reasonableapproximation

[reasonableapproximation]

I had to switch my work laptop from Arch to Ubuntu. Some things are improved (less buggy with my external monitor), some are degraded (when HLS gets OOM killed, it now seems to take emacs or my whole desktop with it). The installer didn't let me preserve my existing home partition inside an LVM-on-LUKS partition, and that's not too surprising except that apparently previous versions could do that. So far it's mostly not as terrible as I feared.

... Except that (at least with focus-on-hover, which is obviously the correct focus behavior)

Left clicking on a window titlebar doesn't reliably raise it, which it should obviously do

Middle clicking the title bar doesn't automatically lower it, which should happen because that's a setting

But double clicking and right clicking reliably work according to their settings (toggle maximize, open menu)

Raise and lower seem to work for some apps but not others. Which, what? Why? How can this be the case and how did it slip through?

[reasonableapproximation]

One of the S&S ISAs (M&G), I just didn't end up being able to prove it was mine. They don't have a pdf export feature, so I just had to print a page on the website to pdf. And they didn't have any pages with both my name and my account balance, and whoo boy, "here's one document with my name and account number, and here's one with my account number and balance, don't you think that kinda suggests that maybe my name is associated with that balance, at least as long as I'm not committing the kind of fraud that would be trivially easy to commit even in a single document" is apparently Not How Things Are Done Around Here?

Idk, maybe it could have worked? This was all going through my mortgage broker, and I'm not sure how hard he tried - it wasn't really necessary, because I have more than enough in other accounts to fund the whole thing, so mortgage providers don't actually need to know about this one, so we decided not to bother.

But my plan had been to fully drain this one. And I think it makes sense to do that over a period of weeks-or-months, instead of running the risk that I happen to withdraw it all in a market dip. But if something goes wrong, and I need to give proof of funds again, then suddenly I have a mysterious injection of tens of thousands of pounds into my bank account that I can't easy give provenance for. Proooobably not a dealbreaker, but at least a pain in the ass.

So I thought maybe I'd withdraw it all from the other ISA (Vanguard), and then when I'm done I transfer everything from M&G to Vanguard and close M&G. I've been vaguely meaning to do that for years anyway.

But! I can just transfer it all to my Vanguard now. People who want proof of funds only ask for three months of statements for my current account, and single snapshots for other accounts. So as long as it doesn't go through my current account nothing's going to look suspicious. (And it's not even allowed to go through my current account, HMRC would be Very Upset with me if it did that.)

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[reasonableapproximation]

Current account: the update went through the next day, but the downloadable statements still had my old address. I explained my problem to the customer support bot. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I do not want to change my address. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I want to talk to a human. «Sure. They'll be able to see the conversation so far.»

«Hi there. I see you want help changing your address.» I explained my problem again. «I see your address as being updated.» I explained my problem again. «It can take some time to regenerate. Try again tomorrow.»

Tomorrow, to no surprise, nothing had changed. This time I found their phone number and spoke to a human. She said those statements had already been generated but she could generate a new document, essentially three months' worth of statements in one pdf that would have my new address. That would take 24-48 hours to generate. I said I'd have hoped to have it sooner, and she said it's usually less than 24 but they have to say it could be up to 48 just in case. That's not what I thought she meant originally, but okay, that's less bad. It actually came in ~12 hours, and was fine.

The text conversation asked for feedback at the time, but I didn't know for sure the advice was wrong at the time. By the time I found out that the person had, bluntly, wasted my time by spouting a crock of shit, there was no way for me to feed this information back.

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[reasonableapproximation]

There's an ad for some google AI thing that features someone saying «tell me about dating Scorpios» and the AI saying «Scorpios are known to be blah blah blah».

And like, "AI entrenching existing prejudices" is so far from being the most important story about AI. And "AI playing along with your astrology bullshit" is far from being the most important story about AI as it relates to entrenching existing prejudices.

But still. What the fuck!

[reasonableapproximation]

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[reasonableapproximation]

Like either you can afford to buy the more-expensive chicken already, or you can't afford to have animal welfare regulations.

I think this is an overstatement. I'd expect stricter animal welfare regulations to raise the minimum price of chicken, but not to the current price point of ethically raised chicken. Partly because there's more supply of ethically raised chicken, and partly because there'll be more optimization power applied to the problem of "how to raise chickens cheaply and ethically".

I have no particular intuition for where in between the current price levels things will equilibriate, or for that matter what the current price difference is.

I'd also expect other foods that can substitute for chicken to become cheaper/more available, since there's more demand for them. I could imagine that being basically-unnoticeable though.

(I also buy meat raised under welfare standards that I'd vote to outlaw. This is a moral failing on my part.)

