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Before the fall of Techshop, they offered me a setup where I could take all of the classes I wanted in three months. Muhahahahaha.

I already had a few advantages going in: a year of drafting in high school, a year of computer drafting in college (mind you the tools were long dead); the ability to think in parametrics; courses in engineering to go with my physics degree; and just being a general geek. Like a maniac, I took all but one class they offered.

Probably one of the happiest times of my life, scampering around the shop and churning out trinkets for friends and family, making weird art projects for myself.

It seems what would be best is something topical that did not "go systemic," which blocked androgen receptors from receiving DHT.

I have been tiptoeing around this topic because, while I desperately need testosterone supplementation (my levels have never been high and they're now in the toilet), my situation is made more complex by having a metabolic disorder wherein I must avoid the estrogens (and since testosterone is partially metabolized to estradiol, I would need an aromatase inhibitor) and one of the few attractive features I have is a head full of thick wavy/curly hair, nice enough that it had been requested I grow it out and donate it for wigs. I am hesitant to gamble with one of my scarce obvious assets.

So, yes, I definitely want to find a counterbalance that would not kill the libido (I have almost always lacked) I would like to, uh, relaunch more successfully.

This is strongly reminiscent of the main animation in the arcade video game Qix.

This is partially a question and the rest is shameful confession: I had haltingly used cvs as a solo programmer, and when I was suddenly no longer a solo programmer and had to use git, everything went haywire.

I am an Old and we never were taught anything about coding with other people who were also working on the same project. I have had many successful projects but never with another person.

With that as a background, does your guide cover things like:

1) Merging. I was told that merging happens "automagically" and I cannot, for the life of me, understand how a computer program manages to just ... blend two functions or whatever and it "works." Does your guide make sense of this?

2) Apparently there are holy wars (see also vi versus emacs) about the One True Way to ... decide on branches and whatnot. Are there pros and cons laid out anywhere?

3) Everything seems broken down into teensy tiny functions when I look at someone's git repository, just skillions of files all over the place. Is this a git thing, a code repository thing, or simply that, in order for multiple people to work on the same project, everything must be atomized and then reassembled later? What's your opinion?

At a Starbucks years ago, a woman next to me requested to plug into my USB charger, which had an open port. Since any interaction of mine with a new person was doomed to awkwardness, of course I ended up with the sadly comical three-try, two-rotation final insertion. She made a crack about Schroedinger's USB port and I smiled, then she began to explain to me that it was a physics thing. After I replied that, yeah, that was my undergrad. It turned out to be hers as well. Then we found out that we had both gone into programming. She was doing programming in medicine, and, when prompted for further details, mentioned working on the software for one of those multi-beam radiation gizmos.

I mentioned Therac-25 and we were off to the races. I think we talked for about two hours on programming in high-risk situations, hers in those machines, mine in location services and routing for emergency services. That maniacal technician who irradiated that poor boy (the names escape me) was brought up. At one point we hit on the Challenger disaster. I was comforted to meet another programmer who had certain philosophies about making reliable niche software. I'm not at that level, but I think it is something to which I ought to occasionally aspire.

Gracious, I never said that they were the only people informing me on society. They make for some interesting seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a series of books, not really something I can cram into even a page.

That's close to what I have gleaned. You'll recall in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, HST goes on and on about the American Dream, as if the duo could locate it in a physical place, like finding the source of a river. In this case, Las Vegas.

I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.

The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract, it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you than not busting your ass, but there are no guarantees. You can only approach the table and go again. Another role of the dice or the hope that you haven't drawn a bad beat.

I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores, background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth. You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still alive, but never met.

Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section of them are products lifted from the mud and polished for public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators' sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.

And you get all of that energy back when you powder that aluminium, mix it with rust, and manage (with difficulty) to ignite it.

I have a very vague concept for this, with a different implementation.

Some, uh, sites (forums?) have content that the AI crawlers would like to consume, and, from what I have heard, the crawlers can irresponsibly hammer the traffic of said sites into oblivion.

What if, for the sites which are paywalled, the signup, which invariably comes with a long click-through EULA, had a legal trap within it, forbidding ingestion by AI models on pain of, say, owning ten percent of the company should this be violated. Make sure there is some kind of token payment to get to the content.

Then seed the site with a few instances of hapax legomenon. Trace the crawler back and get the resulting model to vomit back the originating info, as proof.

