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I’m in danger of becoming homeless

If you can spare a few dollars, it would go a long way to helping me survive: PayPayl.me/Guard13007

Update: It’s now October 2nd, 2024 and my partner has temporary employment. This danger is still present, but not as immediate as it was. The primary danger at this point is the lack of savings due to living for 1.5 years without income combined with being severely behind on housing payments.

Thank you to those who have helped! We have only been able to afford food due to assistance from others for the past few months.

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Font Choice Matters, Bionic Reading Doesn’t

A couple years back, Bionic Reading took the internet by storm with influencers advocating it as a method to increase reading speed and comprehension for people who have ADHD and dyslexia. Readwise quickly debunked this1, and in their conclusion highlighted studies2, 3 that show what really matters: Font choice significantly affects reading speed without affecting comprehension – but this effect is highly individualized. There is no “best” font.

Bionic Reading has since changed its website dramatically, but used to make the claim that on an independant test of 12 participants, there was a “positive effect”, despite also claiming that some participants found it “disturbing” and that the results were unclear4, 5. Bionic Reading claims to improve how fast your eyes/brain can see words, but as The Conversation points out, reading speed is based on language processing, not how fast your eyes see or visual cortex processes visual information.

Bionic Reading appears to be a solution in search of a problem, with a profit motive rather than an altruistic motive. Their service is partially a font, partially bolding certain letters. The concept is patented and charged for. This is not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a genuine interest in helping people.

While some may benefit from using it, this does not make it special – it makes it equivalent to any other font choice. It has been researched thoroughly6, 7, with no significant benefit found.

References

I try to make sure all references are archived through services mentioned on Archives & Sources. For this post, all references were backed up using Ghostarchive, as it was the only public-facing working archive at the time of writing.

  1. Readwise: Does Bionic Reading actually work? We timed over 2,000 readers and the results might surprise you. Readers were 2.6 wpm slower on average – a statistically insignificant result.
  2. Study: Accelerating Adult Readers with Typeface: A Study of Individual Preferences and Effectiveness “[…] readers in our study read better with varying fonts. An average 117 word per minute difference between worst and best typeface, or around 10 additional pages an hour […]”
  3. Study: Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals “Participants’ reading speeds […] increased by 35% when comparing fastest and slowest fonts without affecting reading comprehension.”
  4. The Conversation: Can Bionic Reading make you a speed reader? Not so fast
  5. Quartz: Can adjusting font styles really help us read faster?
  6. Study: Kan bionic reading bidra til økt prestasjon i leseforståelse hos sjette-trinns elever? “This study […] shows that formatting as a method to enhance students reading comprehension may be inappropriate […]”
  7. Study: No, Bionic Reading does not work “Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference in reading times between Bionic and normal reading.”
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it’s a small world, but my head is in space

Sometimes life rhymes in weird ways. It’s a small world.

Approximately 14 years ago, I discovered the game Elite, and open-source reimplementation called Oolite. I was hooked conceptually (because I sucked at the game, I never played it for that much time before giving up again).

I spent a lot of time looking at all the mods for it, and in that search, I stumbled across a promo video for one of the mods that featured really nice music:

So good that every few years I come back to it and play that video again. Somehow I never looked at the channel itself, just that one video, until tonight, where I discover that not only did they make the music used in that video, but they’ve made a good amount of music over all these years. They’ve a Bandcamp and a SoundCloud.

And then I noticed they make mods for a game called Trainz, which I stumbled across in a bargain bin years before I played Oolite. I didn’t get much chance to play it, but I always wanted to. This same person has just been involved with two random relatively obscure games I enjoyed and I kept coming back to this one video and not seeing these other spurious connections.

There’s no deep plot or special meaning here. I’m just tickled to discover these random connections and hope others enjoy their music too.

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Realms Half-Post-Mortem (from LD39)

I started writing this in September 2018, and didn’t get very far. It’s clear I will not finish it. That said, I do want a record of its existence here, so I’m publishing it now.

To describe it in one word, ambitious. An asynchronous web-based multi-user dungeon, that looks and feels like a terminal. Everyone starts in nullspace with 1 health. Kill players and take their souls to power up the other Realms to access them.

original welcome prompt
The original welcome message on Realms

As you can see, things were running perfectly well with no errors what-so-ever. Items were implemented, characters could see actions of others using a jury-rigged event system, and there was even a dummy that could be used to create souls!

Probably my biggest achievement was in flexibility I managed. That, or the fact that I put in a way to send me messages with the report command.

As with many of my game jam entries, I was overly ambitious and failed to deliver something complete. That said, I think it was at least an enjoyable experience to briefly search around in this pseudo-terminal.

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There Are Enough Homes For Everyone (Greed Causes Homelessness)

This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief and accuracy is not guaranteed.

Observing propaganda is useful to see how it is constructed. I just got through watching a video that claimed California is being taken over by “the drug-addled violent homeless”1 due to decriminalization of felonies and stringent building codes. In case you need the reminder: Homeless people are victims of landlords, a lack of rent control2, and a lack of social services. And the felonies in question? Minor crimes like drug possession and petty theft, the kinds of crime done by the desperate or disadvantaged. In other wods, crimes that never should have been a felony in the first place.

(They also claim that providing medical services to drug users increases harm. I remind you that the purpose of medicine is to reduce harm.)

