Now waitaminit—you’re saying that my Roomba has hallucinogens inside it? I tripped over it the other day, but this is a much different kind of bad trip hazard than I was led to think.

Pretty sure my Calc2 prof pulled this trick on us sometime in the solids of revolution unit. Started deriving something on the board, just another cylinder ok, but wtf are you calling the radius ‘z’?

I don’t know dude. I took multivariable calculus, ODEs, linear algebra, modern physics; and a numerical methods for engineers class— all in the same semester. I was a fucking mess and swimming in integrals and derivatives and matrices and systems of equations (both differential and ordinary algebraic) 177% of the time. I honestly don’t remember anything of that five months of my life. 11/10 would not recommend.

I don’t know that any one book was a savior. I was reading from like three books per topic all at once to try to make heads and tails of anything and spending every minute I could in my prof’s and TA’s office hours.

Those two books were some of the only ones I kept, and just donated everything else. Maybe it’s just nostalgia.

My Dover Ordinary Differential Equations book is my second favorite math book.

My first favorite is Spivak’s Calculus.

They’re both just so beautiful. Wish I had time to relearn it all again. :)

… come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if they’d just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And I’m way happier with this company than I would’ve been there.

The Universe does funny things.

I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.

Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasn’t the X they were looking for.

Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the role—and the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying they’d done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.

That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.

Never again.

Fun fact: the scientist’s name was Adam, and the soup was primordial.

Reminds me of this trad classic in Lumpy Ridge @ Estes Park, CO: Magical Chrome Plated Semi-Automatic Enema Syringe

The novelty of the view is more fun than the climb/crux itself but the overall route is fun and worth doing.

I need you to understand that most people just don’t go around talking about other people’s dissertations to other people.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

But three is two, and two is one, with one is none, then I need to buy four more. But wait there’s more; because five is four!

Can’t find Saddam.

That’s pretty normal. Like, less than sigma.

Calculus, Motherfucker! Do you speak it?!

This is a masterpiece. You should publish.

deleted by creator

Fucking work for once you piece of fuck. Fuck this day. Fuck this shit. Fuck this degree. Fuck.

Same kinda happens in industry, too.

Intern: 12 shitty slides. No appendix. Mumbles through the entire pres.

Jr/Associate: 47 immaculate slides, full appendix, 30 minutes to present, runs short on time, skips half of them and the audience fell asleep 20 minutes ago.

Senior: 10 slides, good enough but not pretty; too busy being technical for pretty slides. Serves the dessert first because that’s what we’re fuckin’ here for, the meat and potatos are there afterwards but we probably won’t have time for it because of Q&A. 30 appendix slides and ready for any question including “when is the heat death of the universe?”

Tech lead/director: 100 slides, 2 or 3 at the front called executive summary, agenda, recommendations; 2 more slides to back it up and introduce the team/rest of the presenters, and 95 other slides ready to go for whatever, spliced together from like 30 other slide decks they have for every occasion.

CTO: I don’t have slides. I have a spreadsheet; but I need you all to tell me the numbers. Here we go.

sudo chmod 000 /

Sometimes old software just has too much legacy spaghetti written in to really build from though. Starting from scratch gives new ideas room to breathe and grow that might otherwise be impossible to implement in the previous framework—which while probably useful can also be stifling. See the reason why Wayland is being written to replace Xorg.