Quotes Tagged 'jpo'
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jpo: As much as I might find the extent of our society’s reliance on personal metal boxes on 4 wheels to be distasteful, having one’s own metal box does have undeniable utility. I went several hundred miles in someone else’s metal box with the check engine and BRAKE light on a flashing and blinking the whole time, through rain and that snow/ice/sleet/hail storm, and control of the vehicle was indeed lost. Mildly terrifying. Lots of highways with semis too. Having my own metal box without these real and present risks to life and limb seems overdue jpo: Traction control light (ABS not working) was also on. Along with a couple other lights. Only light that was any consolation was the “passenger airbag on” light
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JPO’s steps for success: 1) find a community that’s technically awesome, and has a real sense of community 2) read, learn, do shit, share it, contribute something of value 3) participate in the community’s form of communication (e.g. mailing lists) (help people out, give feedback in areas you’ve actually learned about and done shit in) 4) go to events of said community 5) surround yourself with people way smarter than you are, shut up, listen, ask questions, take notes, really research the shit you didn’t understand afterwards 6) keep going to said events, speak up, engage, and let people associate your face with your name that they know from your worthwhile contributions 7) repeat from step 2 until the community considers you one of their own, and you’re (at least just barely) old enough to get past HR 8) find someone willing to give you a chance. Some is luck, but luck absolutely favors the prepared. If you want to get stuck by lightening, go climb a mountain in a thunderstorm. Here: go do shit that’s worthwhile and let it be known 9) profit 10) give back to help the next person do the same, and be willing to take a chance on someone when it’s your turn to pay it forward Cost of above: a sacrifice of time (perhaps years of your nights spent hacking instead of sleeping, perhaps a bad GPA), and maybe ~$600/event once or twice a year
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// Discussing weird hobbies. Re-ordered for clarity. jpo: My current hobby is reading about tax law echarlie: Why? haicen: Probably to learn how legal tax evasion works haicen: But realistically, you either have enough money to hire someone to figure that out, or you don't have enough money for it to matter jpo: No. You can hire someone to figure out how much you owe, but I haven’t been able to find someone who'd be able to tell me how to change what I'm doing to minimize future taxes in the first place jpo: Such people give standard advice which may be good for most people, but I am not most people, and am trying to save way more than a typical American and retire early, which means my tax considerations are not standard, and "just max roth" doesn't necessarily make sense jpo: So the best way is of course to write a program in Haskell that expresses tax laws as a directed graph of money-type transformations, express the resulting graph as a matrix, express your desired outcome as a fitness function, reduce said matrix, and out pops optimal tax avoidance strategy jpo: Of course, nobody takes this approach, they just look at single choices in isolation, and so the overall macro-scale outcome is suboptimal because they aren’t considering everything holistically haicen: I was with you except the Haskell part lukas: oh what's this, a real world useful application of haskell?!?!? jpo: actually yes! ;)
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// echarlie posts photo of his new vt220, along with slide rules echarlie: that's my new retrotech; dec vt220 echarlie: I need some superglue and retr0brite for it, but it is a fully functional vt220 with a white crt lukas: of course that's a thing lukas: is that actually your battlestation? echarlie: it's a hardware serial console. it is hooked up to my desktop for irc timelord/jpo: Wait, for real? You personally own a vt220 that you actually use? timelord: Because if so, I don’t think many other people or groups would appreciate this properly, but holy shit timelord: I'm legit impressed. Not gonna lie timelord: You have completely transcended timelordism and phased into a new plane of existence