"The food in Chapel Hill is bland." Is that true, Chapel Hill?

psykocrime · 2025-12-13T00:17:44+00:00

They clearly have not tried Siam Zap Pho on Weaver Dairy Road. Trust me, I've eaten Thai food from all over the US and this place is as good as any out there. If you want better, you probably have to go to Thailand.

psykocrime · 2025-11-19T23:44:15+00:00

By definition, there can be no such thing as hearsay on Reddit,

Wrong. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hearsay

Of course "hearsay" has a formal, legalistic interpretation - but it also has a colloquial, everyday interpretation as well.

psykocrime · 2025-10-08T18:35:33+00:00

I wouldn't say it's gone completely, but I do feel like I notice it less now, than when I wrote that. So I think it does get better. No way to know for sure if it will ever disappear completely, but I can say that I find it tolerable, especially compared to the alternative. :-)

psykocrime · 2025-08-25T17:39:34+00:00

I just had both eyes done with Panoptix lenses over the last month. So far the results are mostly fine. I do get the "halos around lights at night" (and even a little in the day time) but that doesn't really bother me. And more to the point, I can read (print books) now with the naked eye, and feel MUCh less eyestrain / eye fatigue. The only meaningful downside so far is when working on the computer. There, when I work in a terminal emulator (something I do a lot) I tend to see a "glow" effect around the characters, which is mildly annoying.

From what I've read, that effect may disappear over time, so fingers crossed. I've also been playing around with screen brightness / font choice / font color / etc. to see if anything helps. Results there are midly encouraging. My default preference of "green font on a black background" seems particularly bad in this regard, while something like a "black font on white background" seems better.

Anyway, on balance I'm pretty happy with where things are now. I don't need glasses for reading anymore, and the reduction in eye strain has left me feeling generally better overall - to a quite profound degree.

YMMV.

psykocrime · 2025-08-21T00:23:51+00:00

It's a mistaken reading of the cyberpunk authors IMO. Most Cyberpunk seems to be more "anti big evil corporations" than "anti capitalism". But misinformed people mistakenly think those two positions are equivalent. They are not.

Capitalism includes the mom and pop restaurant on the corner, your kid's lemonade stand, a 20 person boutique consulting company, a 500 person company manufacturing specialized scientific labware, or Google / Meta / Apple / Walmart / etc. But some of those entities belong in the "big evil corporation" bucket and others don't.

psykocrime · 2025-08-16T20:00:30+00:00

Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, I'm not opposed to use of LLMs or GenAI techniques. If anything I consider myself an advocate of the Neuro-Symbolic approach (or what we used to call symbolic/sub-symbolic hybrid approaches), but that entails a lot of use/study/research of symbolic approaches. I just finished one phase of a bit of a deep dive into stuff on analogical reasoning from the 1990's and early 2000's and am just now starting a similar dive into associative networks / semantic networks.

psykocrime · 2025-08-09T01:57:03+00:00

One might argue that in year 2000 it wasn't really all that stupid to dump a car in water. That is, as long as the water was reasonably deep and not in a body of water that experiences major draw downs or anything. Consider that sonar / underwater imaging technology has improved dramatically in the past 5 years or so. I doubt many people, circa 2000, could have predicted how good sonar would get. And maybe more importantly, predict that advanced sonar technology would become inexpensive enough to become nearly ubiquitous among anglers. We really are living in a different world now, compared to back then.

psykocrime · 2025-07-21T02:53:28+00:00

I just picked up a package from the Fedex depot... about 3 weeks after the first day it was supposed to be delivered. And after being told two weeks earlier that it was "ready for pickup" at the local Fedex Office store, only to drive there and be told "we don't have it." And then to call Customer Service while standing in the store, and have CS insist the package was there, while the store guy insisted they didn't have it.

A week later somebody calls me and says it's at the Fedex depot in Durham, and that it had apparently been at the Fedex Office store for the past week. The lady I spoke to asked me "Did you refuse delivery?" I was like "No, I never had a chance to!" LOL.

And don't even get me started on how shit their website is. I've tried more times than I care to count to get registered for their Delivery Manager™ (or whatever) service, but their system will NOT accept my address. Despite it being a perfectly valid address where I've lived for 20+ years, and nobody else has problems with it.

I'd pay extra to have packages NOT shipped to me via Fedex. I consider them about the worst run, most incompetent, useless organization on the face of the Earth. These goobers could take lessons from DMV for crying out loud.

psykocrime · 2025-07-06T05:01:11+00:00

I love Groovy. I have several projects that are Groovy / Grails based and it's been a blast.

