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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they’re not really wrong.

    Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never “contributes” in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot’s comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there’s a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.





  • It’s all tied to the old military thinking.

    Russian soldiers are not fighting for Russia. Russian soldiers are fighting for their generals. Similar to how Roman armies worked, or… well, really like any army worked until we got to the nationalism level that eventually lead to WWI. One of the most effective ways the generals got their troops to follow them was allowing them the “spoils of war”. Good ol’ raping and pillaging.

    By comparison the Ukrainian army is unified in their fight for Ukraine. They’re not fighting for a person, they’re fighting for their people. All the fighting happening inside Russian borders isn’t to secure loot, it’s to end the war so they can go home.


  • Converting miles to kilometers and vice versa is a fun exercise to do in your head

    The Fibonacci sequence (where every number in the sequence is a sum of the previous 2 numbers) has a ratio of Fib(n)/Fib(n-1) converging to the golden ratio phi (~1.618) as n approaches infinity.

    A mile is 1.609 kilometers, so the ratio of phi is an extremely close approximation of that.

    What this means is you can easily use the Fibonacci sequence to quickly convert from miles to kilometers using adjacent numbers in the sequence

    1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …

    So you can quickly see something like 5 (or 50, or 500) miles is approximately 8 ( or 80, or 800) kilometers.

    Also, yiu can quickly do easy multiplication or division to figure out other approximate distance.

    Say, for 6 miles. 3 miles ( * 2) = 5km ( * 2) = 10km.

    For 11 miles, 55 miles * 2 = 110 miles / 10 = 11 miles, and 89 km * 2 = ~180 km / 10 = 18 km [actual conversion is 17.703 km, so, pretty close]

    You can do similar approximations by using other multiples.






  • Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn’t play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom’s old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.

    If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.

    So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.







  • In the UK visas are awarded on a points system. You get X number of points for having a college degree, Y points for it being in a certain field, etc. from what I’ve been told, nurses and doctors immediately qualify for all points required to get a visa just based on profession

    However, as someone that moved to the UK 13 years ago, I don’t consider it a great destination. Prexit really screwed everything up. Having an EU passport would have been an incredible complement to my US passport, but now a British passport is no more useful that my American passport, especially since most of my travel is to the European continent. Also, the NHS is being gutted continually so in all id just say it’s not the most desirable location if you’re in the healthcare field.

    At minimum, I’d look at countries that are properly in the EU, which includes Ireland. Other countries in western Europe would be great as well I think, depending on what kind of life you’re looking to live in. Something I’ve noticed is that generally Europe very quickly transitions from city to countryside. In the US you’ll get suburbs that stretch for dozens of miles past the core infrastructure of the nearest major city, where as in Europe it’s usually straight to farming fields and two lane roads.

    France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain and Germany would all be excellent locations to start a new life in healthcare I think. Each of those (except the Netherlands maybe) would expect you to be working towards fluency in their language though, so if you’re not interested in learning a foreign language that is definitely something to consider - which is why Ireland and Dublin specifically is so desirable to Tech companies and has been for the last 15 years.

    In general I would say that as someone in the healthcare field, you do have a job that is valued highly as far as getting a visa is concerned in Europe.