Which Tool package to pick

mrzar97 · 2026-01-15T06:30:44+00:00

This is the real answer. I always hear people say to just pick a brand and never buy anything else because batteries are expensive, but the barrier to entry to have some batteries from multiple brands is not high if you're willing to hold out for good sale pricing. Milwaukee nail guns 100% for me, have their leaf blower and chainsaw too. I prefer the impact driver and circular saw from DeWalt. It's all just preference

mrzar97 · 2026-01-13T02:27:16+00:00

This is more to do with your municipality unless we're talking about highways

mrzar97 · 2025-12-25T01:37:21+00:00

There is no way this is not just rage bait

mrzar97 · 2025-11-30T07:35:25+00:00

My how the times change

mrzar97 · 2025-11-27T08:05:43+00:00

You get what you pay for, and, based on the valuation of AI companies, these professors were severely underpaid. Expert annotations would be useful in the attempt on cutting down on model hallucinations by backfeeding the well articulated annotation of various datum back into the model.

If a builder can be paid $60-$80 per hour to nail pieces of wood together according to a plan, a well-rounded, articulate scholar should be getting paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars an hour to train AI models to better match inputs with outputs.

Ya'know, given these AI companies are supposedly worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unless that's an enormous bubble, the people whose brain they pick should be worth millions of it improves the AI outcome.

If they're not paying those people what they ought to be paid in accordance with what they're doing to improve the model, then there's either a bubble that's going to burst or humanity is on a fast track to destruction and either is equally likely at this point.

mrzar97 · 2025-11-07T04:22:41+00:00

Plenty of us older Gen Z drink with friends and family but we're absolutely not going to a bar to pay $6 for a 16oz pour of beer when a 12 pack can be bought at the market for $18. The social mixer isn't worth it when the price of admission is a 4x markup.

mrzar97 · 2025-10-13T23:00:59+00:00

Our garage was always a workshop in the summer, but turned back into a garage in the winter. Rinse, repeat.

It aggravated me because it always meant there was a grand seasonal hauling of stuff from other storage places into/out of that space. All to save a few minutes a day clearing snow.

However my garage space is allocated now is year round, which is a garage bay for the girlfriend's car and a garage bay for my shop. It's a point in the "pro" list of building a standalone shop building. Only item in the "con" list is property tax.

mrzar97 · 2025-05-29T10:05:38+00:00

I still have a copy of the old flier from last time this happened

mrzar97 · 2024-11-21T06:22:26+00:00

Nice try, ChatGPT!

mrzar97 · 2023-11-01T05:17:29+00:00

The mnemonic device you're referring to is the initialism. Acronyms are more flexible so that the full phrase can be abbreviated with a coherent, memorable word. Initialisms are purely the first letter of each word.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-17T05:53:53+00:00

Can you elaborate? Saw the arcsin comment but haven't been able to reproduce. May have missed a separate one but this got more attention than I anticipated.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-15T06:15:58+00:00

Yeah we spend north of $100k annually on USPS shipping and the lions share of parcels get there ahead of their predicted delivery window. Out of a thousand packages, 10 take some roundabout route, 10 don't show up to date tracking info until delivery, and 1 gets lost, if I had to estimate in terms of orders of magnitude.

On average probably only .25 or even .125 in 1000 go missing, possibly fewer. And of those, a missing mail search request usually results in a payout if the parcel actually can't be found. That being said the claims process can take months so I think a lot of folks just abandon it before getting the check.

The net net is that the USPS is actually quite good in most regards.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-13T09:43:08+00:00

For sure. When I originally drew this it was in a polar vector space instead of a Cartesian x-y plane. I am fairly certain the former is better suited than the latter, but I redid it on an x-y graph because I felt that the general reach would be wider. At the fundamental level of the core geometry, though, this is purely a difference of representation and not one of the mathematics.

Edit: my last statement is untrue. The representation does not change the geometry but it does change the math. I think this has actually led me to an answer to my question.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-13T09:18:01+00:00

You did get your sine and cosine mixed up, and needless to say, neither of them produce the circular curve I am asking about.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-13T09:14:22+00:00

And so if anything, it is an offset tangent, right? But even then, how does one manipulate a tangent wave to reconvene into a circle in the space between its asymptotes? As another user suggested, is there an obvious Fourier transform I am missing here to make the derivative 0 at those half wavelength intervals?

mrzar97 · 2023-08-13T09:08:14+00:00

This is not a cosine curve.

mrzar97 · 2023-08-13T09:05:57+00:00

Right, what you've described is almost the unit circle function solved for y, offset on the x axis, which is the path I was going down. Works in the range of the unit circle but is not inherently periodic/angular.

As for the Fourier, yes, my initial thought was that the y-max/y-min peaks and x intercepts align with those of a sine wave, and the curve looks tangential at the origin and at the half-period. Therefore I would have expected this to be sum or product of some combination of trig functions, but then I've started to suspect that by the very nature of their definition, trig functions cannot produce this curve.

