The joys of C++ templates

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

Anyway, this post is about C++ and how nothing ever goes wrong with it, ever. I was building a map with a pair of strings as the key and a complex (and confidential) value. For the purposes of this post, I’ll say the value is an int; the exact value type is irrelevant to this post, anyway.

Mass Effect 2 viewing angles

I recently started replaying the Mass Effect trilogy, having not much else to do while under quarantine. It's been about 7 or 8 years since I'd played through any of the games, since the ending of ME3 really made the rest of the series feel pointless. Now, with some emotional distance and a fresh perspective, I'm going through again and noticing some things that I didn't appreciate before. This post is about viewing angles and why you miss out on some of the pretty skies that exist in the game (and still look pretty great even today).

Controversy after OCON 2016

I got back from an awesome OCON filled with guitar-cello duets, talent-show selfies, an awesome fireworks show, and oh, right, some interesting talks about Objectivism as applied to art, childhood education, and foreign policy. It was my second time going (first was last year), and I had a great, but exhausting time.

Obvious disclaimer is obvious: I speak only for myself. My opinions are not necessarily those of ARI, OCON, my employer, people on Facebook who attended OCON, or crab people.

The sad state of free speech in college

I just saw some videos of the shameful assault on free speech at CSULA by students, faculty, and the president of the university. A speaker named Ben Shapiro was set to give a talk called "When Diversity Becomes a Problem" and had received permission and a venue to speak. In the week before the event, students demanded that the event be shut down, citing the usual (and usually false) claims of "racism" and "hate speech." The president canceled the event, but Young Americans for Freedom and Shapiro decided to hold the event anyway. A professor, Robert Weide, threatened to assault students sponsoring the event. Shortly before the talk started, the president un-cancelled the event, but hundreds of students barricaded the doors to prevent Shapiro and the audience from getting in the room. Here are some videos I found of the event.

Letter to the city government

So I just found out that, despite promising to end the program this month, the Mountain View city government has decided to extend its stupid food scraps collection pilot "indefinitely." This program cut garbage pickup services in half to once every other week and instead allowed residents to put food scraps in composting bins to be picked up. Upset at this pointless extension of a decrease in useful services provided by the city government, I wrote them the following email:

Response to a bunch of nonsense

This was originally going to be a Facebook comment in response to this article, but ended up being much, much longer.

Some musings on unwed parents and poverty

My dad sent me an article about inequality a few days ago. The two points of the article were:

1. that the minimum wage is not well targeted at reducing poverty
2. that a large factor in poverty is family structure