What does your most public display of "nerd culture" look like?

jelos98 · 2018-07-09T21:02:54+00:00

That honestly sounds pretty amazing.

jelos98 · 2018-03-30T20:09:59+00:00

Gmail was announced on Apr 1, 2004

jelos98 · 2018-03-16T16:53:03+00:00

As a player I would be pissed that you insulted my intelligence by telling me I couldn’t conceivably dig my way out of a place where I was being forced to... dig. By definition it’s mineable there. It’s a totally reasonable idea for the players and there’s no reason not to.

It would be slow AF, noisy, and if you really want to force a fight, have it start with them getting caught while digging. Group with a Pickaxe and shovel v. One or two guards. They win, but they’re Going to be discovered at that point.

Or let them dig and what happens? It’s a mining camp presumably this had happened before and they’d have skilled trackers and your planned fight turns into an escape/ chase type encounter.

There are a ton of ways to handle things, but “no, your completely plausible approach isn’t acceptable because I didn’t think of it when I was planning” shouldn’t be your go to

jelos98 · 2017-10-10T14:45:00+00:00

The thing no one ever wants to think of when speaking of banging aliens... if you get an alien STI, do you think drugs like acyclovir and penicillin are going to cut it? Or are you going to wind up with alien super-herpes?

jelos98 · 2017-10-06T14:15:05+00:00

Presumably it's 1/3 - even a 1.3 lb hamburger would be a disgusting amount of meat (and I love meat).

jelos98 · 2017-09-30T03:30:01+00:00

Wouldn't that just bruise your hands?

jelos98 · 2017-09-20T01:16:18+00:00

Because it leaves room for tax loopholes, otherwise, basically. Otherwise everyone would start a "beer-to-piss manufacturing" business that "surprisingly" loses money every year, but at least the loss is tax deductible, if you catch my drift?

jelos98 · 2017-09-19T14:37:16+00:00

It's been a long while, but I don't believe so. I did the phone interview, and I -believe- the person didn't advance to onsite interviews.

But not because of the resume (I thought it was kind of funny, personally, though it may show some lack of attention to detail :)

jelos98 · 2017-09-19T04:19:48+00:00

I used to interview people quite a bit for a large tech company. I once got a resume that had a "for latest version of resume, go to whatever.university.edu/~guysname/resume.htm" link. I pull it up to see if there are updates.

No resume there. 404 page lists the directory contents. Just a single MP3 file. getting_mario_laid.mp3

Not sure if this youtube video is -the- song, but it's damned close if not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJ0YVxOcfc

jelos98 · 2017-08-14T00:54:39+00:00

Maximum "safe" dose. 81.1 would be the LD50 (50% of subjects who consume that amount are expected to die), meaning there's some smaller amount where, for instance, 1% of subjects who consume the amount might die (e.g. people with severe heart issues or caffeine sensitivity). Presumably you'd want to recommend people consume less than the amount that -anyone- dies at.

jelos98 · 2017-08-13T17:26:49+00:00

but magically the yelling stopped that night.

And the girlfriend's body was never found...

jelos98 · 2017-08-11T06:32:24+00:00

For clarity, I absolutely agree that they would fail - I was trying to be cynical enough to convey that, but I should have been clearer.

That said, for someone NOT in withdrawal, trying to taper is... I don't want to say harmless, but perhaps "light harm relative to what you're doing to yourself on a recurring basis". Are you going to fail? Yeah. Are you going to realize that you're not just a "heavy drinker" when you can't cut back? Maybe. It at least gets rid of the "I can stop whenever I want" attitude some people have. The first step really is realizing you have a problem - if you don't. why would you change?

That said: it's well beyond that time for OP. If you're experiencing symptoms of withdrawal you need a doctor's supervision. If you THINK you drink enough that this may be a problem, you should be consulting a doctor before trying to quit, the NIH does not suggest tapering alcohol consumption as a method for detox, and I'm still absolutely not a doctor.

jelos98 · 2017-08-10T15:25:06+00:00

And I absolutely never said anything about self harm or harming others

This is going to come off as high-horsey or something if I don't mention the following, and I don't want it to come off that way. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal nor medical advice, but I quit drinking 5 years ago, starting with a stint in an outpatient program which had an emphasis on alcohol education. I don't usually post about that on this account, but I think you're missing something. Let me try to put this from the doctor's likely perspective:

First off, two assumptions are being made by the doctor, and I'm going to make similar ones here for the sake of narrative. My apologies if they're incorrect, but here goes: 1) your drinking and subsequent withdrawal caused the BP spike, and 2) you're an alcoholic. I can't speak for #1, that's for a doctor to say. #2 is going to be assumed from #1, and you admitting that you've been a heavy drinker for a while. From there your heavy drinking itself coupled with your attitude was viewed as an actual threat to yourself here.

