<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

8/27/2024, 8:51:26 AM

First day of school, and I’m totes casual about it. I don’t remember if I was worried last year. I was worried about second and third grade. And first grade was on Zoom.
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8/26/2024, 8:57:15 PM

I felt like it was a marginal call to cancel on the previous heat pump quote we got and get another one. But I thought it was worth doing because I knew the new guys give you the $10K Mass Save rebate up front, which is very handy because it saves you a lot of paperwork and following up, but I thought there was a chance the overall price would be higher.

It's not. It's $4K lower because they don't think that the extra indoor ductless unit is necessary, but they said it could be installed later if it is. The first guys shied away from that. They also didn't think about changing the existing supply trunk, which the current guys said would allow us to use a less powerful in-duct pump. In general, I think they think these guys things through in more detail in addition to being cheaper.
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8/26/2024, 5:37:31 PM

Anyway, I hope tech unions pick up, and staying away from that kind of political cosplay will help.
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8/26/2024, 5:35:56 PM

I’m in this tech workers unionization Slack, and someone posted a pro-Harris thing. People got mad because she’s not good enough for them, and they’d prefer whoever the PSL candidate is. It’s very “Massachusetts DSA disowning their only Massachusetts representative because he talked to the governor” —it’s people who are more interested in having their positions affirmed than having actual change (or lack of catastrophic change) happen. Tiring!
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8/26/2024, 4:51:41 PM

One of the cats threw up on the doormat yesterday, so I took it outside and hosed it off. That's the cleanest that doormat has been in years. I have really enjoyed looking at its cleanliness today!

I should probably clean more things, but I don't want to reduce the significance of the clean doormat.
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8/26/2024, 3:16:42 PM

The ranking of the three cars we've rented:

1. Nissan Leaf
2. Nissan Altima
3. Chevy Malibu

The Malibu feels awkward in the way that Soviet products were purported to be, according to American design culture.

Also, in addition to letting you skip gas stations and not fill the air with CO2, electric cars just feel way better. It's sort of like the way a web page with all sorts of overwrought React garbage tied to every event feels vs. just clicking on "normal" html pages. You don't know exactly what's going on in the former case, but you end up feeling like it's a lot every time you do something.
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8/25/2024, 8:54:09 PM

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8/25/2024, 8:54:09 PM

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8/25/2024, 4:14:03 PM

Implemented most of the algorithm the guy and I worked out. I haven't gotten to ranking spots by distance from the center of the group yet, so the layout isn't very compact.
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8/25/2024, 8:41:22 AM

Ambiguous sun moon! (It’s the sunlight from a rising sun reflecting off of the moon, pre-dawn.)
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8/24/2024, 9:07:19 PM

I’m back on trying to make a Mario Kart style song, and once again, I’m finding it to be way tougher than it sounds. You just do a bunch of happy doo-doo-doos, I imagined! Well, no. You can get the first riff that way, but finding a B section is an undertaking.
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8/24/2024, 7:36:16 PM

Another Rush E wipeout. There’s progress, though.
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8/24/2024, 5:40:23 PM

Today's Godot finding: If you declare an array as `const`, there's no error if you call `append` on it. It just quietly doesn't do it.
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8/24/2024, 4:38:55 PM

I figured out why really large versions of the guys occasionally show up in the game. When guys exit a level I put them in a "liminal space", which I initially set to be in a place that I thought of as "really far from the rest of the objects." Sometimes it's not, though, so it shows up on camera.
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8/24/2024, 12:38:53 PM

It’s been a couple weeks since the exterminator got rid of the wasps living under a loose window trim board. They haven’t been back! We just have the good bee now.
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8/23/2024, 5:39:19 PM

An hour after we boarded the plane, we got off.

Unfortunately, we got off at the same gate we boarded at because they have to reboot the plane or something. I should dig up the percentage of our flights that have been delayed.
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8/23/2024, 4:02:59 PM

This guy did not remove before flight.
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8/23/2024, 12:58:21 PM

You can kinda exploit kids for algorithm design. They can help work out contiguous group placement algorithms for game. (The idea is to place a group of n sprites in as contiguous a group as possible on a grid when they move to a new level. Probably needs work, but this is enough to start with, and he’ll enjoy seeing it in the game.) It’s sort of like people using ChatGPT to get something started.
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8/23/2024, 10:46:54 AM

A dog appears!
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8/22/2024, 9:43:55 PM

Bonus Cat’s at home, lasering.
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8/22/2024, 4:16:15 PM

I played a game of Big Two, which is the game that Balatro was in its proto-Balatro days. It’s so obviously far from that now that I didn’t expect Big Two to resemble Balatro at all, but the two games share a tiny bit of the same vibe because of the big draw situation. Having more than one viable poker hand and deciding which ones to break up for the situation at hand and which to keep together are an element of both games. Anyway, regardless of Balatro-resemblance, I recommend it. It’s sort of like competitive gin.
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8/22/2024, 4:02:30 PM

Some people in a discord with toddlers or about to have a baby were worried about having to give up making their hobby games, so I chucked this out there to hopefully help:
My hobby time isn’t solely devoted to game dev, so I’m not humming along in that regard, but I will say that you do eventually get more time when your kid hits school age. Plus, the parenting you do spend your time on is less demanding, usually.

My kid just turned ten, and I was just thinking about how much more was involved in a simple trip to the library when he was a toddler. I had to be with him, I had to help him navigate conflicts with other guys at the train table, and I had to read to him.

Last Saturday, we just walked in, split up for an hour, then he came up with a stack of books, and we left.

And, though you shouldn’t do this all the time, sometimes spending time together can just be doing things you’d normally do to destress, like playing Balatro.
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8/21/2024, 9:57:42 PM

The sound of the sea!
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8/21/2024, 8:57:37 PM

Didn’t really get it here, but the ocean was reflecting a bunch of red from the sky. Cool nature shit.jpg
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8/21/2024, 6:12:53 PM

Praying mantises are very still.
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