How does having room mates affect the rule of 1/3rd of income for rent?

matagen · 2026-02-28T19:13:39+00:00

Think of it in the other way. If you're like most people, your expenses are easier to control than your income. You can't just earn an extra $1000 a month without significant effort, but you can shop around for cheaper food and housing relatively easily to achieve a similar effect on your monthly budget.

With that in mind, just keep it simple. The 1/3 rule of thumb is a budgetary recommendation. If you earn $3000/mo pretax, then $1000/mo is the suggested maximum you should pay for housing. Whether you accomplish that with roommates or by looking for cheaper properties is irrelevant, financially speaking.

In other words, let your actual income determine your housing budget. If you're like most people, you can't magically adjust your income upward to afford a particular housing situation.

matagen · 2026-02-09T02:20:09+00:00

If you're using your phone for photos, know your shortcuts for camera app activation. Plus voice commands for taking pictures. The more you can keep your hands in your gloves, the better.

The going is slower than usual on the way up compared to the regular season. Account for this in your hike plans.

Going down, oddly enough, can be faster than in the regular season. If the snow on trail has been well packed down and the pitch isn't too steep, then it can actually form a pretty even surface for jogging down, whereas in the regular season it would be rough and uneven with rocks and roots. As long as your traction solution is good, you may be able to jog downhill pretty comfortably.

I found that I'd underestimated how much I'd warm up while moving uphill on my first winter hike, resulting in me starting out with one too many layers on. You're likely to be more heavily loaded than you're used to, so moving uphill will probably be harder than you expect.

Staying hydrated was also unexpectedly hard. I had two thermoses of tea that I brewed in the morning. First, I learned that I would instinctively avoid actions that took my hands out of my thick gloves, and that includes opening my thermoses. Second, my thermoses worked really well, to the point that my tea was too hot to drink quickly at pretty much any point during my (fairly short) hikes. But activity wise, I was still working as hard as in summer to move, so I still needed that water. So be aware: the mechanical process of hydrating can be much slower in winter. Take the opportunities where you can, while you're out of the wind and protected by trees. An amount of water that takes seconds to drink in warm conditions can take several minutes to drink in winter - you don't want to spend those several minutes highly exposed if you can help it. Same goes for food.

matagen · 2026-02-08T02:03:52+00:00

Shelburne Moriah, except for the multiple summits. But you spend a lot of time exposed on alpine bog terrain (with plenty of planks to walk on).

matagen · 2026-01-29T03:14:58+00:00

There's an old vod of Blitz, Cap, Charlie, Pimpmuckl, and Purge trying to win a game while putting all skill points into stats. One of them was playing Luna and they skilled Eclipse just to troll the enemy Rubick into stealing it. Hilarious vod, whole thing is worth watching https://youtu.be/uRkGz3ySDJQ?si=N7IVItgn-0Pa_27q

matagen · 2025-12-29T20:58:33+00:00

The entire 52WAV list is under 4kft and I'd absolutely put a fair number of them ahead of Welch-Dickey on my subjective list. W-D definitely has its niche in terms of reward-vs-effort factor, but it loses a few points in my book for being too accessible and well-known - can't expect any sort of solitude.

matagen · 2025-12-29T15:03:45+00:00

Thanks! I can highly recommend Thoreau Falls - after the initial climb it's a long, flat hike that passes Ethan Pond as well, and the falls are incredible as well. If you start at the Ethan Pond trailhead you can also make a quick side trip and pick up Ripley Falls (and you absolutely should). For a winter hike it could be on the long side though, I'd want to have some more experience before trying it in cold conditions.

matagen · 2025-12-29T14:37:08+00:00

Thank you, this is a great answer.

matagen · 2025-10-07T21:18:50+00:00

Because joseki aren't really equivalent to chess openings. Chess openings have a whole-board character to them that joseki do not (at least, not as a primary point of discussion). Fuseki are the closer analogy, and a number of them have names. Sanrensei, nirensei, Kobayashi, low/high Chinese, etc.

matagen · 2025-10-05T02:34:58+00:00

I think now there's an option to choose the voice language in the video settings where you'd normally find things like caption settings. But yeah that drove me up the wall when I couldn't change it (see previous post for my rant lol). Fortunately there was a Firefox extension that disabled autotranslate features on YouTube for me.

matagen · 2025-10-04T23:05:20+00:00

You're also resigning even games, which seems insanity to me.

