Brinens and Things

brin_bellway @ 2026-02-21T19:33:00

2026-02-22T00:33:46Z

[cw: apocalypse]

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Meme idea, free to a good home

2026-01-18T00:43:23Z

[cw: illness, death]

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The Glorious Transhumanist Centaur Future

2025-09-03T19:41:38Z

Apparently I am a good level of tech-savviness for vibe-coding a Linux version of this thing.

"Write, from scratch, a program that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white": beyond my skill level.

"Here is a Python script that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white! It has one (1) critical bug causing it to silently fail. Figure out that the bug exists, then track it down, then fix it": *not* beyond my skill level, actually.

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(I *was* originally running the linked program in a Windows 7 virtual machine (connected to the Internet, but not logged into anything), but at least one of the following possible explanations had started to happen:

(1) Windows was pissed that I didn't give them a software key and, after a grace period, started throttling me.

(2) The updates Windows 7 had downloaded (apparently Microsoft is still running update servers for 7, just not uploading new patches to them?) had increased its minimum viable specs beyond the specs I'd given the VM.

(3) It was getting clogged with viruses.

(4) Other.

A Linux Lite VM should be better at these. (Except maybe "other".))

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the code (click to expand)

import time
from PIL import Image
import os

# Define region to monitor: left, top, width, height
REGION = (100, 100, 200, 150) # x, y, w, h

# Path for temp screenshot
SCREENSHOT = "/tmp/screen_region.png"
SOUND = "/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga" # replace if needed

def capture_region():
os.system(f"scrot -o -a {REGION[0]},{REGION[1]},{REGION[2]},{REGION[3]} {SCREENSHOT}")

def contains_white_pixel(image_path):
img = Image.open(image_path)
pixels = img.getdata()
return any(pixel[:3] == (255, 255, 255) for pixel in pixels)

while True:
capture_region()
if contains_white_pixel(SCREENSHOT):
os.system(f"ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet {SOUND}")
time.sleep(1) # avoid repeated alerts
time.sleep(0.5) # check interval

Everything *except* the bolded "-o" was written by ChatGPT (current default free tier). If you don't include the "-o" (for "overwrite"), each screen capture is written to a new file with a new filename, but the program only tests the *original* file for white pixels. So it only actually functions during the very first screen-check after you start the program, and each new check after that just re-does the first check over and over (while also piling up more and more screenshot files it isn't looking at).

You also have to figure out yourself (and manually edit) what the pixel coordinates should be for your particular usecase, but that's fair.

(Note: I haven't included the part where ChatGPT explains which prerequisites I should make sure I have installed in order to run this, but it did explain that and it does seem to have been correct.)

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This may all have sounded like faint praise, but as someone who has barely used LLMs other than Whisper, I am genuinely very impressed by how close it got. Nullius in verba, sure, but that's true of Stack Exchange too.

Rather than digging around trying (and failing, other than the Windows program) to find someone who has posted *almost* what you were looking for so that you can tinker with it until it does *exactly* what you were looking for, you can directly ask an Internet egregore to manifest the software that post *would* contain if it existed!

The future is *wild*.

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Hath smaller fleas that on him prey

2025-08-31T04:21:45Z

[cw: venting, (arguably) poverty]

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brin_bellway @ 2025-05-19T12:21:00

2025-05-19T16:21:32Z

[cw: unsanitary]

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Liveblog(-ish): Early Retirement Extreme, by Jacob Lund Fisker

2025-04-13T03:43:29Z

[arguably cw: poverty, illness, disordered eating]

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brin_bellway @ 2025-04-07T13:28:00

2025-04-07T17:28:02Z

[arguably cw: politics, poverty]

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Things I read this fortnight

2025-04-02T00:50:42Z

[cw: apocalypse, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) illness]

[not an April Fools post]

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Just meet me at the 아파트

2025-02-15T01:32:43Z

Sometimes, when there is incomprehensible pop gibberish on the work radio and I try looking up the lyrics, it's like "oh, it seems obvious in hindsight, how did I not parse that before", and the sensory data kind of snaps into place. (Though it sometimes turns out that the song was better as incomprehensible gibberish.)

