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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I definitely know at least one woman IRL that would post like that.

    Aight let’s do a quick lesson in Bayes Theorem, here in a shitpost community.

    Imagine there is a disease that exists in 1% of the population. Medical science develops a test with 90% accuracy (both in false positives and false negatives) on whether a person has the disease. Your doctor orders the test, and it comes up positive and saying that you have the disease. What is the probability that you actually have it?

    Well if you test an entire population of 1000, 10 of whom have the disease, it will correctly positively identify 9 out of 10 who have the disease, and incorrectly give false positive results to 99 out of the 990 who don’t have it. So among the 108 people who get positive results, you only about 8.3% chance of having the disease.

    My Bayesian priors for an anonymous prolific poster of thirstposts in a shitposting community on a heavily tech-centric social media platform is that they’re about 90% likely to be 30+ year old men. Claiming to be an 18 year old woman might move the needle a little bit, but not as much as you might think.


  • Sarah’s Scribbles is one of the better comics for drawing the author’s self as pretty cute in most comics but knowing how to draw herself as an ugly goblin when the comic is making a point about insecurity or embarrassment around physical appearance.

    That comic is basically the gold standard for how to convey those ideas in an otherwise cute art style.



  • It’s not about wavelength, but about intensity.

    At night, in darker conditions, cameras dial up their light sensitivity so that they can see faint light (the human eye does the same thing through the iris). So in that mode, they’re sensitive to the brightness that can be produced by human-made light emitters.

    But during the day, they’re already set for sunlight levels of brightness so that blinding them in that setting will require more light than is feasible to produce using normal light emitting technology. Infrared or visible light.

    Think about trying to blind someone with your car headlights in the middle of a bright sunny day. It just doesn’t work.



  • Weight of human beings, weights at the gym, etc.: pounds

    Height of people: feet and inches

    Height of buildings: mostly feet, but occasionally meters.

    Depth of water in scuba: meters

    Kitchen weight: grams

    Kitchen volume: fluid ounces only between 0-128 oz, then gallons after that. Decimal places, not fractions. So for example, cocktail recipes should all be in ounces, no tablespoons or teaspoons.

    Distances in wilderness: meters/km

    Distances on a football field: yards

    Distances on a basketball court: feet

    Distances on roads or in cities: miles

    All temps in Fahrenheit.

    Energy in calories for food and heat, watt hours for electricity, joules for everything else.


  • My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).

    So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.

    I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.

    I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.


  • Those percentages don’t really add up to 100, though.

    Something like 40% of American corn is used as a feedstock into ethanol fuel production. But that just strips out most of the starches and carbohydrates for fermentation into alcohol. The remaining proteins and fats are used mostly for animal feed. And somewhat surprisingly, the captured CO2 is sold as an industrial CO2 product, such as dry ice. So for that 40% of corn, we could say it’s used for ethanol production. Or we could say it’s used for animal feed. Or other processes. But it’s really all of the above.

    Modern American corn and soybean farming is just basically efficiently producing a bunch of bio feedstock into whatever processes can make use of those products, whether for human food, animal feed, industrial processes, etc.