California’s population peaked in 2020 at 39.5 million people3. At the time, there were approximately 151,000 homeless people living there4, and 711,679 housing units were unoccupied5 – enough for every homeless person to have 4 homes! (This mirrors a larger trend in the USA, where there were 16,883,357 vacant housing units in 20196, and 1.5 million homeless people7.) By 2022, California’s population had dropped by 0.5 million and there were 2.4 million more housing units (from 12.2 million5 to 14.6 million)8, which is plenty more space, despite the increase in homeless population to ~181,000 people9.

A preliminary estimate shows the homeless population in California has grown by 2% since that figure, which still doesn’t strain the available housing units10. However, the source of that claim is one of the least reliable sources available, so the real difference may be higher.

Underreporting & Accuracy

The USA has always had very reliable census data. The numbers regarding housing units all come from census data, and are accurate. The information on homeless populations that I found broadly comes from 3 categories of sources, with varrying levels of accuracy.

  1. “Continuum of Care” sources (commonly abbreviated CoC) seem to be the least reliable, first because they count homeless people at a single point of time (which ignores the magnitude of homelessness by omitting people who are frequently homeless for brief periods of time repeatedly), and second because they only count homeless people participating in a homelessness preventation program (which are often highly exclusionary, tunring away most homeless people). For example, the HUD’s CoC sources claim that in 2019 there were only 279,327 homeless people11 in the entire country instead of the 1.5 million7 I stated above.
  2. The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) seems to still fall into the trap of only counting people at a single point in time, but as far as I can tell actually does try to come up with an accurate count at that moment in time. The 9th and 11th items in my footnotes/sources are these reports, whose numbers are close to the PIT estimate in the 7th item (so I consider them related / roughly equivalent in accuracy).
  3. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) only counts homelessness based on children during a school year. Despite this, it captures a much more realistic estimate of the magnitude of homelessness by accounting for families over a significant period of time.

It would be fair to take these sources as a lower bound, average estimate, and upper bound. Operating from that assumption, I note that the difference between the lowest estimates and the highest is about 5x, while the difference between the average and upper is 3x. I think it important to consider this when looking at the numbers presented earlier, specifically the comparison between California and the whole USA.

There Were Always Enough Homes

When I want to make a point clear, I take the estimates most against my position, and use those to prove my perspective valid even under a worst-case.

California has 1/3rd the homeless population of the entire country. The estimates I found for California match the average estimates for the USA. If we assume that the average estimate is wrong, and the upper bound is correct, there are 3x more homeless people in California than I said above.

In 2019, the highest count I found was 181,000. If we presume that there are actually 543,000 homeless people, that the 2.4 million new housing units don’t actually exist, and that 500,000 people didn’t actually leave California… there are still 711,679 housing units available for them. There have always been enough homes for everyone.

Footnotes & Sources

(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)

  1. An important signifier in any conversion about disadvantaged people is how they are spoken about. A specific flag to look for is the usage of terms like “the homeless” vs terms like “homeless people”. The first is dehumanizing, the focus is on a group of “disliked things” whereas the second acknowledges these are people of a categorization. While this language usage does not necessarily coincide with how a presenter values the people being discussed, it is a hint at how they perceive of a topic.
  2. There are a billion sources that all show this. I just happened across a really detailed document about ALL of this in State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition (archive.org, archive.is)
  3. California Remained Most Populous State but Growth Slowed Last Decade (archive.org, archive.is)
  4. Page 3 of Homelessness in California (archive.org, archive.is)
  5. California Housing Statistics (archive.org, archive.is)
  6. Housing Units and Population Measures for the United States (archive.org, archive.is)
  7. Urban Vision Alliances’ HOMELESSNESS STATISTICS (archive.org, archive.is)
  8. California – Profile data – Census Reporter (archive.org, archive.is)
  9. Page 186 (printed as pg. 16) of The 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress (archive.org, archive.is)
  10. Partial 2024 California Homeless Count Results Reveal a Statewide Increase of 2% (archive.org, archive.is)
  11. HUD 2019 Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs Homeless Populations and Subpopulations (archive.is)

Updates:
2024-10-11: Clarified text in footnotes, added redundant archive links.
2024-10-27: Corrected heading size for footnotes/sources.

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Uncommon Knowledge: NTFS Allows Weird Filenames

The whole internet confuses NTFS and Windows. If you try to find what characters are disallowed on NTFS, you’ll probably find what Windows blocks:

But NTFS doesn’t actually have this limit. As far as I can find, the only limit is the NULL character. I don’t know of an operating system that will let you use a forward slash (“/”) in a filename, but technically it is allowed.

Not only is this relatively unknown, but it is hard to find information on because most searching will bring up results about Windows only. 😀

Sources

(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)

  1. Discussion: Edge cases of file naming in NTFS/FAT/etc, Windows/Linux. The only specific affirmative answer I could find.
  2. Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces Microsoft does mention namespaces, but doesn’t go into detail.
  3. Filename Namespaces – Concept – NTFS Documentation & the 101th page (pg. 93) of NTFS Documentation (PDF) (different formats, same source) The NTFS Project states that only NULL and forward slashes are not allowed. (The forward slash is disallowed by the NTFS project, not NTFS.)
  4. Filename – Wikipedia (Comparison of filename limitations) Mentions that Posix namespaces remove some character restrictions, but doesn’t specify details (and is also flagged as “dubious” lol).