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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 people11in the entire country instead of the 1.5 million7 I stated above.
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).
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.)
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.
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.)
This is just to vent frustration at a thoroughly stupid experience I had recently. A portion of that stupidity is me failing to read something correctly, but I’m just really stuck on the stupidity of the response to me asking for help:
My reaction clearly indicates that I am not undrstanding something, and I even tried to give context to where I’m coming from so that it would be easier to spot what I misunderstood, but instead I was told to go ask a bot.
And then they blocked anyone from ever asking for help again.
What’s most frustrating to me about this is that it coincides perfectly with another issue I ran into today where I couldn’t add an important detail to an old issue. Past conversations are useful to people looking for assistance, especially when one solves their problem and explains it. When I am blocked from replying to something with a solution, anyone in the future experiencing the same issue is likewise blocked from finding the answer.
I now know what I messed up, but I’m not allowed to pass that knowledge to the future, because I was confused and made a mistake in how I asked for help.
There’s another layer to this that is often ignored: When this is the response the average newbie gets when they first try to contribute, they are encouraged to never ask again, or in the case of submitting pull requests, encouraged to never try to help again.
When open source maintainers discourage newbies, they cannibalize the future of their software.
Okay, that’s my entire point, but I also encounted some funny things as part of this.
What is a contribution? GitHub doesn’t know!
I think it’s interesting that GitHub says the repo limited opening issues / commenting on issues to past contributers, but I am a past contributer. GitHub clearly considers issues to be contributions, as every profile has a graph showing issues as part of their contributions:
AI tools can be very powerful, but they can also be very stupid
Earlier today, I tested Perplexity AI’s capability to answer a few basic questions easily answered through traditional search engines, such as which insect has the largest brain and which country is the current leader in development of thorium-based reactors. The results? It doesn’t know ants are insects, thinks fruit flies have large brains just because they have been the subject of a large number of studies, and ignores India in favor of China because western media reports on China a lot more.
But you know what, I wanted to test this asshole’s suggestion to ask ChatGPT about my problem, and surprisingly, it gave a very clear and accurate response!
Note (2024-10-02): Open AI has since removed the ability to access web sites from ChatGPT, and dumbed it down significantly. It is no longer a viable tool for most use cases.
When you offer binaries for a project, they have to actually exist..
To be fair, this is a fairly recent change to the ReadMe, but maybe you should publish binaries before advertising that you publish binaries?
Installation and usage aren’t the same thing
It’s understandable to be confused about whether someone has correctly installed something, but after confirming that installation has worked, ignoring the question asked is unhelpful to say the least.