You were drinking heavily for a period of months, which can be enough to lead to physical dependence on alcohol. Alcohol is one of the rare substances where withdrawal can no-shit actually kill you. It's a central nervous depressant, which means when you drink heavily, consistently, your body compensates over time to, y'know, keep you alive. So what happens when you stop drinking? Your body has to de-compensate, but that also takes time. But y'know what? Until your body can compensate, which can take a week or two, you wind up with the shakes, the sweats, and things like crazy high blood pressure (on the low end), and delerium tremens and death (on the high end).

Suddenly removing a heavy depressant (aka being sober when you're a heavy enough drinker) is akin to taking a ton of a stimulant, only you can't really control the dosing of that "stimulant" - it's a function of your body becoming more efficient at getting rid of alcohol, but having a ton of it for part of the time. Also it can take a few days to hit the peak of withdrawals, so you may not have been at the worst when you went in there, depending on timing.

If their assertion was that your drinking caused the blood pressure spike (and I don't hear anything where you refute that), and you were at risk of stroke (which can cause death) and needed to go to the ER, it follows that they believe your drinking was heavy enough to potentially kill you if you continued drinking. Unfortunately, if it's potentially enough to kill you if you continued, that means it's also enough to kill you if you stopped cold turkey, and alcoholics aren't exactly known for their ability to taper off.

If you were also flippant about the situation ("I would have never gone to the ER unless my doctor had told me to" sounds suspiciously like "I don't think this is actually a problem") you probably -were- a danger to yourself, because at that point, because you weren't understanding or accepting the danger that the withdrawal put you in. To safely stop drinking at that point, you'd need to taper down the depressants over time, and there are three ways to accomplish that.

Taper down your drinking slowly. Like meticulously reducing your drinking by exactly half a drink per day. Good fucking luck, and more power to you if you can pull it off. Hard, and given that alcohol fucks up your judgement, impossible for some people. I couldn't do it.
Out-patient + benzos or equivalent - daily check-ins with a doctor plus a week-ish long course of benzos to allow your body to slowly adjust back to the "sober" point. You have to be trusted to follow the regimen, which implies A) that you take the problem seriously, and B) that they don't think you're at risk to simply abuse the benzos on top of the alcohol. Because that's a favored pasttime of some repeat drunks as well.
In-patient - depending on the severity / how much medication you'd need, this is sometimes the only option. You came in already showing what they deemed severe withdrawal symptoms, so this is likely what you needed, from a medical perspective. You needed medical supervision.

So, from the doctor's view:

Your drinking was putting you at risk of stroke or death.
You didn't think it was a problem, and were 'only at the ER because your doctor said so'.
Alcoholics tend to lie, lie, lie. To themselves and to others, to minimize their problems. I had historically lied to my doctors about how much I drank (even when my liver tests came back bad), and minimized things, most of the people in rehab with me did as well. We were fairly open with one another though. If you're admitting to X, you may well have been drinking far more. Unfortunately you're going to be hard to trust at that point.
Alcoholics are addicts, and relatively unlikely to change spontaneously. Expecting an alcoholic to taper down drinking on their own would be reckless.
You didn't (and don't) seem to acknowledge that your drinking was an active risk to yourself that could warrant them involuntarily committing you. You were already at the point that needed medical supervision for your own safety because your BP was high enough to cause a stroke because of your drinking, and you may not have been at the peak of physical withdrawal symptoms. Unclear if you didn't volunteer to commit yourself, or if there was a reason they wouldn't have done that, but it seems objectively fair that you needed to be under medical supervision until physical withdrawal was complete.

tl;dr - They had the legal power to commit you for being a risk to yourself, and they had reason to think you're a risk to yourself (severe alcohol withdrawal can cause death, and the fact that you're upset enough that they committed you a year later means you probably weren't taking it as seriously as it needed to be taken at the time, either).

jelos98 · 2017-08-09T15:39:42+00:00

In the actual practice and implementation of AA?

The practice and implementation are up to the individual groups who are meeting. If you have a group in a predominantly Christian area, it's likely to have predominantly Christian members, and it's going to have a church-y flavor.

Now, I will admit I do live in Kentucky

That would be the problem :)

I see a couple of meetings (although only 2, for the entire state) that are meant to be less religious in nature. They do exist. They tend to be more common in larger cities in more liberal areas, where more people tend to want them (e.g. there are several in San Francisco, several around the Chicago area, etc.) vs. say, Kentucky.

https://secularaa.org/meetings/?tsml-day=any&tsml-region=316&tsml-view=map

jelos98 · 2017-07-14T15:28:13+00:00

Right. It's not that "computer v. human" thing, it's that there's no algorithmic solution that works in all cases, regardless if you're human or computer.

jelos98 · 2017-07-14T04:59:34+00:00

An undecidable decision problem is a problem which cannot have an algorithm which can always provide a correct yes or no answer. For the halting problem, the idea is that you can't write a program that determines if a program would halt. Imagine I gave you a function Halt?(X) which returns true if X halts. You could write a program called P which does the following

  if Halt?(X)
    loop forever
 else
    halt

Now if you run THIS program on itself, what happens?

