gperkins978

It is worth a try. I have had really good luck with the US Postal Service. People do not get much mail, so if you send it, someone might actually see it. That will never happen with email or any electronic tools.

I used to buy laptops, and the external quality peaked at different times for different brands (the Asus all aluminum was wonderful, but Sony made some nice stuff twenty years ago as well), but for the actual guts-PCB, power supply, ..., they all seem like the same old sh^t. The monitors get better, but I swear all laptops slow down with age. The only solution is to re-install windows and start over.

I personally prefer desktop workstations. They are better.

If you want to get REALLY angry, go to school in poor neighborhoods and watch teachers "teach" children how to search the web. Computers in schools was a mistake. If there were to be computers, they should all be Unix or Linux or BSD distros run from the command line.

There are key phrases that a school is scam central. Any time they try to say "X percent of students went off to college" that school is a scam. If they speak of creating "computer literate" or "technology literate" students, the school is a scam.

Check out how easy many of the reading and math tests are, then you will know how horrible it is when schools only have 20-30% of students getting to their grade level. It has been a bizarre transformation where schools went from being oriented around student learning to being oriented around teacher wellness and teacher preferences.

We should be hiring teachers from Singapore and Hong Kong to fix our schools. Instead we hire creepy education consultants that get rich peddling idiocy. It iw a crime against children.

For many business-type courses they like you to be able to quickly get an IRR or NPV value. One could solve that by hand, but the exams would be long and require manual grading. According to my older colleagues when I started my career, they used to bring their HP calculators to client meetings before laptops were a thing. They would sit around and do estimated calculations. If you look at old photos, your can see the HP calculators in them and paper with written calculations. When I started my career in 2000, laptops were already ubiquitous. There were still old timers with the RPN calculators from HP. Excel is better for finance. For real analysis and simulation stuff like Mathmatica and Maple are better, with SAS, SPSS and R for statistics, although SAS is used a ton in finance, insurance as well as government.

My thought exactly, or Maple, if you are one of THOSE people.

That rabbit hole will make you angry, then sad, then hopeless. I live in Chicago, on the South Side. The number of foolish fads in education have been forced on poor children for decades. It is shameful. Children should not be experimented on because their parents could not afford Catholic school or a house in the suburbs. Rich white people enjoy warping the minds of black children far too much. They never experiment with their own children, only ours. It is sickening.

An example: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/09/08/c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curri...

I used the TI-85 back when dinosaurs walked the earth. I still have that and the TI-92, the best FAT calculator ever. This thing will tie your shoes and help fight off depression. I strongly recommend the TI-92. It is not allowed on any standardized tests though.

I do know that even my TI-85 was programmable. I made a few different functions with it. If you try anything too sophisticated, there really is not sufficient space for it, but it was the first device I ever wrote any kind of program on. I used that through university, but for work I had the HP 12c with reverse Polish notation. Now that was useless. I could never understand why old men preferred that to Excel. Excel is better in every way, and one can write pretty sophisticated functions and simulations in Excel VBA. I spent years doing so.

Overall, I do not see the point in bringing out new calculators. I do think the existing ones should have more RAM and storage with a bit more computational heft, but only 1-3% of owners are ever going to use that, but it will make them so much better.

I can assure you that no one writing such comments on the internet is winning anything.

As a lover and admirer of all things porcine, I am deeply offended by that comment. Although pigs do enjoy a good wrestle, they are a fine animal with a great spirit and refined wisdom. If you think I am joking, I am wearing a solid gold pig pendent right now, surrounded by pave diamonds. I genuinely adore these creatures. They have been unfairly maligned in our culture.

This is what happens when people are anonymous. I assume these are all 12-year-old victims of bullying with a lot of pain and no where to get it out. They spit venom wherever they go. I assume they grow out of it.

Frankly, I would recommend you think on why you are so sensitive to random criticism? That is not healthy. I had the privilege of growing up in a rough place where ridicule was the norm, so I was rather immune to insults by around age 14. I mean, it would hurt if it came from someone I respected, but not a drug dealer or bum on the street. That is what internet commenters are, homeless junkies throwing insults out of powerless rage. They do not matter.

I do not know you, so I will not provide the tough love I would give to a friend or relative, but you should not care what unimportant people say about you. Such insecurities are dangerous and counter-productive. If some crack head on the street pointed out your deepest insecurity, it should not bother you. He is a crackhead. He does not matter. You do. You need to let that shit go. It will eat you up inside. If you have legitimate insecurities, fix them. If you are bothered by silly stuff (appearance, ethnicity,...), you need to shake that off. No one should be able to use that against you. That is giving others too much power over you. It is an insane submission for no benefit. Let it go.

