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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

    If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.



  • What cross are you talking about? Ankhs are the only thing that comes to mind and you buy those at the shops at the start of each 5 level set, so 6,11,16, etc. Ankhs provide a resurrection if you die but you won’t have your gear or any potions etc, so you have to run back to the site at which you died where you will find a backpack with all your stuff.


  • If someone does not treat you with respect you are not their friend, you are their pet.

    It is no reflection on you at all, this is purely on them, but if they don’t respect you they are not treating you as an equal as they should be.

    You deserve better.

    A healthy relationship can include a difference of experience, knowledge, even power, but not respect. Respect is the bedrock of a good relationship and if you don’t have that you may need to look elsewhere. If you were not modelled self respect or taught it you would benefit from learning about it.

    That all said, she sounds like she may just be compensating in some way, putting you down to elevate herself, but seriously you don’t have to take that. She could potentially change and stop this behaviour but she may persist and you may have no option but to get into a new friend ggroup and leave this one.


  • The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.

    That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don’t have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don’t claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying “do this perfect thing” seems counterproductive.


  • I used heavy trance when I had trouble when I was younger. I used night sounds like rain and thunder for a couple of years. Now my partner watches Minecraft videos while heading off to sleep and I cuddle them and fall asleep with them.

    That said, other tools are exercise, less caffeine, Ritalin (so I am not overtired and stressed), less sugar, and better heat management.


  • If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.

    That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.


  • I’m reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said “Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it”.

    If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don’t axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.

    As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don’t have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.


  • I’ve made it through the final boss and returned to the surface with the amulet as a huntress and mage but never a rogue. That said, yes, it is hard, and yes, it takes a lot of attempts. I would recommend trying to find ways of diverting enemies, tanking a little damage, and making yourself invisible. You can get closer to the boss using blink, haste, and invisibility and you can make the other enemies hit him with stones of aggression. You may also want to consider scrolls of challenge, wand of lightning or corrosion, and using the cloak to go invisible for a turn to let enemies dispirse. That said, good job getting that far, try again with what you learned, you will get there.


  • I’m here in Australia and now, 4.5 years in, still haven’t had it. I mask whenever outside and use good hand hygiene at a times. I carry alcohol hand sanitiser and have wipes in the car for when I take my mask off in the car to wipe my face. I haven’t had a cold, flu, RSV, or covid since 2019 when I started wearing the mask because of bushfires. I work with vulnerable people who could get very sick from covid and so I don’t want to carry it person to person, and I also have an immune compromised partner who I don’t want to give it to. Honestly it is not a big ask and it is very effective to just mask up.


  • I work in disability support. I leave the house, drive to my client, then don my mask and wear it until I leave the client and get back into my car. If I have a client all day I can just wear the mask all day, eating before and after my shift. I have not gotten a cold, flu, or other disease for the last 4 years and I have worked with people who actively have covid, influenza, RSV, and other illnesses.

    My mask is a pm 1.0, so a little better than pm 2.5 which is what n95 is, and it works very well. Honestly I can’t see me changing my behaviour around masking ever. I don’t get sick, I don’t carry illness to vulnerable clients, and I don’t have to change my behaviour day to day so habit is solid and easy to maintain.

    While it didn’t help my endocarditis last year it has definitely protected against covid and even now I have not gotten it once. I think it is a good deal overall.





  • OK, so good, a clear starting point.

    First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

    The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

    So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

    So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

    Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

    Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

    Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.


  • You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

    1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

    2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

    For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

    So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

    Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

    That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

    Can you give more detail about your goals?


  • I meant to say language in the linguistics sense, a series of abstract items which can be arranged to convey arbitrary meaning. For example, a dog barking can be a threat display, a warning, playful, sad, afraid, and so on. But can you use barking to create grammar? With grammar you could have labels for items in the world and use various barks to refer to them, make requests, ask questions, and so on. Some types of animals have warning calls that are specific to types of predators, for example an eagle call or a leopard call. Leopards require different responses than eagles so the distinction is very useful and helps others to respond. This is not quite language but is definitely a step in the right direction.

    So yes, you are correct, lots of animals can communicate things to each other, but it is not the same as language like what humans have. Could we find an animal that does have language? Or something very close? Sure, but we haven’t shown that yet. Maybe we should focus on giving other animals a chance to develop before we wipe them all out.



  • No, but that is because they don’t have language.

    That said, plenty of humans do not have a voiced internal experience. The lack of language does not imply a lack of cognition. I would expect that the brain of a closely related organism, say a chimp, would have many similar experiences generated by the same stimuli. Would they experience green like I experience green? I can’t even say that about a person sitting next to me, but they probably have an equivalent experience.

    That said, if we had a way of communicating could we reach agreed terms? I can do that with my cat, so I would think he has an understanding of me and my behaviours along with what tends to happen when I do certain things like clap then shake my hands at the end of a treat session. He knows there are no more treats, he associates that with my hands clapping and shaking, so we communicate. Does he have a voice in his head describing it? Probably not. Does he have Meows? Again, probably not, but he would have a sense and memories of previous times.



  • No idea, but I put it together from ideas around algorithmic decision making and anarchistic thought. Design a society where you would be happy to be dropped in as a random person and you can’t have massive power and wealth imbalances. As soon as you get rid of the idea that you will be on top you gain the drive for equality and fairness.

    If nobody wants to do a job then people will pay more to not have to do it. In that way people getting paid to do shitty jobs at least get well compensated and that makes the job more attractive, leading to it being less shitty.