breakfastburrito

I recently had to do linear algebra for the first time ever irl. I’ve been out of school for ~15 years. I was trying to make a rotation matrix to transform some points in 2D space. It took me a very long time to remember how it’s performed yet alone “transformation matrix” which is something I’d never heard of before. I got my code all working and was so proud, then later found that one of the r packages I was using could have just solved it all automatically :/

Everyone I know who studied English in undergrad is a coder now. Everyone I know who studied it in grad school is a high school teacher now.

Bad lieutenant and wild at heart are really good out there movies

I thought maybe I was misremembering the numlock thing so I looked it up and found a mention in someone’s user manual! See top of page 8here

Maybe a bit niche, but the Scanco software for computed tomography analysis. Cant remember what it’s called off the top of my head. It’s horribly dated and unintuitive. It does work though! My favorite was when we stopped being able to use it for several weeks, we thought it was busted. We contacted the company for help and they informed us that with a new update the numlock key toggled a “feature” that prevented editing files. No visual representation that editing was locked. Wild

Sas is awful but I will say doing mixed linear models and doing contrasts was pretty easy compared to r.

I think the most famous example is probably “Pale fire” by Nabokov. Not sci-fi, but very very fun! George Perec write some interesting concept books. One is about this apartment in Paris where every chapter just describes a random room in the building, but slowly tells a story of the inhabitants.

I think one of the benefits would be less war since every citizen would be personally affected by it. Also all the public works and infrastructure. And healthcare. It could be great! Maybe it would help with all the “lonely men” culture that we hear so much about, and likely plays into some of the gun culture. I guess we’ll never know since that won’t happen here, though.

Mandatory conscription is probably my most “out there” political belief. I think the benefits would be vast! I don’t think it would prevent mass shootings in America, though.

Policy on prescribing opiates had gotten a lot tighter in the last 7ish years. It’s unlikely to get prescribed those drugs for small pains. People got addicted before this tightening, weren’t allowed to wean off them, and now turn to street drugs instead of pharmaceuticals. Also they cutoff people with chronic pain. OD deaths actually have steadily increased despite an enormous drop in prescriptions and it’s mostly fentanyl. Fentanyl is also much cheaper than pharmaceutical opiates.

What’d you think the first time?

This was nearly a decade ago. I worked at a small app company (5-10 developers) for a bit that used Ruby on Rails for our product. The product was in active development, but was available to customers so it was “done”. We were hiring a senior level dev to oversee the team and we interviewed this guy (maybe in his 40s?, a but older than most people in tech) and he said his first order of business if hired would be to refactor the entire code base to php. I don’t think he was joking. I’m not sure why he interviewed.