So my advice is to let it go. Choose to stop reacting to these comments. You CHOOSE to react. The comments are irrelevant. The problem is that you are letting yourself react negatively. You need to stop that. There exist evil people who will use that weakness to control you. PLEASE fix it before you meet someone of that nature. Insults are like cockroaches. You do not need to fear them, but you should never let them into your home.

I think the easiest distinction is the high part. I assume you have never crushed up Ritalin and/or Adderall to snort (I have). The guys taking it non-medicinally get a clear high, and tolerance demands higher doses. The best/worst one is desoxyn. That stuff is heavenly, but so addictive. After scoring a bottle of it I decided that I was never going to take any amphetamine ever again.

From what I understand, ADHD folks do not get the high part, so the addiction risk is not there.

I take provigil as well. I was wise enough to stop taking Adderall and Dexedrine when I ended my schooling. I never had a prescription, but these were easy enough to find. Provigil is not an every day tool for me, only once and a while, but it gets the job done.

What are you doing to change this? Are you trying to make the situation better? California has been run into the ground for the last thirty years intentionally. Many residents love having mentally ill people die in the streets. They have created an entire system to support this. Money has been drained away from roads and schools to pay for ever growing "programs" to employ rich white ladies so they can brag to their friends about their incredible virtue.

You are free to leave. There are plenty of low-tax countries. If you want to live in the US, Europe, Japan,..., then you must pay to be part of our reindeer games.

That said, PLEASE get involved and try to direct public funding and attention towards core activities (roads, schools, infrastructure) instead of ever more ridiculous programs to employ Berkeley graduates in virtuous-looking jobs. Utah does a great job at this sort of thing. Instead of learning from them, our political elite degrade them and insult them for their religious beliefs. I once repeated a colleague's obscene jokes, only I stated that he said them about Muslims instead of Mormons. He lost his mind trying to correct me. It was amusing.

The state of nature has no schools, no water, no sewer and no police. If one is going to live in a civilized nation, he should pay his share of taxes. Capital gains is 15%. That is not an outrageous amount. Everyone should pay because everyone benefits. One is free to leave and live in tax shelter principality or Sultanate.

There is a problem with high taxes on earned income, but anyone complaining about the 15% capital gains tax has problems. The estate tax only applies to this who are very, very fortunate. These are not even earned. Again, if one hates his country, he can move to Dubai, Bermuda or the Glorious Sultanate of Brunei and enjoy their lifestyle.

I do understand that people in California get angry because the state is so poorly run, but most of the US has easily avoided the self-created problems of California and New York city.

My biggest regret is not staying with my first job out of college. I loved it, and had I stayed my options at the age of 26 would be worth over $10m now. I left that job for a woman. I feel so stupid about it. I am good at math and bad at life. I should have stayed with that job. I was recruited out of university by men like me, who looked out for us.

I have found my peace, but large company nerd divisions are great for brilliant wierdo's.

No, it is simply an idea to live and let live. Sane people escape California or New York where one must be insanely wealthy to live a decent life. In most of the US, you can do your thing and no one will bother you. Most hellishly expensive places would become affordable and fun if they implemented Texas-style zoning.

Now, obnoxious white people in Silicon Valley would be upset that multifamily housing had allowed displeasing minorities in, but man would that make life better for everyone. I lived in East Asia, and it is really nice when cities are not too expensive for regular people to live in. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for rich @holes who complain about losing their expensive view.

Freedom helps all, but especially the poor. The leftists have tricked people in California and NYC into thinking the system fails the poor, when in reality it is their stupid regulations that made these places expensive.

In the US, most municipalities will publish each employee's compensation every year. You can literally look them up by name.

Public servants do not make enough money to be useful targets. The meaningful threat comes from large compensation tied to other asset information (tying an online person to that income, not difficult). You can buy lists of these already tied up and ready to download for your scheming pleasure. From English Rolex robbers to Florida kidnappers, they all enjoy the data.

I do not think it can be stopped, but the days when a wealthy person could safely live in a suburb and have the kids imagine that they are middle class is long gone. It is terrifying. The best thing for a wealthy discrete person to do is move to Singapore or Australia, or somewhere with a sufficiently low crime rate to feel comfortable, or get quality security, which sucks.

This is also why certain homes get hit in high-end burglary crews. There are multiple crews hitting those who purchase precious metals with physical delivery (like gold American Eagle coins). It is not all positive. Considering how few victims even bother to report such crimes, it is terrifying.

