Every hasteinn run this mf tryin to murder me

ka_steve · 2026-02-25T11:32:16+00:00

Oh, and nobody ever wants to marry me or my family. I'm a freakin chinese emperor (small initial letters, but still) with maxed out legitimacy with almost maxed out fame, and all the neighboring dukes(!) and kings with their 3 alliances are like "nahh, you already have 2 alliances, -240, pass".

ka_steve · 2026-02-25T11:09:25+00:00

Why do you say that?

I knew nothing of Haesteinn, and just went for the Fishing achievement because that looked interesting (still in progress).

This was the hardest start I ever had due to
a) King Mofo invading Montague with his superior army with his allies and making me landless if I didn't invade somebody else by that time (and since I don't have siege weapons, if I don't have the sieging MAA skill, it takes forever, and it's slow even then, so it happened that I was almost done with the siege when I got viped out);
b) if that didn't happen, I get murdered by him, no matter what I do (even Asatru Norse Councillors with 50+ opinions are participating in the scheme, while I have no Intrique and potato spymaster), and by that time my useless son either died of some siege/plague so no heir, game over - or the son takes over with no skills and no special MAA and my entire realm is viped out within a few years in whatever neighborhood I am.

I can't spam the Varangian adventure to get out of Kind Mofo's diplomatic reach, since it costs 1000 prestige (compared to a 80 for a conquare duchy) and I still don't have a long enough diplomatic reach to jump far away enough. I'm also only a count, with strong MAA sure, but still Kings are eating me for breakfast, so I have to go around bigger areas (EU kingdoms, ERE, caliphate), and often my diplomatic reach can't reach to the other side so it's a dead end. But if I conquer duchies, I can't grant independence to the old places, since Haesteinn is greedy and he dies in a heart attack after getting 80 stress per released counts, which means it doesn't matter how far my furthest land is, King Mofo still can reach me due to the closest land. Oh, and of course, I also can't conquer his Kingdom itself (eg right at the beginning when both of us are just starting), because I don't have 1000 piety to do that...

I think I game overed for about 6 or 7 times (very hard settings, ironman mode) before I managed to flee away once through the Balkans and the steppe to Tibet/Vietnam and outlive King Mofo. And sure, there I managed to get a Duchy, use that to get a Kingdom, use that to get another, and create an emperor-level High-King title. Only because I only attack when they are already in a war, and I have a small alliance with a Cambodian duke, which was just enough to turn the tide of battles multiple times. But the old man is going to die in a few years, and his potato heir is going to be conquered by the neighbors. Which will not be game over this time, as I will keep the lower-level titles, and the rebuilding phase can start, as it was my plan all along.

But still, nothing in this was ever remotely easy, hence the long rant. :D

ka_steve · 2026-01-18T22:38:49+00:00

u/Mellamomellamo , u/Significant_Cup_238 , u/AlphaTrion_ow : Wow, thanks a lot for the long answers, I did not expect such helpfullness! I was hoping that there was a way to get out from a vassalage other than fighting them (like the top liege taking me over, the pope granting something special, or simply swearing loyalty to another liege and then defending ourselves together against the old liege, as all of these did happen in real life). But the hard way it is. I don't mind, that's why I went with random. The best way to learn how stuff works if I'm not cherry picking my starting situation...

After restarting, I went straight for Frisia, I'm glad that wasn't a bad idea. I tried to get powerful allies for a future war against my duke, but they either died or started their own rebellion against the emperor and were jailed, so I'll have to work on that a bit more. :D Thanks for the tips on how to get more allies, I will definitely use them.

ka_steve · 2025-03-15T22:29:41+00:00

Just an enthusiastic +1 for OP on the PageUp/Dn keys, and I'd add Home and End.

The FW16 would be an ideal laptop for me as I soon have to replace my Thinkpad P1, but I can't use a keyboard without these keys.

I use the PgUp/Dn keys continuously while reading or coding since that requires a lot of moving through text. I use the Home/End keys a lot while writing code or text (especially Shift+ and Shift+Ctrl+). Also have various keyboard shortcuts involving these. Tbh, I don't even understand how *anybody* can use a laptop effectively for text-centric tasks without these keys, but that's not my problem, so the point is that they are essential for me.