As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.

[reasonableapproximation]

Chapter 4 (probably the finale) of the series is finally waiting for publication. This is what the stats look like several months after chapter 3 was published.

Along with with the general flow of time, it gave a boost of 4.1k views, 6 hearts and 25 votes to chapter 1; 2k views, 3 hearts and 14 votes to chapter 2; 0.8k views and 1 vote to one of the other stories and 1.1k views and 1 vote to the last.

I've written some porn over the past few years and I don't feel like making it easy to find but I am interested in talking about how it's been rated.

The first two are chapters 2 and 1 of the same series. (Chapter 3 is awaiting publication and I intend there to be a chapter 4 hopefully by the end of May but I'm not gonna rush myself.) #4 is one I wrote a few years previously but just didn't put on Literotica until I wrote #3.

I agree with the general ranking that #1/#2 > #4 > #3. I maybe think #3 is a little underrated but not much. #s 1 and 2 I really am proud of. My girlfriend and recent ex also think they're great, and they got some very flattering comments on reddit. (#1 got way fewer votes on reddit than #2, probably because it's a chapter 2 and both chapters are longer than normal for the subreddit. Chapter 3 currently has slightly more votes there than #2 there but no comments yet.)

Both the stories in the serial have similar numbers of favorites-per-view, which tracks with them having very similar ratings. But #4 has way fewer favorites-per-view despite also a fairly similar rating, and #3 is in between despite having a notably lower rating than #4.

#2 was at 13 favorites before #1 was published and got 9 after. The others got one favorite each after #1 was published. Between #2 and #1 they got no favorites but that's when #4 got its comment.

My guess would be that that's because #4 is F/m, so a lot of people bounce off without even reading. It says in the summary that it's F/m but maybe a lot of people don't notice that. Or maybe they're just looking for a different style of femdom or something.

But it has more votes-per-view than #3, so that doesn't seem like it can be the explanation. I don't have any other guesses. And I don't have a guess for why #2 has wayyy more votes-per-view than the others.

My guess for why it has lower views than #s 2 and 3 is saying F/m in the summary. And I guess #1 has low views because it's a part 2.

(I don't expect it would be hard to find these if you wanted and I'm not gonna be sad if you do, but I still don't feel like making it easy.)

[reasonableapproximation]

Gilmore Girls isn't about food, so probably this isn't fair. But to the extent that Sookie makes it about food, Gilmore girls is closer to Cruella than Ratatouille.

(I think there's a scene at one point where she's sad that someone didn't like her food and then later she's like, «oh! They had this wine with this meal and that was a terrible pairing!» But mostly she just seems to have Strong Opinions)

Cruella has a character named Artie. Wikipedia has it that he "was promised to be the first original character in a live-action Disney film to be openly gay".

But unless I really missed something, the text of the film doesn't give him any sexuality. He basically doesn't interact with anyone except Cruella (briefly with her henchmen) and doesn't talk about himself much. He doesn't kiss anyone, gaze longingly after or into the eyes of anyone, pull anyone into a closet and come out looking disheveled, talk about banging or wanting to bang guys...

I think the subtext based on how he dresses and speaks is supposed to be: "he's gay, he's not trying to hide it, this is supposed to be obvious to you and it would have been obvious to the other characters even if he doesn't explicitly tell them".

But I actually parsed him as "trans woman but in the 70s". Not sure exactly what caused that - maybe something like, today I don't particularly think of gay people as presenting different from straight people, I do think of trans people as presenting different from cis people, and in the 70s trans people would presumably have presented differently than they do today? Idk. And I don't actually know anything about how "people we'd understand today as gay" versus "people we'd understand today as trans women" presented in the 70s.

(Ally, who is themselves a trans woman except NB, parsed him as gay.)

Also, the actor says "I think it's important to say he is queer because obviously, lots of people were dressed like that at the time that weren't necessarily queer, but in my head, he always was." So acknowledging that it's valid to read him as straight.

So I'm not sure "openly gay" is quite accurate, but I'm not sure how I'd word it differently.

(Also who's "promising" that he's openly gay? Wikipedia has two citations, the one before which is "actor headcanon is he's gay" and this one which is "people who've seen it read him as gay".)

[reasonableapproximation]

Weird things about the Eras concert on Disney Plus, that I remember so far:

«Would I be more successful if I was a man?» Idk when you wrote this song Taylor, but I do not think this is a plausible hypothesis right now

«Does anyone know the lyrics to this song? Prove it!» Subtext: Prove how much you love me.

