I may or may not have done this haha. I’m a threat to any working piece of software, just enough knowledge to be able to break shit and too little knowledge to avoid breaking shit. I think after all these years I’ve mostly learnt my lesson though. The package manager is the boss, and if I don’t like it I have to work around it without upsetting the package manager

Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.

I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.

This made me struggle with anything that didn’t interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more “logic driven” subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I’d spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me

Autism definitely isn’t a “super weapon” like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.

All those with a known number attached (or when I’m expecting an unknown call). Probably 70-80%. But I rarely call, maybe like once or twice a month

Idk. I’m an aro/ace and to me it’s mostly just another body part. I’d be surprised if most gay guys would feel different

I loved Fallen Order and I loved Survivor even more. It’s the perfect follow up to Fallen Order. At launch it had quite some issues tho, which is why it wasn’t received well. Not sure how much better it is now since I never really had issues to begin with.

Video games are honestly incredible. The prices have stayed relatively the same for a very long time, despite inflation, and yet the quality has shot up immensely. On the one end you have the AAA games like Cyberpunk, Jedi: Survivor, and RDR2 which look absolutely stunning. I’ve spent significant amount of time in games like those just being in awe with the graphics, taking screenshots. These worlds are so big and immersive, and there are so many tiny details.

Then you have the huge indy/smaller game scene. There are so many good games these days, it’s impossible to play them all. Factorio, Satisfactory, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Valheim, BAR, the list goes on and on. And all for a low price or even no money at all.

I always thought LibreOffice was shit and it always felt like I was using a “replacement”. However, after finally using Word again after many years I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not miles ahead and also quite shit. The docx format is bad, so Word is still better at dealing with it purely because it’s their format, but LibreOffice honestly has a nore logical but uglier design. The Word top bar is pure pain

Yeah definitely this. The improvements are insane compared to 10 years ago. It’s just annoying that techbro’s and CEOs have decided that it’s the next big thing and will shove it into anything. To too many people AI is a tool that’ll solve any problem, even if it’s usually a very wasteful and unpredictable solution.

Luckily we seem to be hitting the hype plateau and people are getting increasingly sceptical. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to another AI winter. There’s still plenty to gain and figure out, but we don’t need the insane hype that exists now.

Imo it’s both overblown and very impressive. Deep neural networks are capable of many things that we didn’t even imagine 10 years ago. We’ve made huge leaps.

The problem is that every company is putting “AI” in everything and techbro’s and managers are heavily overvaluing the technology. Most companies don’t need AI. In many cases there are way better methods to do the thing they want to do. The fridge or washing machine doesn’t need AI, the website of whatever company doesn’t need an AI assistant, and most people don’t need an AI accelerator in their laptop or phone.

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn’t it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: “Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves”, DnB: “Telomic & Susan H - Underwater”. I’ll be visiting the DnB festival “Liquicity festival” this weekend so I’m very hyped right now

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.

Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest

Uhm, not sure where I lie on this scale I guess. Is this the real scale or some abstract representation? Personally it’s a 1 or 2 for me, but the image constantly changes and is never quite stable. There can be quite some detail, but it’s only very temporary. Once I focus on some other part of the apple and go back everything is different

• Actually being the owner of my phone. Apple decides everything for their users and allows them little freedom. I want to be able to put random apps on my phone, including maybe even my own.

• Price. Shit’s expensive. I now got a Pixel 8 for less than 500 euro’s. Before that I had phones around the 300 euro price range.

• Their ecosystem. They try to lure you into an everything Apple ecosystem. Stuff like iMessage is horrible for consumers. With an Android phone I have choice of apps, smart watch, earbuds, etc. Apple will always try to force you into buying their fancy but expensive things.

• No benefit, there’s plenty of cool Android phones.

Etc etc.

I mean, yes and no. The festivals I visit and my gaming PC are also a complete waste of energy when you view it like that. I hate the dangerous situations we have every year in the Netherlands with fireworks. The heavy fireworks and loud bangs, the vandalism. But I’m okay with the people who send a lot of nice colourful fireworks into the sky around new year’s eve, and the farmers with their loud “carbid” launchers.

I like it. It’s sort of a follow up to Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2. Same kinda play style, but then in a modern game. I had some good fun with it. Personally I like it more than Planet Coaster, where I found the customization too overwhelming.

Block out the heat and sun during the day. Have everything open during the night, with a tactical fan placed wherever it helps the most.

But this only really helps the first few days. After that it’s down to accepting the situation and being so tired that you fall asleep anyway.

Maybe it’s the same thing I recently had. After running a half marathon in April this year and cycling another 20km from and to the course, I also had some weird muscle cramps when finally taking a rest. It was almost like something was crawling under my skin. My muscles felt like they were cramping together and releasing very quickly and very locally in tiny spots all over my calves. It was such a surreal feeling. Kinda creepy and weird, but at the same time also kinda nice and satisfying.

Yeah the bots were fine. I definitely liked splitgate more than the new tribes though. Even against humans I felt like I had way more chance to get some kills and overall the game felt more polished.