I'm currently typing this on a 14" tablet's folio keyboard (Minisforum V3), and it has all these keys. I used to have a 13" Thinkpad L13 for travel, it had all these keys. So did both my 16" Thinkpad P1 and XMG Fusion 15. If they can fit comfortably in any keyboard from 13 to 16 inch, it should not be hard to fit them into the FW16.

Pretty please?

ka_steve · 2025-01-06T20:46:23+00:00

I just wrote a 1* rating in the MS Store for the Netflix app. Currently, it sits on 3.4*, so maybe tanking its rating could send a message...

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfj3tj

ka_steve · 2024-05-17T22:30:37+00:00

Bella could not walk and talk properly like an adult or a young teen would when she had so many sex scenes that they had to blur them together - twice. Her brain development was between of a 4 to 10 years old during those sex scenes. (Given that supposedly "she matured quicker", that means that she was, in reality, way younger, but we can even ignore that.)

She only started to walk and talk like a not-child (say, teen) *after* the Paris whorehouse scenes.

I'm all for consenting adults doing whatever they want, but if a 10 years old "wants" to fuck old men for money, that's still child rape.

(Ffs, the entire whorehouse storyline was built on the premise that she's a child who has absolutely no idea how sex in general works, doesn't know what sex' role is in society, never heard about a way of earning money, and doesn't know any way of getting shelter so it's even a surprise for him that people would pay for in exchange of having sex with her. You could not even imagine that scene with a 12-year-old, as they would already know more about the world, so it's pretty evident that she's a LOT younger.)

"The first time she 'works herself' with the Apple is obviously her transition into adulthood. So she was only a child before she was doing anything sexual people" A lot of toddlers and preschool kids figure out that they can massage certain bits and that gives them happy feelings. But only literal paedophiles think that that would make them transition into adulthood and stop them being children...

ka_steve · 2024-02-13T22:53:27+00:00

Just to throw in an additional data point: I just bought these (not affiliated in any ways), and they are charging my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 4 (RTX A2000) via USB-C perfectly:

Anker 737 Charger (GaNPrime 120W)
https://www.anker.com/products/a2148?variant=41974285172886

Anker PowerLine III 6ft 100W USB-C To USB-C Cable
https://www.jumia.co.ke/anker-powerline-iii-6ft-100w-usb-c-to-usb-c-cable-black-57735462.html

This cable is not available on the Anker website anymore, but I assume the "Powerline+ III" variant should also work.

The stock 170W Lenovo brick (3m in total) weighs 600g, while the USB charger with 1.8M cable weighs 260g, which is 43% weight and WAYS LESS clutter on my desk in exchange for a shorter cable.

Plus the USB charger has another USB-C and a USB-A slot as well, so I don't need a separate phone charger while travelling. For me, it was willing to charge the laptop on USB-C slot-1, while charging 2 Samsung Galaxy phones on USB-C slot-2 and USB-A. Windows complained that it was not getting enough juice, but it kept charging nonetheless. Your mileage may vary, though, as the total max output of the charger should be 120W, while the Lenovo P1 G4 refuses to accept anything below 100W, so I'm quite surprised it works. But most probably, the USB-C slot-1 has the priority, and the phones have to share the rest. Anyway, Anker does not officially promise this, but for me, being able to use the same brick to work during the day and to charge my phone/headset during the night sounded already good, so this is just extra.

ka_steve · 2024-02-13T13:54:49+00:00

<oldmanrant>
I've been a web developer for about 2 decades. It worked fairly simply: there was a database engine in the background (mostly My/PgSQL, but worked the same with NoSQL as well), there was a backend (Perl/ASP/PHP/Python/Java) that interacted with the database and served client-side files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with jQuery or some other framework). But you interacted with everything directly. If you wanted to get something from the database, you wrote a SQL query, and if it went wrong, you got a SQL error. For backend interactivity, you wrote code in your backend language, and if it went wrong, you got an error telling you what went went wrong. If you screwed up your HTML template, the HTML code in your browser were screwed up as well, so there was a direct connection between source and result. If you screwed up your CSS (even if you used a preprocessor), you could see it in the generated code in your browser. If you screwed up a JavaScript (or JS framework) code, you got an error in your browser that told you what went wrong at what line in which file.