Other times it's like, no, actually, the reason you couldn't understand what they were saying there is because they were secretly code-switching into Korean.

(Okay, yes, the Korean word for "apartment" clearly descends from English (via Japanese, apparently), but still, overall I feel vindicated in that I could not reasonably have been expected to figure out what they were on about this time.)

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brin_bellway @ 2025-01-18T12:47:00

2025-01-18T17:47:42Z

[Substack; Wayback] (by Matt Glassman)

At the heart of the book is a simple proposition. Imagine I offered you a choice. You can have $500 no questions asked, or you can roll a die. If you choose the die and it comes up any number but 6, you get nothing. But if it comes up 6, you get $5000.

This book is not about the people who take the $500. But it’s also not about the people who think for a couple of minute and choose to roll the die.

This is a book about the people who instantly grab the die, can’t imagine not instantly grabbing the die, and think anyone who doesn’t instantly grab the die is somewhere between irrational and insane.

The me of a month ago, when Scott Alexander asked this hypothetical, thought about it for a bit, didn't come to any satisfying conclusions, then took the $500 with a vague sense of this being the Objectively Incorrect Decision and some self-loathing.

The me of today has been through quite a bit more training on this subject! The me of today has practised taking appropriate risks!

The me of today thinks about it for a bit, pulls out an arcane-looking calculator, types some numbers into it, then says--

"That's above the half-Kelly wager for my bankroll."

--and walks away with $500 and a clear conscience.

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Guide to Advanced Grocery Shopping, 2024-2025 Edition

2025-01-03T00:21:31Z

Hello, folks! I'm going to be teaching a class on advanced grocery-shopping techniques for KW Rationality (currently planned for the evening of Thursday, ~~February 27th~~ March 6th). If you'll be in the Waterloo, Ontario area, I encourage you to come out and join us!

Below is the "textbook" for this class. The further away you are in space and time from late-2024 Kitchener/Waterloo, the less of it will apply to you (in particular, advanced grocery shopping looks very different in the United States), but you may still get useful tips out of it and/or find it anthropologically interesting.

This work distills many years of refinement to my techniques, and to this day I am still learning. If it seems overwhelming trying to take it all in at once, try picking up just some of the new tactics, and expand later. I have tried to put the most important aspects first, where feasible.

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Table of Contents

Where to shop

Before your shop

Rotated stockpiles

Price-matching

Loyalty programs

Coupons

List-making

Payment methods

During your shop

Clearance

Error-catching

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Inflation-protected security

2024-12-29T17:25:36Z

It's traditional in my household to put a chocolate orange out on the New Year's Eve dessert table: you can usually get them at a good price during post-Christmas sales.

I did, indeed, find them at a good price during this year's post-Christmas sales! And the batch they were selling didn't expire until May 2026!

So I bought two of them, and now we have *next* year's NYE orange already sorted out.

(I put a note on my calendar for 2025-12-23 reminding me that we already have one. I may, next year, rotate in a 2027 orange and repeat the cycle; but if I don't find any chocolate oranges in stock at a good price next year, it's no big deal.)

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1.44

2024-12-19T19:55:46Z

You don't realise how much of your income is denominated in USD until the exchange rate goes up 7%, huh.

~~(I feel like sigmaleph is laughing right now at the idea that 7% constitutes a major fluctuation)~~

I'd...been thinking of that as an annoyance, paying exchange fees when Americans working the same gigs didn't have to, but I guess it's kind of useful as a hedge.

(And Swagbucks lets you *pick* between [CAD-PayPal at a fixed 1.33 exchange rate] and USD-PayPal, so you can check the spot rate and decide for yourself whether you're better off paying PayPal's extortionate 4% exchange fee. I made the switch and am getting around 60 - 70 extra cents per $10, which is a nice boost.)

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(To give a specific figure: during the last full calendar month (November), 14% of my income was USD-denominated. It varies from month to month, though.)

