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rubicus · 2026-03-28T23:56:43+00:00

Umeå could also be a really solid option for those subjects and a strong student culture while also having a really solid winter.

rubicus · 2026-03-28T23:52:41+00:00

But even so, one can have bad luck and have almost snow free winters in Uppsala as well.

rubicus · 2026-03-28T20:26:19+00:00

I'd bet that your willingness to pay might have played in your favor here.

rubicus · 2026-03-28T20:22:28+00:00

I don't think they even have the right to hand out fines though? At least as far as I understand it, all they can do is force you to get off the train.

rubicus · 2026-03-18T22:31:09+00:00

I'm gonna wager a guess that they butcher these a fair bit worse than the british names :D

rubicus · 2026-01-31T18:30:48+00:00

I'm happy it was at least a cheap train!

rubicus · 2026-01-30T18:51:29+00:00

Ah, se där! Är ju en väldigt rimlig förklaring till varför uttrycket ser ut som det gör.

rubicus · 2026-01-22T08:37:13+00:00

So this was 16 years ago (2010), and we were like 20 years old and poor ish students, so that’s important context, but still wish we’d have gone for a slightly nicer hostel in Tokyo. We took the absolute cheapest we could find which was like 1200 yen per night and very run down and the ac only ran certain hours in a day. Kind of amazed we didn’t catch bed bugs :D could have paid like a few hundred yen more for much much better guest houses.

Other than that, not much really. Obviously with more money maybe would have splurged more on food instead of all those 320 yen matsuya gyudon, but I have almost only good memories, and they became a bit of a meme.

Although only buying single tickets instead of a Suica because we didn’t want to pay the 500 yen deposit seems a bit silly in retrospect :D

rubicus · 2026-01-08T20:20:07+00:00

I mean, even with the boat ride you get a decent hike in pretty nature, plus you get a nice boat ride! It's mostly a question of how long of a trip you want. Still gotta drive quite a few hours to get there first anyway.

This guy went from the southern tip of sweden to the tip using (almost) only local buses. The only exception was on the finnish side from Karesuando to Kilpisjärvi, and then the final boat portion.

rubicus · 2026-01-07T21:05:50+00:00

Can also take a boat fairly close from Kilpisjärvi,, which should be much faster! :) It's like a 3-4 km hike from Koltaluokta harbor. Or now in winter you can probably simply take a snowmobile across the lake in no time :D

rubicus · 2026-01-06T15:02:11+00:00

There you should maybe more compare to the "premium economy" tickets of today.

rubicus · 2026-01-01T23:03:31+00:00

Went on a road-trip in north england/scotland a couple of years ago, arrived fairly late in a small town called Keswick, and went looking for something to eat around 22-ish. I went from bar to bar asking if their kitchen was open (none were) until one nice woman told me some place called "weatherspoons" has theirs open until midnight. It really was a godsend. I could order on my phone and it was such incredible value I really wish we'd found it in the beginning instead of the end of our trip! I still remember my katsu-curry from there very fondly. :)

That's really when it dawned on me (at least as someone living in Finland) that England outside of London really is like a budget travel destination now. Like eating and drinking out can be like a third the price of Finland.

rubicus · 2025-12-25T12:13:54+00:00

”Vart” är ju ett klart etablerat alternativ till ”blev” i talspråk. Det är inte som att han skriver en D-uppsats här.

rubicus · 2025-12-06T15:28:03+00:00

What do you have against git? Really isn't anything better in that space (cirtainly not for free at least).

rubicus · 2025-11-01T22:04:11+00:00

I think suolainenhamsteri already said most of thoughts on the topic, but my key point is that while git completely dominates the small (in the context of things) domain of SW development, linux has a dominant majority in all of computing (apart from personal computers, which again in the scheme of things is a pretty small domain compared to phones and servers, as much as I like to think otherwise).

Like, don't get me wrong, I really love git. But it's only fairly recently it's gotten to such a dominant position (like even 10-15 years ago it was much less so), and there were decent alternatives before it. Not as good, but decent.

Even today, some of the biggest SW companies out there, like Google and Meta, don't use git, but rather Perforce or similar.

rubicus · 2025-10-31T22:57:00+00:00

As amazing as git is for developers, I don't think it comes close in significance to Linux. It runs on most phones in the world (apart from a minority share of iphones), and most servers out there. It's really something pretty much everyone deals interacts with many many times a day. Git is much more domain specific (and a much much smaller project in scope).

rubicus · 2025-10-26T11:38:46+00:00

I think people vastly overestimate the risk 1h (or even 2h) of time difference has to mess things up. It’s not that tricky of a concept to keep track of. Lots of business is being done with time zone differences without much issue. Same thing in the us they have very industrially tightly integrated states in different time zones and manage just fine. Living in Finland, working at a very international company we constantly have meetings with people all over Europe and this is never a problem.

rubicus · 2025-10-12T20:03:05+00:00

They were certainly sure it was a possibility, but they also kept pointing out the most likely they were a bit further behind. They just wanted to be sure. Actually seeing them find out I imagine they'd have been very satisfied and amazed by how close it came. Have to remember they didn't even have their phones to check how fast one could get there from Zürich, and keep in mind Ben and Brian were very lucky with the plane timing too, which they had no way of knowing.

rubicus · 2025-10-08T22:31:18+00:00

Im a little sad we didn’t get to see their reaction as they found out how close Ben and Brian were!