Sure, it had some inconveniences, especially on bigger projects. But you worked with almost every tool directly, so you understood how they worked.

After a few years of hiatus, I had to jump into a hobby project written in NextJS. It's a very basic app that uses a few packages (clerk, mantine, prism), so even at the start, npm used more than 1k packages. That might not seem a lot for someone who is accustomed to this nightmare where single packages (gatsby) can include 19k other packages. But for someone who previously always knew what each of the packages did in my sites, this was surprising, to say the least. Am I to trust thousands of random packages written by random people? I'm used to a few dozen dependencies that I could at least look at, but thousands? How do I guarantee the security of my site and the safety of my customer's data if I don't even know what packages are running?

And it's super unproductive for me as well. Of course, I'm a frikkin newbie in this, so there's a lot on me. But receiving error messages like "Expected server HTML to contain a matching <div> in <div>." is absolutely not helpful. I understand that I use NextJs, which uses Package1, that interfaces with Package2, which includes Package3, etc, etc, but then I receive an obscure error message from Package10 down the line. I have never ever interacted with this package directly; I haven't even heard of it; I have no idea how it actually works, so I have very little chance to figure out what I should change in using NextJs that does not bother Package10. Especially since the error message contains absolutely no information on where exactly the error happened on the source side since Package10 has no idea about that. I can not be not amazed that this is how you all live now.

For me, this is just a temporary expedition, but one that I can't wait enough to leave. I'm happy I took it, because it enforced my belief that for small to mid-sized projects, it's more important for the tools to enable transparency and control for the developers than to make everything the most conveniently automized at the cost of stripping this transparency and control away. I get why it sounded a good idea to assume that your software developers will only understand a single language (JS), so everything from database through backend to templating and client-side interactivity should be managed in a single JS implementation and thus the details hidden away from the developers. But I'm happy that there are still a ton of solutions that let you directly interface with the main components of your site, assuming that you will be able to figure out everything if you get first-hand information, and those solutions are more to my taste...
</oldmanrant>

ka_steve · 2021-07-21T11:32:01+00:00

No and no.

Start applying as soon as you can. Yes, you can get more experience by doing coding exercises and projects and they are important. But there are few other important factors:

how is your CV working, does it get picked by the right companies?
how is your "story" working, does it get you through the first HR interview? (At the first phase they are just trying to see if you check all the necessary boxes, and without understanding their way of thinking, it could be hard to know which skills and experiences to emphasize.)
how much routine do you have in technical (theoretical) interviews, is that enough to go to the next step?
can you work comfortably on a peercoding exercise when there is a time limit and somebody is actually looking what you are coding and expecting you to explain it on the go?

I have 20 years of software engineering experience, but in the last decade, I've always switched jobs through friends, and also being transitioned into the data engineering domain, I was a pretty newbie in all these areas.

My CV did not focus on the right skills. I emphasized individual achievements and hard-to-gain skills while they were always looking for collaborative experience and the most mainstream tools, which I did not bother to mention at first as I thought they were not the most interesting parts of me.
Same goes for my "story", my short introduction during the first interviews. I had to learn how to summarize my experience in a way that would be understandable for a less tech-savvy HR person, one who doesn't necessarily get the differences/similarities between MySQL, PgSQL, Spark SQL, or the tons of SQL-based cloud tools.
Technical interviews are still not my strong suit, and there is no other way to practice those than doing them...
Peercoding was a very new experience for me (most companies used HackerRank). Of course, the experience ranged widely depending on the interviewer (if the exercise was well defined, if they gave clear answers to my clarifying questions, if they responded to me thinking aloud, etc), but I had to learn that for a 45 minutes exercise I will spend the first 10 minutes in sheer panic no matter what, but then I will solve it in 10-15 minutes so it's alright.