This should result in either crawlers being more respectful or the end of the hated click-through EULA. We win either way.

How I learned it, as a mere undergrad, was that the mass of the virtual particle for the field in question determined exactly how long it could exist, just by the uncertainty principle -- much like the way the virtual particles drive Hawking radiation.

In short, a massive virtual particle can exist only briefly before The Accountant comes looking to balance the books. And if you give it a speed of c, it can travel only so far during its brief existence before the books get balanced. And therefore the range of the force is determined by the mass of the force carrier virtual particle.

There's probably some secondary and tertiary "loops" as the virtual particle possibly decays during its brief existence, influencing the math a little further, but that is beyond me.

I love ffmpeg, but yeah, some bits are a little ... obscure.

Right now, I am looking to normalize some audio without using ffmpeg-normalize, a popular Python package. Nothing against it on a personal level, I just ... want to know what is going on, and it's a lot of files and lines of code to do what is basically a two-pass process.

I have a growing interest in metadata and that's also a case which I do not find is often well-addressed.

I am here to sell you on one word: ramdisks.

If you are doing processing with intermediate steps you do not want to keep? Ramdisks. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

I wonder what the people against anonymity would make of the Federalist Papers, if they even remember them. Many of the "founding fathers" of the United States wrote under pseudonyms or other such distractions. Probably a dismissal of the "that was then, this is now" variety, which they only haul out as a defense they do not hold in any great breadth, as those same folks will gladly go on about generational trauma, reparations, and so on. Convenient only.

I have deep but vague thoughts around the concept. My first intuition is that we have put too many things under NULL and None and such.

Partially, we use ... and I'll be very broad here ... "variables" as boxes we look in for answers. Answers to questions, answers to "Hey I put something in there for the time being to reference later." If I went into programming terms rather than just SQL, sometimes we get meta-answers.

You haven't made the box yet (declared the variable).

You haven't decided how the box is structured (picked a type or a length or something).

Okay, you did those but the box is virgin (nothing has been placed in the box yet).

That kind of thing. An empty set for "yes, you asked but nothing meets those criteria."

Do not have faith. Once they pick some dumb track, they will stick with it until they either lose legally or lose in the court of public opinion (donors). See also: Oberlin.

If this is a one-party state, record those calls!

Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free is heading in that direction.

Anonymous username, as real name is, uh ... I had hippie parents. Kind of a hapax legomenon. Rotate usernames, trashing old ones fairly often. I started the rotation after an employee of my then-local ISP blabbed my IRL name in IRC, even after I had pestered them to shut down crap like finger. Guy was kind of a petty douche who thought he was untouchable.

Shame for him I kept track of him, every so often. Guys like that accumulate a long list of potential "who did this to me?" candidates after so much time, and after a decade they tend to forget. I didn't.

Easy to implement, but much room for optimization.

The rules are simple, but give rise to complexity.

Despite conservation of mass and such not being a part of the rules, what appear to us to be "objects" arise, and can even exhibit velocity! Physics-lite results out of nowhere.

Finally, nerds like simulations.

This looks interesting for an eventual project.

I want to separate out music into groups, then into shuffleable playlists. I would eventually stream each to one of those local FM transmitters so I could build a few radio stations for my mother, who is absolutely terrible with technology and, at eighty, is not likely to get better. I am figuring a late Fifties/early Sixties (stuff she won dance competitions to), then your basic angry music starting around the mid-eighties (Killing Joke's "Eighties," a few Ministry albums, NIN) and on, a classic rock "station," and now, disturbingly, a yacht rock playlist. Then she can just jump around as needed.

I have passed on at least a few codebases. Sometimes, people get bright ideas and just dump what's working to do greenfield stuff. This is why an ex-coworker recently wanted me to come back to braindump on something I finished in 2009. After I left, some bright spark wanted to start from scratch and now there are continual complaints when the previous thing just worked, aside from a per-semester update, which the software would nag you about, as new departments appeared and such.

On the other hand, I had an apartment-renting suite I had written get passed on to students. While it was written in Perl (a famously "write once, read never" language according to critics), because I did just one thing per line and had comments at multiple levels (a block header for each function, comments within functions, a changelog at the top), they called back and said it was the easiest thing in the world for them to convert it, despite not knowing Perl at all.