«In my head I'm not a lonely millenial woman covered in cat hair watching 700 hours of TV a day.» Yes Taylor I'm sure you want us to think you are very relatable, but uh

[reasonableapproximation]

IME airlines advise arriving two hours early for a short haul flight or three hours early for long haul.

Why? There's no part of the airport experience that's obviously slowed down by the length of your upcoming flight. You go through the same security lane to the same set of shops, and then maybe long haul flights could be at more distant gates but that's not an hour's difference.

I guess some airports might have different terminals for long haul versus short haul? But not many, that's not going to be the explanation. You might be more likely to check a bag for long haul but I doubt it's that.

My guess would be, the cost of missing long haul is higher (less frequent alternate flights) so it's worth spending more time in the airport to avoid.

[reasonableapproximation]

Gilmore Girls has the same format, the variant where minor characters who don't show in the episode don't get billed. (In S2, at minimum Lane, Paris, Jess and Dean are optional.) But I'm pretty confident the theme song is the same length every time, and the total number of minor characters isn't fixed. So are there non-minor-character clips that only show up sometimes? Do some clips get lengthened or shortened to fill the time? Is the fade between clips of varying length?

Maybe this sort of thing is why minor characters tend to get billed even if they don't show up.

Something I noticed: Boston legal has the common tv intro format where you get clips of the main cast with their actor's names. But in season 5, the thing it does that I don't remember seeing before is, a handful of sounds from the clips get heard over the music. Carl saying "boom", Jerry popping, foot stamp, gunshot.

[reasonableapproximation]

Something I noticed: Boston legal has the common tv intro format where you get clips of the main cast with their actor's names. But in season 5, the thing it does that I don't remember seeing before is, a handful of sounds from the clips get heard over the music. Carl saying "boom", Jerry popping, foot stamp, gunshot.

[reasonableapproximation]

Oh oops

Guess I remembered even less well than I thought

I've heard people say that a petard (as in "to be hoisted on one's own") is a type of jacket and a type of gallows, and I think one of those is true but I've looked it up multiple times and can never remember which it is.

But interestingly, they suggest slightly different interpretations of the phrase. If I'm hung up on the gallows I built (presumably for hanging other people up on), that's ironic, I'm the architect of my own demise. If I'm hung on a coathook by a jacket that I just happened to buy, that was never intended for hanging people on coathooks with, that's just kind of unfortunate.

[reasonableapproximation]

I've heard people say that a petard (as in "to be hoisted on one's own") is a type of jacket and a type of gallows, and I think one of those is true but I've looked it up multiple times and can never remember which it is.

But interestingly, they suggest slightly different interpretations of the phrase. If I'm hung up on the gallows I built (presumably for hanging other people up on), that's ironic, I'm the architect of my own demise. If I'm hung on a coathook by a jacket that I just happened to buy, that was never intended for hanging people on coathooks with, that's just kind of unfortunate.

[reasonableapproximation]

Graphical emoji with no good text counterpart that I know of: 😅🥰🔥

Vice versa: ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ :p

Can be either: :)😊 :/😕

[reasonableapproximation]

A thing I gather is that having military control of an island or a piece of coast also gives you some control over the nearby sea. Seems intuitive, but also, I don't actually know what the mechanism behind this is? Or how far the control extends.

You can build a tall tower (or use existing cliffs) and see where enemy ships are, seems useful but insufficient for control.

In the age of gunpowder you can use land-based cannons, but that has fairly limited range and I think this predates gunpowder? Prior to that there's bows and arrows but idk how much use that would be.

If it's a river or a sufficiently narrow strait you can run chains or something across but I don't get the impression that's a requirement.

You can launch your own ships in reaction to enemy ships coming near? And then maybe you have an advantage because your sailors will be fresh and you don't need lots of provisions weighing you down?

[reasonableapproximation]

Another thing that makes this difficult: when I swap one type of crypto for another, I'm supposed to know the market value of both sides of the exchange. (They might not be the same due to fees.)

Coinbase has three different ways I can look this up. Looking at one transaction where I swapped £5 worth of BTC for SOL:

In my account statement (downloadable as csv or html), I get the £/BTC at the time, and the amount of BTC I lost, and the amount of SOL I gained, and the fees I paid. (The csv has price with fees, price without fees, and fees; the html has just price with fees and price without fees.)

In the email they sent at the time, I get the amount of BTC I lost, the £ it was worth, the amount of SOL I gained, the fees I paid in both £ and BTC, and the BTC/SOL exchange rate.

I can look up the transaction on the website. In one place it gives me the amount of BTC I lost, the £/BTC at the time, and how much that makes in £. In another place it gives the amount of SOL I gained, the £/SOL at the time, and how much that makes in £.

These all agree on how much BTC I lost and how much SOL I gained, but that's about it.