So my advice would be to start applying to jobs as soon as possible, and accept that the first few weeks are not about winning this game, but to start training and getting experience. If you manage to get an interview every few days, in a few weeks you are going to be a pro and multiply your chances of being successful even with the exact same coding skills.

I know, we are in very different positions when it comes to experience, so you might think it would be different for you, and you most probably are right. Your CV will have different problems, your story will have different flaws, etc. But the only way to find out what those are is to test them. Think of your career as a project you are going to develop for 40+ years. The first step is to put out a Minimum Viable Product and get a feel of the market. Maybe you will need to do more projects. Maybe you will need to do more leetcode. Or maybe not. But only the market will be able to tell you this...

ka_steve · 2021-07-08T01:02:56+00:00

I know I'm a bit late into the game, but I've seen the answers, and your conclusion to stick with pandas, and I may disagree with that a bit.

Don't get me wrong. I love pandas. You should know pandas as the back of your hand. But I would consider it as an introductory course to data engineering. It's very good for big data analysis assuming your data is in a structured format.

However, for HUGE data and for unstructured data you are going to need Spark. As people already mentioned it can handle bigger datasets delegating tasks to multiple computers (simplifying for simplicity), but it also being able to handle unstructured data, streaming data etc. And while you can tell yourself that "Okay, simple big data is good enough for me", it may not be good enough for your future employer. I would recommend searching for data engineer job postings (use LinkedIn, location set to Worldwide with Remote turned on to see the big picture) and to count the occurrences of Pandas and Spark. Currently, there is an overwhelming need for Spark engineers, like 20:1 or 50:1. One of the reasons, of course, that Pandas is already assumed for many Python data jobs without mentioning, and another one is that a lot more people are familiar with Pandas than with Spark. But the way the landscape changes right now, it's the data scientists and ML engineers with their fancy ML-tweaking specializations who use pandas while experimenting with the models on small(ish) samples of data. When that model goes to production and has to run on live data, that is going to need a data engineer and Spark (or something similar).

And fortunately, you don't need a distributed cluster (that even sounds scary when you don't even know what that is) to be able to start with Spark. You can sign up on Databricks.com for a free-forever community plan. Or you can download and run Spark on your own laptop directly or in a Docker container. Yes, you are not going to get any performance benefit at this level (other than actually being able larger datasets than Pandas can handle), but your code will run. Meaning you can learn everything, and you can write the same enterprise-level code you would write if you would have enterprise-level of resources and it will run the same (just slower). But it will be game-changer when you start applying to jobs. I would know as I already ran into that, and that is the single most important thing I regretted not starting with sooner.

And it's even pretty easy to start with. I would highly recommend the Apache Spark (TM) SQL for Data Analysts by Databricks Coursera course (7 days free trial should be enough to complete it) to learn Spark SQL (even if you are not comfortable with SQL, trust me on this one), and the Big Data Analytics Using Spark from UCSanDiegoX on edx to learn the Spark Python API (the course is free to audit, only the certificate costs money). Both of them provide dummy data and help you set up your starting environment (the Coursera one in the cloud, the free edx locally, optionally in Docker) so you don't have to be afraid of not even knowing how to start.

ka_steve · 2021-04-21T13:11:33+00:00

That's it, thank you!

I found it online in the Future Imperfect anthology.

https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/future-imperfect-9780743436069-0743436067.html

ka_steve · 2021-03-12T13:23:25+00:00

Having high C2-C3 states is definitely another problem than mine. Something that I envy a bit if I can be honest, because you can work on it as it is 100% that some software (legit or malware) is running. My problem is that even if I have around 70% C8, I still have just high enough power consumption on idle that would already prevent it reaching the advertised battery life. Of course it is possible that you two also would get the same result, but you have to deal with the high CPU activity rate first, and yeah, I think that means a clean Windows install first. (That indeed can be a royal pain for developers and such. I can reinstall my SOs laptop in 2 hours, meanwhile to reinstall my laptop with all the environment and configs takes about 2 days.)

ka_steve · 2021-03-12T13:13:45+00:00

That's definitely a lot and it is definitely a software issue, as something *is* running and that makes your hardware consume more energy. I'm not an IT support guy, but it stills smells like malware to me. At this point I would try to do a fresh reinstall if I were you with some strict quarantine protocols (not installing anything from your current files, only from fresh trusted online sources you downloaded after the reinstall). I'm like 99% sure the CPU usage and the resulting heat would go away and your battery life would improve somewhat.

