JakeStone

Ah, Fry's...

Back in 2000ish, went to the Phoenix store to get parts to repair a friend's PC that had blown up.

I think it was around 2010, me and Grandpa went to the one in the Dallas area to build a PC "old school" because he'd built his ham radios from tubes and solder, it was time to stay current. Afterwards, he was a bit disappointed at how easy it was. He expected at least a spark from the power supply and we might have to buy new parts. On the other hand, he was pleased to see that the tinkerer and willing to make things was still running through the bloodline.

For the first few years here in CA, it was a great place to look at new toys and occasionally buy them. It was always good for buying a quick phone when one would die late night. Ingress kills phones, man, deal with it.

But yeah, the year before the plague was eerie and empty and "No, we're not closing." and now I'm sad.

Well, enjoy the next seven months until reality gets rewritten, I guess. /s

In general observation, the kids are going to like what they're going to like.

While nature has its role, and both of our kids are skilled in math, and comfortable with the geek nature of puzzling over that which is unknown and becoming skilled at it, neither of them are into programming computers, despite both their parents having the background.

Instead, one's a visual artist. The other's a theater geek.

I opened the door to introducing them to programming, but with a light touch, as I knew a hard sell would make them hate it. They weren't interested, though I think one is starting to dabble with MineCraft mods. Fortunately, I half expected it, and they're good at what they like to do, so that will hopefully be a source of contentment for them in the future.

They'll still keep popping up. There's profits to be made from "boot camps". A company I worked for a couple years ago partnered up with a UK firm that's doing something similar, so it's spreading.

Hexagons.

There's a library available at https://github.com/uber/h3 that lets you partition the earth into hexagons (minus the required 12 pentagons) at various resolutions. It's spiffy. I had the hardest (read impossible) time when I first took a look at it getting it to compile into a mobile game. It worked fine in desktop, but not on mobile.

So I punted and converted the whole thing into C#. It's a hot mess currently, but it works.

However, the folks who created H3 added functionality and some optimizations that I want, so I'm rebuilding it, partly with dealing with some of the issues that have come up with my game during development. It's coming along smoothly, though the unit tests are what's slowing me down at this moment.

Once that's done, I'm going back to my game. Covering the world in brightly colored hexagons as reality starts to crumble around you.

So, still... Hexagons. That's what I'm working on.

I think I love you. Don't worry, there's a shot for that.

My badness made me laugh. I like certain show tunes when I program. Don't judge me, the web site already did. But because I read a news story about The Chicks rebranding and got curious about their new album, it got added to my gestalt.

Thus: Your spotify was like-country-but-smoke-weed-with-your-gay-friends-drama-club-tonys-watch-party bad.

I learned about 1/7 back in my youth, and it's just been one of those things that I enjoyed knowing as I went on in life.

Imagine my amusement when I ran across a Project Euler problem where those digits were the answer. I recall just looking at it and thinking I __know__ this one, there's no need to code anything. An easy point, but I didn't feel like I cheated on it.

The snarky question I have is, how many of them will become confused with dates?

Hm. I did my first Hacktoberfest last year, and it was fun. I only remember 2 of them.

One was something like build the worst implementation possible of aspects of the .Net framework, but while a joke project, it's been around for a few years, and you actually had to make something that _worked_ and in a reasonable amount of time. It was a fun challenge.

The other one was a bit of a lark, but it led to me and the maintainer having some discussions, working out some code, and then them taking about 2/3 of the PR just because there were constraints that were immutable for them, and neither of us could come up with a viable workaround, and we parted friends.

This is something that should be fun/interesting, and presumably, adding to the open source community. The T-shirt is a cool idea, but I think I ended up doing 7 or 8 of them just because I had gotten into the mode of "I'll just skim through the list of open projects and provide some real help while I have some free time."

Maybe it's time to make it opt-in. Register your projects with DO and Hacktoberfest, and those will be the only ones that get counted. Assumption being though that if you sign up your projects, you're going to stay up to speed on PRs and merge or mark as spam in a reasonable amount of time.

That was amusing. I sort of look like I should be an extra in "Braveheart"

Sometime over a year ago, I finally got tired of medium's shenanigans, so I threw together a Q&D TemperMonkey script to just remove the temptation.

It's nothing complex, just looks for links to medium.com and removes them from the page.

https://gist.github.com/RichardVasquez/5d46ffe01053162562a79...

I haven't used pov-ray in about 5 years, though I used to use it heavily, and at least back then, it didn't allow the export of the objects you render in a 3d format. It's a ray tracer designed to create scenes via objects modified via CSG.

I'm actually pleased to hear about this, since I find my patience with most 3d programs is very short, and I really have a need currently for being able to create 3d objects using CSG that I can work with hopefully for a game I'm making.

I was today days old when I learned about 'git reflog'. I may have to play with that sometime soon.

Gotta admit, I started chuckling at “We use [the fast Fourier transform] in a much more violent way..." I've known some math geeks in my day, and this sounded like them.