Although I had been programming for years and years by the time I took a FORTRAN course in high school, I had a particularly exacting teacher with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and he drilled us on how we would have to deal with the code of others, or our old code, or code when we did not want to come into work with a cold. Cleverness is held in reserve for data structures and algorithms, when you have no other options. He was very firm on that.

So here is my question, or one of them, as someone starting this whole journey: exactly what metadata do you want outside of artist, song title, album title? Because I can see there's a lot to be had. Embedded album covers, subgenre tagging, synchronized lyrics ... hyperlinks to Discogs and MusicBrainz, maybe? Tempo in BPM? Key?

ID3v2.3 or IDv2.4? Can you even do that to FLAC? And where do you get that metadata, using what tools?

I just don't want to be the guy who has to re-rip three thousand CDs because he did his workflow in a lazy or careless manner.

I believe that this is a technical issue now. In a more ideal world, procedure, legislation, regulation, protocols would be followed to slow the growth of antibiotic resistance, but there are just too many Defectors for that approach.

It's in nerd hands now ...

I agree and will add in a few bits: although I will obey the language's idiom, in general, I like to keep the number of "things it does" per line of code to the minimum. Kind of an anti-code golf.

I also document (or comment code) when I am waiting for the flow to kick in. For me, the documentation starts at the appendices. One for input files or api source tricks or describing the input tables in a database. Another for the relevant outputs. Maybe a "justify overall design decisions" section. Just stuff someone would wish if they had to handle it in five years.

Multiple visualizations. A seed, a sprout, a tree. A baby, a child, an adult, an elder. And so on.

I am still a fan of vitrification and dumping the end results along the subduction zone of a tectonic plate, myself.

I was once given this ridiculously short deadline to provide a full project. "We're going to be Agile and run this through Agile processes." I hadn't met the stakeholders yet (I would in fact not meet them at all) or even seen requirements. "How soon can you show me something?" I eventually had to pull out the "How fast does ten percent of a Porche run?" question.

Nobody ever wants a prototype. They think they do, the prototype mysteriously has to have all of its features and so on. And then they'll attempt to shove it into production right then and there.

I finished it by the deadline, despite having the flu and a blowing a non-trivial portion of the allowed time on a work trip that wasn't even relevant to my job, one I hadn't wanted to go on.

And then it sat on a shelf, unlooked at by anyone, for seven months. A lot of goodwill was burned up on that move. Fake deadlines mean to me that the person setting the deadlines does not understand urgency, when anything is actually needed, how to prioritize, or anything. It's a big sign that says I Am Not a Good Manager.

I would say that, on balance, one must prove DNA to be not-junk.

The idea that you can have DNA of some critter and there aren't some errors, unused bits, and so on, after what must be trillions of copies, well, I would find it statistically unlikely. Like saying you have a program with millions of lines of code and it is completely error-free.

Oh, ultrasonics can definitely harm flesh if focused. Yes, I am the guy who tested it with a room humidifier. I knew it would hurt, I did it anyway.

I used to do a great deal of local mapwork. Google Maps tends to not do rural areas as well as urban or suburban areas, usually missing the existence of Road A and then assigning the name of Road A to Road B, that kind of thing.

The naive approach is to expect a Single Source of Truth for roads, address points, and the like, but this turns out not to be true. The road network and address points are usually done on a per-county basis, each with its own standards (and boundaries), and gods help you if you expect that a road in County A that proceeds to County B to "line up" if you import data from each county. Sometimes, parcels are separate. Oh, and they'll use different projections and fields and whatnot.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation for my state had its own road network: fewer fields, often skipping the tiny roads entirely, irregularly updated.

This doesn't even begin to cover how bad the plats of a new neighborhood are versus reality, how infrequently updated and checked data is, height and weight limits for stretches of bridge and so forth.

I recently saw one painted primer black and immediately felt like going home so I could watch Johnny Mnemonic.

It appears to be a triumph of aesthetic over function, needing only EL-wire underlighting to look like it escaped from the Tron storyboards and into low-poly life. I could only wonder if the entertainment system comes with a hidden Sirius/XM channel that only plays vaporwave music.

Then you could replace the LLM with a much cheaper RNG and let it guess until the "bad math filter" let something through.

I was once asked by one of the Clueless Admin types if we couldn't just "fix" various sites such that people couldn't input anything wrong. Same principle.

I did that, too, but I took it a bit further, possibly as a product of not having vision for about a year as a toddler, other than "light" and "dark."