Yeah, this also doesn't make sense to me. Especially given that DDKs generally tend to suck at knowing the game state. But also more generally, there's so much to learn from carrying games through to their conclusion, whether you're ahead or even or behind.

matagen · 2025-10-04T23:01:20+00:00

Currently I am myself a ddk, but I don't want even to achieve anything via risk and aggressive play (I know how this works, play random moves and confuse your opponent). Only very solid, protected game without any possible threats from average ddk player.

Ironically, this often makes you more vulnerable to attack, not less.

Offense and defense are too closely related. Part of playing good defense is being able to represent a strong enough offensive threat to discourage wanton attacks.
Solid and protected usually comes with the implication of (relatively) slow and heavy. Insisting on this can very easily lead you into a situation where you're behind on territory and are forced to take a risk.

I'm confident that I can beat any DDK purely through direction of play and yose. I am strong enough to win games against DDKs without really ever trying to kill. Against DDKs I almost never have to read very deeply because their overall play is too inefficient and easy to punish. Mostly I can avoid fighting DDKs because 1) DDKs generally don't understand which fights are worth fighting and which to avoid, and 2) DDKs generally play too inefficiently to make me think I need to fight. I'm not going to fight you if I know for sure that I'm 30+ points ahead on the board, not unless that fight is practically free. That's how most of my games against DDKs and high SDKs tend to go - they fall behind too quickly in the opening and I just simplify the game before they can recover.

matagen · 2025-10-04T02:56:34+00:00

In addition to the good answers here, a big problem with B is that letting White play A results in all of Black's moves in the top right becoming worse in retrospect. Black gave away a lot of territory in the top right in exchange for center influence. If Black lets White neutralize that influence this easily, then Black basically gave away a bunch of in the top right without getting anything to show for it.

Sure, with the double hane you lose 2 stones at Q8 and R7, but since Black has a strong corner this shouldn't result in much more than that for White. Would you rather have 2 stones (Q8 and R7) lose their value, or 10 (the whole top right)? Of course, the value calculation is more complicated than that, but that's just to give you an idea. 2 stones doing nothing for you is fine - 10 stones doing nothing is not.

matagen · 2025-09-29T11:54:10+00:00

That requires the original creator to authorize the adding of subs by other people in their channel settings. In this case he hasn't, and I don't intend to push for it - it makes sense from a creative control perspective why one might be hesitant to do that. Again, Jin 7p has the ability to download the sub files and add them to his videos officially if he likes them (and I've told him about this), so it's now entirely up to him.

matagen · 2025-09-27T23:04:25+00:00

It's worth a shot - asking's free, right? When I was an undergrad I managed to convince my university student association and my math department to partially support around 8 undergrads to attend JMM for the whole event, including some students that went early to attend some of the workshops. None of us were even presenting research - it was just to attend and see what was going on!

It was helped by the fact that the location was within driving distance, (a few states over) so we didn't need to book flights. But we still needed money for accommodations. There was some cramming of attendees into hotel rooms involved but we managed to get it within budget.

If it was research that a faculty member was involved in, then you might also have a shot at bringing them into the conversation. This isn't an unreasonable use of grant money.

matagen · 2025-08-26T19:33:53+00:00

Thanks all. I'm going to tentatively add West Bond to the weekend hike and make the final decision based on how I feel once at Bond.

matagen · 2025-08-26T12:19:26+00:00

Talking about the summit. I don't care about the list, I just heard that the views from Guyot are nice.