What was the £/BTC at the time? Account statement says £28696.60, website says £28560.00, implied value from email agrees with website.

How much £ was the BTC worth? They all say £5, but the £/BTC on the account statement would suggest £5.02.

What was the £/SOL at the time? From the account statement I infer £41.57; from the email I infer £42.00; according to the website, £41.23.

How much £ was the SOL worth? According to the account statement, £4.89; according to the email, £4.94 (specifically they say £0.06 fees); according to the website, £4.85.

I tried to talk to a customer support agent about this. He asked for a transaction reference and then couldn't find the transaction. He asked me to share a screenshot, but it would have meant going to some other site and signing in with google and I didn't feel like it. He tried to explain that prices fluctuate a lot and that there are different buy and sell prices, but either he didn't understand the question I was asking ("why do these three records of the same event disagree with each other", I didn't get to "why is this record in particular internally inconsistent") or he wouldn't say "I don't know". He repeatedly said that the price at the time I view the account statement is different from the price at the time I made the transaction, and I tried to point out that the price at the time I view the account statement shouldn't affect what I see on the account statement. (I haven't double checked this, but at least the numbers on the website haven't changed over the last few days.)

He did also say that exchange was done by swapping BTC directly for SOL, not by swapping BTC for £ and £ for SOL. Possibly useful tidbit, if true.

My current best guess is that when I did the exchange, they recorded some details explicitly (tentatively: how much BTC I lost, how much that was meant to be in £, how much SOL I gained) and then set off three or four jobs to record this info in different places. Those jobs ran at different times, and each of them looked up some subset of £/BTC and £/SOL and SOL/BTC prices at the time they ran and inferred other details from that plus the fixed info.

I'm tempted to do a GDPR data request, and then if there's only one set of numbers in that I can get in touch and be like "hey this is supposed to contain all the information you have about me, but there's some that I can access that isn't in the data dump, what gives". And because it's GDPR related they maybe have to take it seriously?

(Obviously this doesn't, like, matter. It's the principle of the thing.)

Trying to calculate capital gains on crypto, mostly out of curiosity. (I recently sold some, but not enough to need to report.)

I would have hoped it would be mostly easy. I've been tracking my assets with ledger. So for approximately every fraction of a bitcoin I own, I can see

This is the day I bought it

This is how much I paid

And this is the fees I paid

E.g. "bought 0.00724641 BTC on 2018-05-07, I paid £51.99 of which £1.99 is fees".

There are some exceptions: I have some that I got from mining or from the bitcoin faucet way back when, stored in a wallet on my computer that I couldn't figure out how to access again; I got someone else to do it for me in exchange for about half of what was in there. In my ledger this is just recorded as a 0.03 BTC input that I got given for free. And there's an in-progress bet that involved someone sending me $100 of BTC.

(Other coins are more complicated: I once bought BCH, converted it to BNB, converted that to SOL, moved the SOL to a different place, staked the SOL, moved it back, staked it again and eventually sold, and there's fees involved in lots of these steps.)

But ignoring this I'd hope it would be simple enough? But not really.

I think partly this is because calculating capital gains isn't an objective one-right-answer calculation. If I buy 1 BTC, then buy 3 BTC, then sell 2 BTC, then sell 2 BTC, it matters which order I sell them in.

Okay, but I think FIFO is pretty standard? But I don't think there's a way to specify that I'm doing that or any other approach that could be automated. I just need to manually say "okay, the BTC that I sold here are the same BTC that I bought here", and the way to do that is to specify the date and unit price when I bought them.

Which, I get having this written out explicitly in the file, that seems reasonable, but I'd hope for some way to auto-generate the posting, and I don't see one.

...also I've been letting the unit price be implicit, instead specifying the lot price. Which means the unit price has 16 decimal digits, which aren't written in the file, and which I need to copy exactly when I'm selling or the lots won't quite match up. (Which is mostly fine, but when I want to print lots explicitly it means it doesn't show as "I bought BTC valued at X and then sold them" but as "I bought BTC valued at X and on the same day went into debt for the same quantity of unrelated BTC valued at X±ε".) And sometimes exact isn't enough due to rounding errors.

So I'm converting lot prices to unit prices, which there ought to be a way to do that automatically too but afaict there isn't. (Unless I want to do some python scripting, which might be fun I guess but also might be super frustrating depending how good the API is.)

I've looked idly at hledger as well but from what I can tell it's no better at this. I don't think I've looked closely enough at beancount to know, that might be worth looking into. But I have over 7 years of financial data in ledger and it would probably be annoying to convert it all - just crypto would be fine I guess, but then I'm using two different CLI accounting tools.