Counterpoint: I used to be a contractor and took C2H positions to see if I wanted to work with these people long term. Most of the time, I was happy to see the door when the contract ended, though all of them offered a conversion.

There was one where I converted to full time, and then we got hit with the dot com crash, so that sucked.

Use <magic material> to build a wall around the city? Have the people who maintained each individual building form a team that can keep an eye on sections in shifts? If we have enough magic material, build a double wall system for breaches?

I'm done. Give me my paycheck.

"To grok is to drink."

A few years ago, I contacted a buddy of mine at Tesla to see if they were hiring. That led to a call from their HR/recruiter and a nice chat. I remember being interested enough to continue the process until we reached the end.

It sounded pretty straightforward. Coding test, talk to a bunch of people onsite, etc. Each of the people would write up a report and it would work its way up to Elon Musk and he would make the final decision as to whether or not to hire me.

In a small company of up to ~200 people, sure. A department that's maybe a layer or two beneath him, ok, maybe? I don't remember where this was exactly, but it was something involving web services or similar in C#, and I don't even think it was front-facing, but for internal use, so probably somewhere in the IT department.

For my personal tastes, when the CEO is making hiring decisions on every position, that's an element of micromanaging that I'm not comfortable with, so Tesla is pretty much off my list.

Something similar from 4+ years ago, but in C#

https://gist.github.com/RichardVasquez/6780214

There was nothing wrong with your name until you were about 12 years old?

A little known secret is that the Lunarians had him assassinated due to his declaration of war against the Moon. Elon Musk better watch out for the Martians now that he's threatened to nuke them. :)

  > Even though the constitution still describes
  > the value of a dollar as a specific weight of
  > gold, like most other things in that document
  > it is ignored.

Citation needed.

Article 1, Section 10 is the only place I can recall saying anything about gold:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

_My_ reading opens up a door for "Texas Bucks" issued with backing/redemption of some volume of gold/silver. But I'll wait on expounding more to give you the opportunity to show me where I am mistaken.

There are areas in Texas with moderately tech savvy industries where $50k can cover basic needs for a family of four with good housing (3BR/2BA with reasonable dimensions for all rooms and yard), savings, and an occasional splurge on entertainment.

Now in the SF Bay area, you've got to look at 2.5-4+ to keep that quality of life.

Useful salary, to some extent, is geographical.

The rest of what you're talking about, I've got nothing to add.

Can I throw in a snark? If you buy some number of books because your coworker told you to, then actually spend some time reading them?

I took one of those this weekend for a dev position, along with what felt like an old MENSA test. Answered honestly, but still haven't heard back from them.

After reading this, I suspect I probably won't hear from them in the future, and while disappointed, it still amuses me.

Exit interviews can lead to you being marked as "Do not rehire" depending on the degree of your candor.

It's obviously your call, but for the most part, I've just been as vanilla as possible when leaving, maybe remarking about the lack of compensation increase while working for a state budget determined salary position. That one, everyone groks and I didn't have it bite me in the butt when I came back to work for the local university a year later.

  [TL;DR]
  It's not the destination, it's the journey.

  Archimedes didn't reach the destination of integral calculus,
  but he at least started the journey, and I appreciate it.
  [/TL;DR]

I think it's a sense of wonder thing.

The scope of knowledge (to my understanding) didn't exist back then to imagine infinitesimals. I believe they were having issues with irrationals, let alone things that approached 0 but weren't exactly 0.

There's a sibling comment along the lines of "what if calculus had been discovered 2,000 years earlier" that touches on this, but I think for me there's added the idea that there's proof that some people, some times, can almost see what's next in terms of discoverable knowledge, and it keeps me hopeful.

Most of us have some "off" theory/fantasy/hope with no rigid proof of validity. And many of those are just random neurons firing that might make a good fanfic. But there's that person over there who has a mostly fleshed out idea for (insert super tech here) and just needs to figure out step 37.

It turns out she'll never invent the super tech defined. But X-2891q in the year 3971 will meme a holograph that brings that super tech into reality. While the super tech likely adds to society, the original person who came up with elements of the concept enriched herself in doing so, by my perspective.

Thank you! It's nice to be recognized properly.

You just sadly reminded me of when I was an undergrad taking a grad class on "History of Mathematics".

Two undergrads taking the class because it just sounded neat, and the professor made things interesting. 10 graduate students who were teachers taking the class for the increased salary. An evening seminar of three hours per week after work where we examined as much as possible over how people did math through the ages and through time.

You could tell these grads were bored. But, fine, dealing with kids all day, then having to learn something new that isn't likely to ever be more than a trivia point in a lecture might not be a great thing.

Then... We get to a point where it looks like Archimedes came this close to discovering integral calculus. [insert appropriate WOW! meme here]

A couple of grunts from the grads. Me and the other undergrad were gobsmacked.

There were other examples, but that's the one that always sticks in my head. It's also what contributed to me not being very impressed by some of the grade school teachers I met as my kids were enrolled.