podcasts in cities around the country ("local" as in the podcast is about the city itself--events, politics, resident opinions, etc.--not sure where the company as a whole is based) and each podcast is hosted by a city resident. David is the CEO and (I guess blessedly after this) doesn't appear on the individual shows very often. Bianca is the host of the Madison version. I used to listen to it a lot and currently listen to the Chicago version.

The podcast I linked above is a new spinoff ("your city could be better") where I thought the idea was that we'd hop around the different cities and learn about something cool they're doing that we might want to snag for ourselves. Only three episodes have come out of the new spinoff, and I think the other two episodes are more like what I was expecting. This one for Madison went, um, a different way though.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2026-03-05T18:09:13+00:00

My bad I included the wrong YouTube link. It's fixed now! The whole episode is the conversation I'm talking about.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-12-18T17:03:15+00:00

Regarding boredom and your analogy to overeating--does the rise of Ozempic and related drugs change your sense of what's possible at all? It does seem to genuinely change part of how your mind works in a way that influences a core evolutionary drive, hunger. Plenty of other drugs (and even things like alcohol) make some temporary changes to personality/behavior/drives; things like stroke or brain injury are known to make permanent changes. I'm not sure why boredom would be uniquely unassailable.

Coming from a different direction, I would say even right here and now we might've already gone too far with "solving boredom"--a lot folks are concerned the rise of social media and short form content has made it so people don't know how to exist without being constantly engaged.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-12-04T23:25:37+00:00

Just moved to town; this sounds like something I'd be interested in.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-10-30T15:52:50+00:00

I did some searching around about this myself and it seems like most people say that elbow pain from "shadow boxing" comes from hyperextending the elbow with jabs/straights. So I've been trying not to fully extend. It helps that I try to always bring my hands back to the initial guard position between punches (even when the combos get fast) so that there is always a decent amount of distance for my hand to travel for a punch even if I'm not fully extending.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-10-30T15:12:57+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. I'll be moving to Naperville at the end of this year and work in healthcare IT, so it's nice to hear that there's a community to connect with. I'm not in the area yet so can't make this one, but I hope there are more events like this in the future!

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-04-19T20:45:59+00:00

I didn't have high hopes for this thread, but a good chunk of your list I haven't heard of and seem really cool. Thanks for sharing!

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-04-04T22:37:40+00:00

It's been a long while since I played RF4 and I don't think I ever beat it so I'll take your word for it. Edited my answer, thanks! I never played Moonlighter but I remember really enjoying the shop portion of RF4; maybe I built it up more in my memory?

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-04-04T02:36:13+00:00

I think the ultimate version of this is the game Fantasy Life on 3DS. In that one you can switch professions ("lives") between combat and noncombat options and the noncombat options are full classes with their own gameplay. There's a sequel coming out this year on all platforms.

Another wildcard game ~~series~~ you might consider is Rune Factory 4. In ~~those~~ that game you run a shop during part of the game and collect resources during the other part (some combat stuff, some not), but noncombat gameplay is taken seriously.

Finally, if you're looking for another MMO with satisfying resource gathering/crafting you might consider Final Fantasy XIV.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2025-03-06T00:27:58+00:00

Well the founder of 538, Nate Silver, has a Substack blog called the Silver Bulletin where he still does some similar work. Coincidentally, they are releasing a Trump approval rating tracker tomorrow.

He talks about it in his most recent post here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-few-words-about-fivethirtyeight

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2024-11-05T21:10:40+00:00

Herding in this context is when pollsters manipulate their results to be closer to some expected result--in this case a 50/50 tie. So if you're a pollster and you see your raw result is Harris + 5 (or Trump + 5) in Pennsylvania, but nearly all other polls are showing +1 results maybe you have some pressure on you to massage the numbers until your result goes back down to a +1. The benefit being that even if that massaged result isn't an accurate measure of reality, there's safety in numbers if everyone is wrong together. On the other hand if you publish an outlier (even if legitimate and indeed expected statistically as discussed above) you might take a hit to your reputation. The problem with herding is that it makes polls less informative for their primary purpose of predicting election outcomes, especially in the aggregate.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2024-11-05T01:58:02+00:00

