Just a basic programmer living in California

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  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

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  • The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.



  • 1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

    1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

    100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

    1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

    1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

    The m-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

    The kg-to-lb conversion is two-and-a-bit.

    A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

    Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I’ve corrected it.







  • My wife has worked with lots of people who are not native English speakers who are sometimes taken aback by the idioms. One colleague flat out refused to accept that “FOMO” is a word.

    I suggested that she is in a position to make some up, like “Let’s not put fish in the milk bucket.” But she didn’t go for it. I guess she’s not an agent of chaos after all :/





  • Yes; first pull the black plastic piece out of the end of the refill. I read that there needs to be a little airflow into the refill for ink to flow, and when the back of the refill is jammed into the pen that can cut off airflow so you might cut a little notch in the end of the refill where the black plastic piece was. I also sometimes trim about 4mm off the end of the refill, or put a tiny bit of wadded paper in the pen for spacing. But I do this a little differently every time I put a new refill in.


  • Pilot Hi-Tec-C is a gel pen with refills that happen to fit in the Space Pen. It puts down a crisp, fine line.

    The problem with the stock Space Pen is that it’s a messy ballpoint. I might be getting worse-than-typical results due to being left handed, but in general I find ballpoints don’t write crisp lines, and the ink smudges on my hand much more than gel pens do. But with the gel swap I do lose the feature of being able to write upside-down.






  • When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

    I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

    I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

    I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

    I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.