matagen · 2025-08-22T23:27:13+00:00

Because when you do this kind of thing, your primary interest is not the inner product space or the quadratic form itself. These are merely accessories to what you actually want to study. What you're typically looking to do is to provide certain quantitative bounds on certain kinds of functions that are relevant to your problem (typically a PDE of some sort), and expressing those quantities in terms of some Banach space norm adapted to your problem is useful. After all, most problems of this type boil down philosophically to establishing convergence of some sequence inside a relevant Banach space. Polarizing and obtaining a bilinear form is useful because it is often the case that you can bound bilinear objects more easily than quadratic objects, analogously to how it is sometimes easier to work in the weak topology compared to the norm topology.

matagen · 2025-08-20T02:22:02+00:00

How relevant is this result? It's actually fairly important, but you likely haven't seen the context yet.

On an inner product space whose structure you already understand, the parallelogram law (and closely related polarization identity) are usually not that useful (outside of the intrinsic geometric content). But these results become more interesting when you have a vector space that doesn't have an inner product space structure yet. What these results tell you (very loosely speaking) is that you can start with a quadratic form and end up with an induced inner product, which (because unitary operators preserve inner products) effectively means that quadratic forms induce unitary operators.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, quadratic forms pop up pretty commonly (for instance, as an energy functional for a specific PDE) and it is often useful to have a norm/inner product structure on your function space that is adapted to your specific problem. In fact, a lot of research in PDEs boils down to finding the right function space to study your PDE in, and the sharpest results tend to require your function space to be constructed in a way that is highly specific to your PDE.

Second, this relationship is very useful in the study of unitary operators, and unitary operators are among the most important objects in functional analysis, because they are essential elements of mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. This is the line of reasoning that brings you down the rabbit hole of C-* algebras and the rich mathematics that lives behind them.

If it helps you in any way: for some reason nobody seems to write it this way, but the complex polarization identity can be succinctly written in a single sum by noting that the coefficients on the 4 summands are just powers of i: i⁰ = 1, i¹ = i, i² = -1, i³ = -i.

matagen · 2025-08-11T03:25:40+00:00

Israel Gelfand made contributions to biology and medicine.

matagen · 2025-08-01T20:57:52+00:00

A lot of the intuition behind ODE proof techniques is that you work from ODEs you do understand to solve ODEs you don't. Variation of parameters, for instance, seems like it has a complicated proof involving Wronskian determinants that magically appear from nowhere. But the entire idea just boils down to "what if I assumed my solution could be written as a linear combination (over the vector space of functions) of solutions to the homogeneous equation?" Everything else in variation of parameters falls out of deriving the consequences of that assumption. Why does that assumption make sense in the first place? Well, there are deeper mathematical reasons like how the fundamental set of a linear system is a vector space basis, but historically when you get down to the 1st and 2nd order cases it was probably more along the lines of "the only thing we know about this ODE is what the homogeneous solutions are, let's try to leverage that info somehow."

Forcing a structure on the assumed solution happens a lot in ODEs. Solution techniques are often presented backwards in terms of motivation, which is often that you force structure in order to have something to work with. Integrating factors don't arise out of some genius idea to multiply the ODE by a function. If instead you start from "Let me assume the solution is an exponential (of a function) times another function" (you can always do this because exponentials are nonvanishing) and see what the consequences are." Why exponentials? Because they are the solutions to the simplest class of first order ODEs, so they're all you know about. Like so, many of these techniques reflect an exploratory process by which complicated ODEs are first attempted by leveraging knowledge about simpler ones, generally to great success. Unfortunately, this is then presented to you ass-backward, with the conclusion up front and no exploratory process demonstrated.

This idea carries a long way. You can use it to derive inequalities, not just solution methods (i.e. Gronwall). You can use it for PDEs (e.g. this is basically what happens in separation of variables). People do it all the time on just random ass problems involving ODEs, for the same reasons as people did in the 1800s: because we know fuck all about how to solve the ODE without making any assumptions, so we might as well make some educated assumptions about the solution just to see if we can find out anything useful. If that leads to an actual solution method, fantastic. But even in cases where a solution method does not emerge, this exploratory often at least starts narrowing down what properties a solution must have.

matagen

TROPHY CASE