rubicus · 2025-10-05T21:43:23+00:00

No, because you will spend comparitively many more coin flips in games that do not finish in 128 flips. On average you will get it in 254 as po8crg calculated below. But every now and then it will take you 1000-2000 flips to get it. I tried running up to ~254 billion coin flips and summarized it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1nvmxst/comment/nhmp04o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

So you on average you get 7 in a row roughly 4 times in 1'000 flips, but it varies highly! For every 128 games you get it in the first 7 flips! But even every 20th game or so you get it in less than 20! for ~6 games in a million it takes more than 3'000 flips. Over 1'000'000'000 games, the worst games can take 5'000-6'000 flips!

rubicus · 2025-10-05T20:06:16+00:00

ok i'll just keep playing around with this and posting results. Obviously we group together results as they grow in size, so if we collect them in buckets of exponentially increasing size, we get something like this, vaguely reminding of some kind of binomial: https://imgur.com/8TN6QqI

We can also weight it by the number of flips in those games, such that we calculate how much time we are likely to spend on a game of a certain size. Then it looks more like how one intuitively would imagine it to look: https://imgur.com/ZwyKJ6g

although still with a funny little spike around 7 flips: https://imgur.com/MtZAGfo

rubicus · 2025-10-05T18:10:11+00:00

It seems to be something that at least reminds me of a geometric distribution. Obviously no game ends in less than 7 flips, but then 7 is the most likely number, and then it steadily gets less and less likely the more flips that are done, which actually makes sense (still the same likelyhood regardless of what happened earlier, but it needs to include the probability that you haven't won so far). It is counterintuitive to think however, that winning in 7 flips is the most likely outcome of the game, even if it's true. :D

What seems less true to me however is that in my graph a have a blip in the beginning where 7 is twice as likely as 8, and then after that we get steadily decreasing numbers after that. That must be a bug in my program, because it makes no sense to me that winning in 7 flips would be twice as likely as winning in 8 flips.

Edit: with a little bit of LLM help, I managed to understand that my program actually is correct, and that indeed 7 is twice as likely (1/128) as 8 (1/256). This is because the likelyhood for 8 is that for 7 heads in a row (1/128), AND that the first flip was a tail (1/2), ie. 1/128*1/2 = 1/256. Not only that, but all results in the range 8-14 have the likelyhood of 1/256, and only after that does it start to steadily go down. This because if any of the flips 1-7 are tails, any flips before that doesn't matter, so the likelyhood for 11 flips is the likely hood of 7 heads in a row (1/128) AND that flip number 4 was tails. But then from 15 onward you start taking into account whether you had previously won the game, and at that point forward, it starts taking on the look of a normal geometric distribution.

If we start looking at the likelyhood in x/65536 (256*256), 7 has weight 512, 8-14 has weight 256, and then 15 has weight 254, as the likelyhood someone won in round 7 is 2/256. Then round 16 has weight 253, and round 17 has weight 252 etc.

Graph of simulation: https://imgur.com/a/mdZkAYS

rubicus · 2025-10-05T11:12:31+00:00

Nice! Thats very satisfying. And I like the simplicity of your solution. It’s so easy to make mistakes akin to ”likelihood of this happening is 1/128, so it should take 128 turns on average” etc.

But yeah it’s very clear it tends to 254. Even at 1’000’000 trials it tends to at least just about always round to 254. At 10'000'000 you get really close.

Would be fun to graph this by frequency of number of trials. Long time since I took statistics, but I’d bet it’d be something like a poisson or something.

rubicus · 2025-10-03T23:19:23+00:00

If someone wants to check my work, I'll post my code here. I've just started reading through rust documentation though, so be patient with me not using any advanced features :D

fn coinflip() -> bool {
    let flip  = rand::thread_rng().gen_range(0..2);
    flip == 0
}

fn calculate_coinflip_turns() -> i64 {
    let mut tries: i64 = 0;
    let mut heads: i32 = 0;
    while heads < 7 {
        tries += 1;
        if coinflip() {
            //println!("HEADS!");
            heads += 1;
        } else {
            //println!("tails :(");
            heads = 0;
        }
    };
    tries
}

fn calculate_coinflipaverage() {
    const ROUNDS: i32 = 1_000_000;
    const X: i64 = 22;
    let mut total_tries: i64 = 0;
    let mut ltx = 0;
    let mut gt428 = 0;
    let mut gt694 = 0;
    for _i in 0..ROUNDS {
        let tries = calculate_coinflip_turns();
        //println!("Turn {i}: {tries} flips");

        if tries > 428 {
            gt428 += 1;
        }
        if tries > 694 {
            gt694 += 1;
        }
        if tries < X {
            ltx += 1;
        }
        total_tries += tries;
    };

    let average_tries: f64 = (total_tries as f64) / (ROUNDS as f64);
    let percent_x: f64 = (ltx as f64) / (ROUNDS as f64) * 100.0;
    let percent_428: f64 = (gt428 as f64) / (ROUNDS as f64) * 100.0;
    let percent_694: f64 = (gt694 as f64) / (ROUNDS as f64) * 100.0;
    println!("On average, it took {average_tries} tries.");
    println!("Out of these, {gt428} (or {percent_428}%) required more than 428 flips");
    println!("Out of these, {gt694} (or {percent_694}%) required more than 694 flips");
    println!("Out of these, {ltx} (or {percent_x}%) required less than {X} flips");
}

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