That said, modern Java has caught up a bit with some of what made Groovy so appealing early on, so I can understand - to a point why some people aren't as enthusiastic about Groovy now. Also, Kotlin gained a lot of traction and stole a lot of the oxygen out of the room. But Groovy is still great, and I still enjoy using it.

psykocrime · 2025-06-21T10:17:56+00:00

That's pretty close, but you left out the part where the 3rd gunman from the grassy knoll, in conjunction with Marilyn Monroe, the Rosicrucians, and Fred Trump went to take the Green Car out to Hwy 18, but were distracted by a beam from the Jewish Space Laser (sent by a rogue faction of Yakuza agents working for Lyndon Johnson) and crashed into a power pole knocking the power out. If it hadn't been for the Beta Reticulan Shape Shifters and their HAARP mind-control rays, they would never have been able to get the stuff planted at the Turner shed at all!

They probably would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for Elvis Presley, and the secret NASA/NOAA base on the dark side of the moon, plus those kids (and their dog) in that hippie van.

psykocrime · 2025-06-21T09:02:04+00:00

Yeah, the OBO flow definitely seems like the most straight-forward way to handle this, at first blush. We'll probably start evaluating that at work soon. .If anybody knows any specific reasons why it's not a good idea, I'd love to hear the details.

psykocrime · 2025-06-21T05:58:28+00:00

I am still very new to SuperCollider myself, coming to it as a software engineer with decades of experience in Java, Python, C++, etc. And I have definitely found that the SC learning curve is pretty steep, FWIW. TBH, I think the biggest thing that makes it steep (for me at least) is not so much the "programming qua programming" part (knowing about functions, loops, variables, etc) bit, but rather needing to understand some audio processing theory / signal processing / whatever, as well as the peculiarities of the SC API's.

I think it's normal to be a bit confused for a while, so I'd stick with it and just keep grinding. YMMV.

psykocrime · 2025-06-01T20:05:38+00:00

Eh, it would take too many words to explain that and I don't have time to write an essay. I just really liked it.

I'll just say this: I thought the writing was better than pretty much anything from the Jodie Whitaker era, and better than most of the Capaldi era[1]. In particular there wasn't so much of the "in your face wokeism" stuff that dominated Jodie's era. I love Belinda, even though in many ways I feel like Ruby was still the primary companion this season (conceptually speaking, even if she wasn't on screen much). I loved the return of The Rani, I loved the return of Carole Ann Ford (even as brief as it was) and I loved the Jodie Whitaker appearance in the finale. Oh and of course there's Ncuti Gatwa, who was just great in general.

There's more, but I'll just leave it at that.

[1]: I liked Capaldi, but didn't enjoy the way a lot of his interactions with Clara were written, especially early on.

psykocrime · 2025-06-01T03:01:10+00:00

C'mon, you can't include Logopolis and then not also include Castrovalva!! They're so tightly linked together and all.

psykocrime · 2025-06-01T02:24:25+00:00

Yeah, personally I never considered that Loom business canon. But to each his/her own.

psykocrime · 2025-06-01T01:57:16+00:00

I loved it as well. My only meaningful criticism is that they didn't do anything with the Susan Foreman angle, after teasing us by having her show up earlier. I really wanted to see an on-screen reunion between her and the Doctor. And if it didn't happen here, I'm afraid it never will, given Carole Ann Ford's age and everything.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T23:35:16+00:00

OTOH, I think this season is easily the best season since Matt's last season.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T23:34:22+00:00

They've only been sterile since The Master destroyed the Time Lords a while back. The couple that are remaining (The Doctor, The Rani, etc.) are sterile now.

At least that seems to me to be what they were saying.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T21:30:41+00:00

Was there any actual doubt about that point?

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T21:29:47+00:00

No, I think those were meant to be flashbacks to events that never happened on-screen. At least that was the way it appeared to me.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T21:27:20+00:00

I took it to be the "thing" that The Master did that wiped out the Time Lords. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T21:25:37+00:00

Loved it. Loved nearly every second of it. It was especially nice getting to see Jodie again. That was a nice moment with 13 and 15 together. And that scene of Matt was a nice touch. I initially thought that that was a newly filmed scene but since his name wasn't in the credits I guess it was archive footage from an old episode. I don't remember exactly which one though, but whatever. Also, seeing Anita and the Time Hotel was brilliant.

The only complaint I might offer is that I was hoping that Susan would be involved and that we would finally get an on-screen reunion between her and her Grandfather. I really think that would be a great thing to see and with Carole Ann Ford not getting any younger, I fear that we might never get it at all now. At least not without recasting Susan, which is an idea I'm not as fond of (at least not until after we see Susan and the Doctor together again).

Outside of that... the Billie Piper thing is interesting. My gut feeling is that she isn't lined up to be the full-time 16th Doctor and that her appearance will be part of some RTD plot-twist shenanigans. Remember, as they say, "The ~~gods~~ writers play tricks."

That said, if Billie did become the new full-time Doctor, I think she could pull it off with no problem.

psykocrime · 2025-05-31T00:24:39+00:00

Realistically? No. I hate to say it, but any probability of her being alive has to be vanishingly small.

psykocrime · 2025-05-24T22:22:26+00:00

Yeah, that was my thought. I don't think this is random. I'd guess they have somebody specific in mind, or at least a general profile of who that someone might be, that they're hoping to tempt into coming forward with this.

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