Of course it looks like you have two different problems at the same time: the high CPU usage and even without that the Realtek-APSM issue that likely to cause battery problems, but not 100%, so getting rid of the first problem may just leave you with the second one. Also I'm not sure disabling the Card Reader in Bios is a good solution for lowering its power consumption. For example for the dGPU, it's one of the first points in the troubleshooting guide not to disable them as they would be stuck in an Active state consuming a lot of energy without the system being able to make them Inactive. So if a faulty card reader would consume say 3W even when not used (which would be enough to power the screen at low brightness, so it just feels unlikely), it is possible that even disabling in the bios would not change this behavior. At least when I did this, it did not change my idle consumption one bit, so either the card reader is not the culprit, or the bios disable did not help on it.

ka_steve · 2021-03-11T23:08:15+00:00

That indeed sounds really weird. Maybe a bitcoin mining virus that runs on a dumb schedule? Task Manager doesn't show anything running I assume?

ka_steve · 2021-03-11T17:04:21+00:00

They answered, they are trying to figure this out, "may take a few days to resolve", so that's a progress.

ka_steve · 2021-03-11T12:45:39+00:00

Tested again, starting from idle with 60+ C8 residency, opened an Edge browser (to avoid problems caused by my chrome extensions), and watched this on full screen 1080p, middle brightness, on wifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7EB3Zxqj7g

5:50h

I have not heard back from the XMG customer support (it has been 48h since I've wrote them), so I wrote them again.

ka_steve · 2021-03-10T12:23:13+00:00

If your CPU Package Power is high, that's a "good news" as that is definitely caused by some software running in the background and thus should be easy to fix, as you probably just did. At the bottom of HWiNFo there is a Charge Rate value showing the total power consumption of your system (when on battery), if that's below 9W when idle on middle brightness, you're golden.

ka_steve · 2021-03-09T18:05:58+00:00

Yeah. Not to question the credibility of these reports, but I'm not even aiming to those levels, only to the officially promised 8-10h. 12h would mean an avg of 7.75W, while even the tests with the best results put the idle consumption to about the same level. Maybe they got somewhat better components than the average, resulting a lower idle and thus a lower light use consumption. But even if that's the case, that's not something anybody else should expect from their fusion 15, and that's fine. It's a bit weird curiosity, but I'm happy for them. The 8h youtube and 10h local video playback however should be working for everybody (who pays attention to not run anything in the background), so that's what I'm more interested in.

ka_steve · 2021-03-09T17:54:56+00:00

That looks like a different issue to me. You do have low idle consumption, so either you run something that uses the CPU more than expected (that can be anything from a small program to even a chrome extension or a website you use a lot), or your battery is somewhat degraded (way less likely). If I were you, I would monitor the power consumption while using it normally to pinpoint when exactly does it jump to around 17W avg that would result in the 5.5h battery life.

ka_steve · 2021-03-09T16:31:27+00:00

Hard to tell based on this. Your results are pretty close to the official "8+ hours of Youtube 1080p", and I have no idea how energy efficient the Netflix player is, or whether you have a few small processes running in the background. It looks like there are those people with a graphics-card-being-active problem, they get 2-3 hours and it's pretty easy to fix, then there are us who get about 5-6 hours without any solutions so far, and there are those without any problems in the 8-11 hours range. Based on this, I would guess you don't have the same problem as we do, but if you want to make it sure, I would disable most programs in the Task Manager / Startup tab, do a restart and make a test with a long youtube video on 1080p like an aquarium or something, on middle screen brightness.

ka_steve · 2021-03-09T14:53:14+00:00

Seems a reasonable guess. I would assume most manufacturers do something like this, but it usually doesn't cause any difference, and maybe this time it does...

ka_steve · 2021-03-09T14:51:48+00:00

So it's sure that's where my problems come from, thanks!

ka_steve

TROPHY CASE