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Cake day: June 6th, 2024

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  • My experience was that the school provided free Windows keys for a personal computer if you needed one (they didn’t provide the computer itself) but the majority of computers I interacted with on campus (mostly in the computer lab) were Linux (some Debian variant iirc). I think the printing computers in the library were windows. I took an art class at one point and they had Macs (it was for using the Apple’s Final Cut Pro).

    We never used LibreOffice though. Everyone just uses Google Drive.




  • I find it hard to believe that a far market can exist when everyone is required or effectively required to purchase something. If you think of supply and demand, the demand for something like health insurance or legally mandated car insurance is effectively infinite.

    The decision to get car insurance or not is not “is the value this car insurance provides worth the money” it’s “is the value this car provides worth the money”. Similarly, the value of health insurance becomes the value of getting any sort of medical treatment, because it’s generally impossible to get treatment otherwise.

    This allows the insurance companies to charge rates far beyond the value they actually provide, because they are legal gatekeepers to far more valuable opportunities.


  • Key word “in the given forecast area”.

    The statement “there’s a 40% chance of rain at any given point at any given time in the forecast area/period” is an average over both area and time.

    Many different actual distributions of rain could result in that average, including a 100% chance of it raining 100% of the time in 40% of the are or a 40% chance of it raining in 100% of the time in 100% of the area, and a 100% chance of it raining 40% of the time in 100% of the area. Real distributions are typically messier than that.









  • One Minecraft server I played on installed a program for blocking x-ray hackers (a type of hack that lets you see valuable ores through walls so you know exactly where to mine).

    The anti-xray mod worked by reporting to the user that the blocks behind a wall are a jumble of completely random blocks, preventing X-ray from revealing anything meaningful.

    This mod resulted in massive lag, because when you are mining, every time you break a block, the server now needs to report that the blocks behind it are now something different. It basically made the game unplayable.

    The server removed the mod and switched to having moderators use a different type of x-ray mod to look at the paths people mine in the ground. Those using x-ray hacks would have very suspicious looking mines, digging directly from one vein to another, resulting in erratic caves. Normal mining results in more regular patterns, like long straight lines or grids, where the strat is to reveal all blocks in an area while breaking as few as possible.

    Once moderators started banning people with suspicious mining patterns, hacking basically stopped.

    It’s possible to still hack and avoid the mods in this kind of system by making your mines deliberately look like legitimate patterns, but then the hacker is at best only slightly more efficient than a non-hacker would be.