I very deliberately avoid politics. If I fail let me know.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: May 22nd, 2025

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  • I give through my employer which matches donations. You should look into whether that’s available since it’ll double the amount.

    Decentralized truth is essential to human freedom. It’s not enough to just run wikipedia as a bare bones site, they need to be able to adapt to the times and maybe even fund new projects with the same goals. For people who actually care about the future, it’s hard to think of a better use of the money.



  • You can kinda guess the world is real because of the CAP theorem. Hear me out.

    1. The CAP theorem says a computing system cannot perfectly have all 3 of: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance (division of some parts of a distributed system from another). We’ll assume this is true and somewhat dubiously assume this applies to any simulated universe
    2. Availability is a necessity. A simulated universe that suddenly starts lagging or buffering would mean the jig would be up pretty quickly. You’d probably want a distributed system that can spin up new computing instances instantly, but that brings up issues with partitioning…
    3. But lack of partition tolerance would make it pretty obvious that the universe is fake, because some parts of it would be inaccessible. So can’t sacrifice that.
    4. Therefore, the only thing left is consistency. A simulated universe would need some kind of inconsistency. In a web site, this might mean content is available to users in some areas but not others. In a simulated universe, we’d expect people in some areas to have a different experience of objective reality than others. But there’s no evidence of this ever happening, unless you wanna go down some Mandela effect rabbit hole.
    5. That leaves us with the conclusion that the universe is not a computing system at all, but rather a thing in itself. It doesn’t need to stay consistent because it is consistent fundamentally.
    6. Also, let’s just ignore relativistic speed limits and quantum mechanics entirely.





  • Having gone from the guy with no matches to getting good matches, in part from advice from female friends, here’s what worked for me in order of priority:

    1. De-red flag. Remember, men are about 5-10x as likely to commit acts of violence as women. So imagine you’re looking at your profile as a third person, assuming there’s a good chance you’re a serial killer. Make sure your jokes are clearly jokes and can’t be read as hinting at any extreme beliefs or even overall weirdness. Seriously, there’s like a 90% chance that if you haven’t done this already, you’ve got something on your profile that’s terrifying to most women. Now a common faulty cognition I see is “I should tell her what other girls don’t like about me as a warning”. No, stop. That’s not how you do it. Because girls will assume it’s 1000% worse than what you’re saying, and even worse the algorithm will nuke you if you get too many rejections. Instead, see step 4) and reject other girls who won’t be into you.

    2. Good pictures. Again, 1) comes into play here. No dark backgrounds. Nothing that looks like one of those pictures they show of suspects on the news. Outdoors is good. If you have pictures with people, great. If not, no sweat, just make it look good. Look up a guide on how to take a good selfie and use it.

    3. Keep your written answers short. No one reads them anyway, unless they’re really long and creepy. You’re not going to convince her you’re Shakespeare, she’s really just checking to make sure you don’t remind her of someone she had a terrible experience with.

    4. Now all that being said, the best strategy for swiping is to be the opposite of most people. Don’t just swipe on anyone who meets your attractiveness standards. Instead, swipe only on girls you’d really be excited to meet, and that you think would be excited to meet you too. Are you frugal? Don’t swipe right on the model with a Gucci bag. I know it’s hard. But you really have no chance of making it and dating her would make you miserable anyway. So swipe left and get the little boost that helps you meet a better match. I will say I’ve followed this strategy on Hinge which supposedly has a better algorithm for matching people, so I can’t guarantee it for other sites.



  • Not sure what you mean by Michael Burry levels of ethical investment, but he has a fund and apparently its most recent disclosed holdings are here. You could just buy (or rather sell, in most cases) those. As you can see 6 out of 7 positions are short - meaning he’s betting the stock price will decline - and if you would rather bet against every corporation shorting is an option. But be aware, it’s very hard to make money shorting because you’re fighting inflation and losses are unlimited. Great way to go bankrupt, especially if you’re new to investing.

    Beyond that, if you want minimal exposure to some asshole CEO, you can invest in commodities like Gold (e.g. GLD, which is a gold ETF that just holds gold bars, and generally goes up over time) and a billion other things. Bond etfs are another option (but pose some risk of losing money at the moment due to inflation/interest rate fears), and if you wanna be a sort of landlord you can do a REIT. Many of these pay dividends which probably lowers your risk of loss to some degree. The markets are a little nutty right now and I can’t think of a single thing that’s easy to predict at the moment.

    Finally, there’s simpler options like high interest savings and CDs, which aren’t as terrible of an option as usual because interest rates are higher than inflation in the US for the time being.




  • Once I worked at a place that had its own in-house project management software. It actually worked rather well. Part of the problem is that every company has its own process and Jira and the like try to accommodate all of them and it ends up being a jumbled mess that doesn’t fit anyone’s actual process. It’s like trying to fit a tesseract-shaped peg into a round hole. But companies don’t like to spend money on developing their own software so that’s what we end up with.