Kolya on 10/7/2017 at 16:14
In this thread post a short status update about your daily life or shortly comment on someone else's.
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My cat got thyroid hyperfunction. She used to be huge and dangerous and now I just saw her skin and bones using the litter box and her hind legs were trembling from the strain. I hope she gets well because it's breaking my fucking heart to see her like that. :(
Harvester on 10/7/2017 at 16:41
I've been going to work for two days now after my wife passed away and it's going relatively okay so far, all things considering. Also, I've found that programming is the best way to distract myself from how miserable I feel. When I'm working on a difficult challenge (difficult is relative, I mean the same problem might be easy for someone else and impossible for a third person), I forget everything around me.
Vivian on 10/7/2017 at 16:44
I went on a two day bender over the weekend and am definitely too old for it, I'm now a shivery, weirdly-sweaty mess with the attention span of an idiot and I can't work out why none of my code is functional.
BUT I also bought some sweet powertools and have been wood cladding my balcony, and I finally remembered to go an get some genmaicha tea, plus my girlfriend and I are going over the plans for our loft conversion tonight, so swings and roundabouts I guess. Also the new series of preacher isn't as shit as the previous one.
Harvester on 10/7/2017 at 16:54
Coding is a requirement of your job, Vivian? I thought you were a paleontologist and I didn't know they coded. Or is it hobby-related stuff?
Vivian on 10/7/2017 at 17:00
I do a lot of biomechanics stuff but yeah man, everything involves hefty amounts of coding these days, even more general biology. Stats modelling in R, 3D geometry stuff in MATLAB (should be python but I've never learned it properly), bit of some C variant for biomechanical simulation stuff (++ I think, been a while). I mean, you can do stuff without it, but it's generally just the best way to get good, consistent data processing done. Everyone thinks you're a prick (rightly) if you do it in excel.
Harvester on 10/7/2017 at 17:04
Yeah that makes sense. Shows what I know about paleontology/biomechanics.
Vivian on 10/7/2017 at 17:06
You would probably laugh at the actual code I use though. One advantage of having a modern gazillion-core hyper processor is that it really doesn't matter if your data parser is a horrific mass of nested loops that look like a clown made it, because even if it could be literally hundreds of times faster it still basically does what you want, and it still only takes a few minutes at most.
Harvester on 10/7/2017 at 17:55
I don't know if I'd laugh, I only have a few years of experience as a programmer myself. I consider myself pretty decent (I was the best one of my class at my education, but it wasn't a university level computer science education, more like community college level (paid for by my employer)), but I'm no genius. I do try to write fast code though, but that's just to teach myself to be a good programmer, which will help in my further career. I do these mathematical programming exercises on ProjectEuler.net, and if I find a solution, but it takes more than like 5 seconds to calculate it, I consider my code a failure and try to find a faster solution. There was one I did a while ago where my solution took several minutes to compute, and I kept working on it until I found a radically different solution that took 250 milliseconds to calculate the answer. Felt pretty cool.
I do understand that a solution that takes a couple of minutes is not a problem at all in your field. If I were you, I wouldn't put a lot of effort to make it faster either, because it's the correct answer that counts, and a couple of minutes isn't that long a wait. You can spend your time better than forever optimizing your code.
Al_B on 10/7/2017 at 22:01
Quote Posted by Kolya
My cat got thyroid hyperfunction. She used to be huge and dangerous and now I just saw her skin and bones using the litter box and her hind legs were trembling from the strain.
I presume you've taken her to the vet already? My cat had something very similar last year and was losing weight while eating loads of food. Quite common in older cats (ours is 16) but after an operation where they removed one of her thyroids she's been much better.
SubJeff on 10/7/2017 at 22:36
Quote Posted by Harvester
I've been going to work for two days now after my wife passed away and it's going relatively okay so far, all things considering.
I'm so sorry to hear this. I hope things get better for you.