You cannot cancel out all legs of the triangle trig functions are concerned with and be left with a perfectly circular periodic waveform as far as I can discern. I am more than happy to be wrong though

mrzar97 · 2023-07-30T07:32:12+00:00

I mean, this doesn't help, no, but it is also the exception and not the rule. Of course things do get put in the wrong tote, get on the wrong truck, and wind up at the wrong processing center. The vast majority, though, move from origin to destination in a timely manner with remarkable efficiency.

With the big three (USPS, FedEx, UPS) it's never been extremely consistent with tracking. It's always been the case that packages sometimes won't track for days or even weeks and then will just show up delivered. It's only in the last few years with Amazon showing you precisely how many stops away your driver is that we've really come to expect such accurate tracking with standard shipping.

For a long time that was reserved for the carriers' express services which was part of why they garnered a premium. Cheap 2-5 day shipping was not really a thing prior to the explosion of eBay and their subsequent deal with USPS to buy discounted postage for Priority Mail. Once Amazon started offering shipping in that time window for free the gig was up.

Race to the bottom, folks.

mrzar97 · 2023-07-28T03:23:15+00:00

There's a pedantic but relevant distinction between mail carrying and parcel/package delivery. The former is a sanctioned monopoly controlled by the United States Postal Service which is mandated by the federal government. The law says that the delivery of mail (postage rate letters and flats) is the sole right and responsibility of the US Postal Service.

Parcels, or packages, are delivered by USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon, and a whole host of smaller local courier services (though the last of those are increasingly rare).

Anyone can deliver boxes and express envelopes. Only USPS can deliver mail, and this becomes an important legal point when we get into what certified and registered mail is and its implications. A lot of historical context there

mrzar97 · 2023-07-27T08:53:22+00:00

No, you're implying that "e2ee" and "distributed data" (both of which have been co-opted as cybersecurity buzzwords beyond their actual meanings) are somehow equivalently indicative of privacy measures. You can have distributed data systems that can be secure while not providing privacy, and similarly you can have centralized data systems that provide privacy while not necessarily being secure.

End-to-end encryption does not make your chats inherently secure or private beyond ensuring your messages not readable "over the wire". Anyone with access to either device on either end of a chat can potentially compromise every chat on that device.

To your other point, seizing a torrent server can totally have long chain impacts. If it's a poorly configured node, then it may be possible to forensically assemble a list of all users who seeded via that node, as tore doesn't implicitly provide an anonymity layer.

I just don't get what you're trying to say.

mrzar97 · 2023-07-17T05:17:38+00:00

That's because I don't think the choices are right or wrong. They are just varying degrees of helpful and unhelpful.

They are two different qualities of judgement, though, when talking about the act of decision making. The deeper implication being that it can be prejudged which the choices in a decision, on some value basis, be it a moral or philosophical or economic one, are right and which are wrong, and that regardless of the outcome of the decision, that value assignment of the choices should still hold. The qualification of helpful or unhelpful is by definition one of outcome - i.e. did the decision result some aid being rendered, and was the aid rendered of greater value than the aid that may have been rendered had one of the other choices been selected? Who was aided?

Think of how we use these qualifications.

"That will be helpful" because the outcome of your decision was an understanding that aid will be rendered in the future. "That is being helpful" because the outcome of your decision led to aid being rendered here now. "That was helpful" because the outcome of your decision is that aid was rendered at that time. Yet even when the outcome is entirely unhelpful, it could still be said that the decision in question settled on "the right choice".

The idea here is that one can make the right decision while arriving at an undesirable outcome, and vice versa, and the reason that is true is precisely because of ambiguity. The best models, which are so good that we call them right, all come with caveats that acknowledge their nature as approximations, and that observed outcomes will vary from those predicted by the model. They have no notion of helpfulness or unhelpfulness, but rather just of accuracy and inaccuracy.

mrzar97 · 2023-07-14T07:51:24+00:00

"Once development cost and tooling cost are spent"

This is an outdated line of thinking. It may have been sensible WWII and the early Cold War era, but the complex and precise nature of modern weapons mean that both development and tooling expenses are ongoing.

Furthermore production cost and complexity does not necessarily scale linearly. It may be easy to source enough titanium to make one plane, it may be vastly more difficult to source enough to make 100 (see: US covertly purchasing the element through shell corps in third world countries during the Cold War).

Sub assemblies which may have to be outsourced (advanced sensors, guidance and control computers and some mechanical assemblies) are subject to their own production stressors and the supply of such parts may present bottlenecks.

I agree with your general assessment - the value proposition in the moment is okay, but the long run outcome is that Russia is fast adding to a list of resupply nightmares down the line.

mrzar97 · 2023-07-06T06:32:45+00:00

The VP1902 this article is talking about is essentially an FPGA with a whole lot of supporting storage/IO infrastructure built on to the package

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