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2020s music, part 4

2024-11-24T05:45:17Z

[arguably cw: illness]

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brin_bellway @ 2024-10-13T14:08:00

2024-10-13T18:08:28Z

[Freedom Mobile] also now has a $5/mo plan with 100MB of data, two hours of talk and unlimited text.

holy shit???

I got used to ignoring Freedom back in the day, but they've expanded their network coverage over the past ~few years and aren't effectively city-only anymore

(that's 120 minutes of *outgoing* calls, BTW: incoming is unlimited)

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Oh, that reminds me:

Hey, remember the IRS Free File program?

Yeah, it was *looking* pretty useless at first, but upon careful inspection there turns out to be exactly one Free File participant that accepts self-employed non-residents: OLT (OnLine Taxes). It's a pain in the ass to wrangle into a Canadian shape, but it *can* be so wrangled, and it costs approximately 215 CAD less than doing my dad's taxes through even the relatively cheap expat service.

I suspect that I may need to do one year through ExpatFile after each substantial change in our tax situation, but for years where I can compare OLT's output to the previous year's return to check if I put stuff in the right places, it's a boon.

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I ended up waiting to post this until I actually tried the Freedom Mobile plan.

Signing up was difficult, but if you do it in-person (*not* online) and make sure to specify you want prepaid and *not* postpaid, you should have an easier and cheaper time than I did.

The free roaming in the United States (and also Mexico) seems potentially handy, though I don't have any active plans to go there.

I think it's still worth it even after the hassle and extra signup fees, but only if you have housemates on other providers: these days you're allowed to *sign up* if you live outside the city, and they won't charge you *extra* for it, but it turns out you'll still be spending most of your time on their partnered Rogers network and I think we're all very aware by now of how dangerous that is. As long as Dad stays on Bell or Telus networks, I'm willing to take the risk to save ~$125/year, but I'd never want to put *all* our SIM-card eggs in the Freedom basket.

(though if you have non-Rogers-based home Internet, that might be okay)

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Not a tornado warning, not a kidnapping notice, not even a signal that cookies are done baking

2024-08-31T16:30:44Z

Man, they did *not* know in 1983 that the faint buzzing sound in the background of "That's All" was going to sound exactly like a smartphone alarm, huh.

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Like a mirror, you see yourself

2024-07-26T18:02:50Z

[cw: poverty, venting]

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Today in penny farming

2024-06-27T03:54:51Z

[cw: poverty, (arguably) venting]

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Comment and Link Roundup: June 14, 2024

2024-06-14T18:56:43Z

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness] The one about sore throats and impending doom [two comments]

[cw: government bullshit] ""Fun"" fact of the day (March 1, 2024)

[fairly mild cw: illness] 2020s music, part 3

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Thoughts of Mine; Wayback] (OP by Mabel Schaefer) Fun with cell-phone-plan loopholes. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by slavicafire) Food-disgust test.

[cw: food (with picture)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by lnthefade) This is a thing that is now, unfortunately, not being offered at Disney World.

[fairly mild cw: discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) A modest proposal for affordable food/housing.

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Changing mask tech for a changing world.

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Links:

[cw: death, (arguably) discourse] [New York Times - Wayback] (by Helen Ouyang; h/t swimmer) The race to reinvent CPR.

[Crystalverse; Wayback] (by Chase) How to grow pyramid salt crystals.

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Miscellaneous Money Stuff

2024-05-17T15:04:10Z

[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section from Moody's)

Moody’s tool has revealed thousands of directors who are as young as zero or older than the world’s longest-living person on record. One listed director — at 943 years old — would have been born in the 11th century. This director is allegedly a minority shareholder and beneficial owner of a Belgium-based business services firm that incorporated in 2018.

all of the other immortals must be so mad at this guy

you can't just fucking *tell* people you're 943 years old, dude, we've been *over* this

(on the other hand, it doesn't seem like anyone is believing it, so maybe you *can* just tell people you're 943 years old)

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[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Sridhar Natarajan)

Wall Street firms usually grumble in private after getting punished by regulators. Anthony Melchiorre’s Chatham Asset Management is dragging its advisers into a public legal battle for $100 million.

