501–510 of 865 posts
Modelling natural gas consumption. I don’t think it’ll be actually useful and certainly not as nuanced as professional models for trading, but adding the necessary data to my data warehouse and then working on it has been a fun experience.
Low-plastic living. I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packa…
I’ve tried too, and I agree that it is very hard. I rarely buy packaged and ready-to-eat food products, which eliminates a lot of plastic. But still there’s so much plastic when buying grocery and produce. Buying grains or other items from loose bins means insects, lower quality and what not. I’m happier with the lower plastic though.
Powerlifting. Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't. It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often. Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exce…
Powerlifting can be very dangerous. You can really, permanently, mess up your body, specifically your back and neck. What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?
Crossword puzzles! They make very interesting combinatorial problems (both for solving and creating grids). I recently had a ton of fun writing a constraint programming model that generates grids, including the automatic placement of black squares (this was the main modeling challenge). This model is useful for creating grids using short word lists (which is the case for e.g. thematic grids).
My immediate guess on how to model it would be to create reified constraints for the wordlists of different lengths (the constraints in chapter 22 of https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf). For each square, use standard logical constraints to check if it is the start of a word (previous square a black one, this square not a black one), and how long the word is (using backwards counting of runs). These can be used to trigger the reified constraints above.
If the word-lists are short-ish enough, then an alternative for the above model would be to model the whole words using MDD or regular expression constraints, with an added control variable and setting all values as don't-care for the false case.
Home automation. I always had an Alexa and a couple of WiFi switches, but I just discovered the rabbit hole of Home Assistant, Zigbee devices, flashing devices to get rid of cloud capabilities and install your own firmware, and the whole ordeal. Haven't had this fun with tech in a while.
Ultra HDR - I predict it will cause a revolution in photography. This isn't the old HDR that was all about capturing a wider range of brightness; it refers to display of a wider range of brightness. It's built into Android 14 and you can now capture Ultra HDR images with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Ultra HDR is really just jpg, uses the standard jpg extension and works the same as a regular jpg, unless your display softwa…
This post caught my attention because recently I met a woman I really admire. She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect. The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it. I used to have one. My goal was to make the l…
Ultra HDR - I predict it will cause a revolution in photography. This isn't the old HDR that was all about capturing a wider range of brightness; it refers to display of a wider range of brightness. It's built into Android 14 and you can now capture Ultra HDR images with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Ultra HDR is really just jpg, uses the standard jpg extension and works the same as a regular jpg, unless your display softwa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any tips for running pain free? I used to run pretty often (3-5 times per week) for 5+ miles. Longest was 11. However, my feet started hurting while running -- never while walking even long distances.
strength training helps a lot in preventing injuries. I've been through years of achilles tendonitis and finally got rid of it mostly by doing leg/calf strength exercises. Fwiw, here's some example exercises for Achilles: https://routineshub.com/public/1faae50e-8d36-4eec-84ee-ae3ef...