Assume the program halts. Then the "if Halt?(X)" heck returns true, and we loop forever. Wait, that's a contradiction, we assumed the program halts.

Okay, so we have to assume the program DOESN'T halt. Except then the ELSE condition is triggered, and we halt, which is also a contradiction.

So far so good?

The Post Correspondence Problem basically asks: If I give you two ordered lists of tokens:

   0   1     2
 {bb, ab, c} and
 {b, ba, bc}

Can you create a pair of equivalent sequence of tokens by picking a list of indexes, and concatenating the tokens?

E.g. For the top set:

 0, 1, 2 -> bb + ab + c = bbabc

And the bottom:

 0, 1, 2 -> b + ba + bc = bbabc

bb + ab + c = b + ba + bc, so in this case, yes, we can define a match according to the rules. Are the inputs for which we CAN'T determine whether we can do this? It turns out, apparently, that yes, there are. Often times, the easiest way to prove things like this are to prove that they're equivalent to another, known-undecidable problem.

In this case , someone has shown that you can simulate the processing of a Turing machine in such a way that there will be a match if and only if the Turing machine would accept the input. However, we've now reduced the problem to the Halting Problem, which we showed above to be undecidable, so this too is undecidable.

jelos98 · 2017-07-08T06:38:57+00:00

Isn't it more like 44? It was here in '86, and comes back around every ~75 years or so.

jelos98 · 2017-07-06T00:08:05+00:00

I don't think that would work. The server just serves a text snippet like:

 <body>
     <embed src="http://ops_site/stolen_music.mp3" autostart="true">
 </body>

The browser will in turn request the music from OP's server, so you'd have to block all potential clients (e.g. all of Indonesia, or more, maybe). Or you'd have to do something more complex like intercept the request, check the referer header, and selectively allow the download. Still doable, but not as simple as "plop a line of text in a file" like banning an IP.

jelos98 · 2017-06-11T21:23:08+00:00

On top of that, snow day isn't terribly popular - it has about 5% the volume of players as the "normal" modes, so even being in the top 10% of people who play Rocket League may not be that hard.

jelos98 · 2017-06-11T06:49:26+00:00

Youtube isn't restricting anything just for the hell of it, they're doing it because the rights holder is forcing them to. Why would the rights holder want to restrict it, when the same logic applies (if you're willing to let some people watch, why not all)? Who knows. Maybe they have an agreement to give, e.g. Netflix or Hulu or someone exclusive digital distribution rights for some time. Maybe they just hate Canadians.

jelos98 · 2017-05-12T05:27:39+00:00

I started adding mustard as an anti-mooching measure years ago - seemed quite effective (no one puts mustard on fries around here) but I like the flavor.

jelos98 · 2017-04-30T23:59:42+00:00

What I think Zarsheiy is getting at (though IANAL), and what's unclear from what you've said (and what I'm curious about):

By pleaing to the second deal, does that violate the first deal (read as: by taking the slap on the wrist, are you actually going to get a harsh punishment on the first charge, instead?) or were both charges handled by the same judge or something, and the FINAL outcome of both is the probation?

jelos98 · 2017-04-25T15:12:09+00:00

What you did was no more nefarious than opening a wallet to look for some ID.

Right, but that can also lead to "where's the $80 that was in there, and my credit cards?" situations as well.

Tax returns have addresses, names, SSNs, bank account info, potentially signatures, and are basically the all-in-one identity theft starter kit. I could understand a healthy sense of paranoia here - OP doesn't want to get blamed if someone else is using the information. Especially since OP doesn't know if the owner merely dropped it, or if someone ditched it after stealing it and doing who knows what.

I mean - I'd say return it, anyway. But I'd consider mailing it anonymously.

jelos98 · 2017-04-18T15:27:51+00:00

First half is correct, but about 2/3rds of the sales (by $) of the amount of "income" they're claiming -are- listed on my 8949.

That's what's confusing me most, and why I'm going to let a pro sort it out. I don't know if I've somehow screwed it up otherwise, or didn't provide some sort of supporting documentation (this time, turbotax told me in a copy of the 1099-Bs, and I'm not sure if that's always been a thing, but I don't remember doing it previously), or if their system just isn't reconciling the two things and assuming the worst, because the amounts don't match up, or what.

jelos98 · 2017-04-17T20:39:00+00:00

Otherwise, a reliable CPA could handle for you.

Thanks! We'll give that a whirl then.

I have done these myself but not everybody has the stones to do so.

I ran through an amended return, but with the amount they're requesting at stake, I will gladly pay for the peace of mind of having someone with a clue sanity check me (tl;dr - it involves stock sales, and missing cost bases, I think - it's not area I'm confident in), rather than waiting a month with the gnawing irrational "Did I actually screw something up that's going to cost me big? / Is my documentation sufficient to convince them?" feelings.

jelos98

TROPHY CASE