From what I understand from my cousin, a career criminal, there are entire theft rings working off of databases such as these. He knew mostly of car-related theft rings, but I hear about safe-cracking burglaries quite often, usually stealing Rolex watches or precious metals.

If you are affiliated with a university, you should have a way to read articles through there, or some service (LexisNexis, Factiva,...).

I used to subscribe to many publication, but then I kept rage quitting them. The only one I have left is the Economist. The New York Times was painful. I used to love reading it, but it just became a rag. I never managed to find anything to replace it.

Has no one used the word enshittification yet? Google, Stack Overflow, Amazon, ..., it is like every useful website twenty years ago is now literally a steaming pile of excrement. I find myself using books again to look things up because it is often easier. I never thought Bing would be the best option, but now it often is, but not because it got better, but simply because everything ese got so much worse.

Stack Overflow is how I learned to do almost everything. Now I never use it anymore. Mostly because it has become useless. I love that it does not have video (I hate video), but the good answers are no longer there, but there is far more attitude. I never recall being insulted or degraded before, but that sure is common now. I increasingly think that real internet ID's are a wonderful idea, just so twerps can get beaten again, as is just.

Any anonymous tool will trend towards soft, whiny bitch in the absence of leadership or subtle forms of norm enforcement. Male spaces tend to be enjoyable because of swift, brutal norm enforcement. This is missing at Stack Overflow and pretty much everywhere online, so behavior converges towards 13-year-old teen cheerleader behavior. We need to make it more of a high school male locker room environment (silent unless you have something valuable to say, with consequences if you misbehave).

In summary, the judicious use of the appropriate level of violence is the solution to everything.

I was going to recommend an A100, but they are not available cheaply anymore. I set someone up with two of them I managed to score from Amazon for like $400 each, but used. They had 40gb RAM, but it was HBM and super fast. There were mining cards based off of these as well, but I have no idea what was stripped down to make them cheaper. The only issue is that you need to heat sink them if they are not going in a server, and in a rack-mounted server, there needs to be proper cooling (big dog fans).

But I just looked again, and A100's are not around at reasonable prices anymore. I cannot even find the old mining equivalents (they used to be everywhere, and CHEAP). Perhaps many people are building similar systems now. After the Ether merge it was a great time to build.

A100's are cheap. Are those bad now?

I know a welder. He had to quit after 15 years do to physical ailments. If you get a job like that, you must be into fitness. It is easy to work a desk at 55, but being a welder is hard. Personally, I would live modestly for a few years and bank as much as you can. Then go buy or build a small business. That is an easier, more interesting life, and you can learn all the "hard stuff" typical business owners must pay others to do (finance, IT,supply chain,...)

So, there is an existing market of guys who know linode. If you have room in your payroll, you can hire a linode guy and have him manage it, but I would make sure that guy has a junior guy learning from him.

I say this because the rest of the world either does AWS/Azure, or still does it all onsite. Just my two cents.

I hate to be the one to ask, but I must. Why on earth would you voluntarily go to Iceland? There is nothing there. There are a few attractive ladies, but the place is so dreary that it makes Scotland look like Hawaii.

Go get a visa to Malta or Trinidad or Jamaica. Hell, just over0stay your visa in Jamaica. If you weather and hot women, go for the Philippines or Thailand. The latter is safer but more expensive.

But Iceland? Are you interested in learning Norse in your spare time? Catching up on on your Runes?

I tried to use a Google Coral. I have no idea how to make it work. I could follow a tutorial using tensorflow. I could not figure out how to use for anything else. Is there some way to run CUDA stuff on it? I always assumed it required someone with actual skills (not me). I have used CUDA stuff before, but more for mass calculation and simulation (for financial stuff). It is great when it works. I worked at a shop that had these Xeon Phi systems that worked great, but I had no clue how, and it only worked with their pre-canned tools.

Just as an example, over a decade ago I replaced a few cases filled with racks and a SAN that made up a compute cluster with one box (plus SAN) and a backup box (both boxes were basically the same in case one failed), but basically like dozens of servers were replaced by a two CPU box with a couple Tesla cards (probably one A100 later). The entire model had to be re-written, but it was not that bad. I wanted to do with AMD cards, but there was no easy way.

I would also say that modern networked has made all kinds of stuff more interesting (also lining Nvidia's pockets). Those TPU's do not make sense to me. I have no idea how to use them. They should release their version of CUDA.

I once had a long argument with a colleague who did not realize that MacOS had terminal. I brought my macbook in and showed him. Many young people are often surprised at even the Windows command line. They must be taught that only Linux has this.

Yes, the best institutions will last, but not all of them. The region of the Roman Empire where the Vandals settled down did not have a university again for over a Millennium.