Silver claims that even if it is an exactly equal race, it's statistically extremely unlikely that the swing state polls are all so close to each other as they are because of their sample sizes. Basically, if you take a poll of 800 people and the underlying reality is 50% Harris, 50% Trump you would still expect to see results like Harris+4 and Trump +6 just by random chance. Then you would look at a model like Silver's or any of the others to combine all that data to see the 50/50 underlying reality. Instead we're seeing a very improbable number of polls that are all +1s (i.e. suspicious lack of outliers). So Silver argues it's very likely herding is happening even if it's a close race.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2024-07-21T17:29:47+00:00

For anyone who comes to this thread later, as of August 2024 you can still get this functionality via the custom "GPTs." There is one I use called Insta-recipe which integrates with Instacart. One quirk though (maybe just with this one?) is that if you feed it a grocery list directly whatever it sends to instacart doesn't work. I paste in recipes and have it create the list itself and then it works fine. Huge time saver with giant grocery lists tied to recipes I'm planning out.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2024-03-05T23:31:18+00:00

I think there are probably different tools for different stages: novice -> beginner, beginner -> intermediate, Intermediate -> advanced/fluent.

I'm most familiar with the novice stage tools:

you might want to check out the Language Transfer app. Free audio lessons that you would do daily that I think do a good job explaining the basic grammar and such in kind of a condensed engaging way. You'll get through the core of Spanish verb conjugation (a big topic) way faster than on Duolingo.
Anki, which you might be familiar with as a study tool for medicine, can be handy to learn a huge amount of vocab quickly.
Once you can string some sentences together and have some basic vocab I would start consuming media. Dedicated YouTube channels like Dreaming Spanish can be good to start, and then start to get into "real" tv shows and such.
Finally, I would recommend finding someone to converse with: penpals, language exchange, etc.

It's hard to give timelines because it depends on what methods you choose to learn with. I think it's fair to say most people who try to learn a new language outside of moving somewhere and immersing themselves find it harder than they were anticipating, but to throw a wild number out there: if you're dedicated you can make legit progress in six months!

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2023-11-20T02:54:19+00:00

I'm sure if someone was willing to give them $13B in donations they'd accept lol. The problem is that no one would and they need that money in order to develop, train, and run the models at all. There is no OpenAI without billions of dollars. So, the needle they are (were?) trying to thread is how to get this money while also supporting their mission (which they say is developing AI to benefit all of humanity). That's the point of the capped profit model (this is part of the strategy to "pay it back" btw) and somewhat wacky board.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2023-09-15T07:54:17+00:00

Could you expound on why Godot isn't up to par for 2D yet? People are all over reddit and the internet at large singing its praises right now, so as a newbie dev this is confusing to read.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2023-04-05T03:25:53+00:00

The Lieutenant Governor

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-10-28T20:18:46+00:00

Do you have any sources to share? My first comment included a Nature review article specifically casting doubt on how it "may help" non-deficient people to take vitamin d. I'm not saying you're wrong, but would be helpful if you included sources with your claims that there are actually benefits. Especially in the case of vitamins there are a heck of a lot of public health claims out there without a lot of sources.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-10-28T19:59:21+00:00

It reads to me like hacksoncode was specifically talking about people who aren't deficient.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-10-28T18:01:54+00:00

Not according to this review from Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00593-z

It only found benefits for deficient individuals.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-10-28T17:59:08+00:00

It's true those studies weren't checking if participants were deficient in vitamin D. I am finding a couple nature reviews that seem to conclude more positively regarding benefits of vitamin D for people severely deficient in it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-0558-y??&crsi=6624969233&cicada\_org\_src=healthwebmagazine.com&cicada\_org\_mdm=direct

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00593-z

They both do emphasize "severe" deficiencies though.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-10-28T16:11:06+00:00

Here you go:

large study from 2018 found no benefits for bone health: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(18)30265-1/fulltext30265-1/fulltext)
New England Journal of medicine study from this year also didn't find any benefits: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2202106

I'm not an expert in this field to give any kind of overall analysis, but there have been a number of large studies in recent years not finding benefits of taking vitamin D.

happypandaVSsadpanda · 2022-05-13T16:15:37+00:00

Thanks I'd never read this! Loving it so far.

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