The $6 billion hedge fund is demanding that Adviser Compliance Associates not only cover Chatham’s costs for settling a US probe last year, but also damage to its business. In an unusual lawsuit, Chatham claims the outside consultant, founded by former regulators, failed to prevent trading practices that ran afoul of authorities. …

“Chatham sought, received and followed advice from ACA that certain trading practices did not run afoul of the SEC’s cross-trading rules,” Melchiorre, 56, said in a statement through a spokesman. “ACA gave it improper advice and failed to flag these trades as problematic.” The hedge fund intends to vigorously pursue the matter, holding ACA accountable, he said.

~~man, imagine having recourse when your financial advisor advises you to break the law~~

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[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Elizabeth Lopatto)

“Short … [Reddit],” wrote one r/Wall StreetBets user. “They have not proven that this user base or data set can be monetized.”

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[Bloomberg] (by Matt Levine)

By the way, there’s a very funny anecdote in Scott Patterson’s Chaos Kings in which Nassim Nicholas Taleb goes for a walk with some colleagues at Universa, Mark Spitznagel’s black-swan fund. “Taleb, sweating in his professorial jacket in Miami’s eighty-degree heat, spotted a penny on the pavement in front of a parked steamroller — and picked it up, laughing at the inside joke.” The sort of thing that could only happen to Taleb.

oh my god

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2020s music, part 3

2024-04-16T01:33:02Z

[fairly mild cw: illness]

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Hail the unconquered sun!

2024-04-09T02:55:14Z

I live less than an hour's drive north of the zone of totality.

Brother wasn't interested in going out of his way and Mom is conserving her spoons for tomorrow's trip to Toronto (they watched the 99% eclipse from our backyard instead), but Dad and I went down to an arbitrary small town within the zone to watch.

It's pretty neat! I wouldn't trek across a continent for it, but it's nice to have the experience.

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Mom asked me last night if I was excited. I've never really been one for excitement *prior* to events. Also I was worried that if I let myself get hyped up I'd just be more disappointed to find it cloudy.

(There won't be another total eclipse anywhere in Canada for about 20 years, and there won't be another within day-trip distance of here until the 22nd century.)

I awoke to a concerningly grey-white sky, but it cleared up in plenty of time.

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We arrived forty minutes early, to give us a bit of time to poke around the shops and maybe try some food (though we eventually decided against this). The traffic was light, and the streets were not very crowded; there were enough knots of people with eclipse glasses scattered around to have some sense of solidarity, though. (I heard one person applauding during totality, and a dad excitedly giving his kids a science lesson.)

Excitement *prior* to events is not my style, but I did feel some giddiness as the light began to turn to "sunset".

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From my perspective it was neat-but-not-overwhelmingly-emotional to look up and see the black sun with its corona, but like, if I did not know what was happening that would sure freak me the fuck out.

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My phone, at least with its default camera settings (and I don't know which ones to tweak), was not up to the task of taking a picture of totality. I *did* get some pictures of the crescent sun, though. For example:

(I saw somebody else taking pictures by pointing his phone through his eclipse glasses, tried copying him, and was kind of surprised to find how well it worked. (Vastly better than last time.))

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Thanks to blog reader Jenn for sharing her pack of eclipse glasses with us. <3

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thinking about brain-damage insurance lately

2024-04-07T19:25:56Z

[fairly strong cw: what it says on the tin, aging]

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brin_bellway @ 2024-03-27T23:39:00

2024-03-28T03:39:40Z

Do people with bus commutes, just, have frequent kinesthetic hallucinations when they close their eyes? Is that just a normal part of day-to-day life? Does it go away after a while?

It's not especially bothersome, but it's weird. It's like a Tetris effect, but in my vestibular system.

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Weird milestone

2024-03-24T17:33:22Z

I have now, *at one time or another*, owned every Flight Rising familiar, but not all at once.

The two Kickstarter familiars I still have left to collect are the two I used to have (before deciding that the Boolean was a higher priority and selling them to raise funds for it, which I do not regret: if you think *Kickstarter familiars* are expensive and hard-to-find in the Year of Our Boss 11, you should see the trouble Boolean hunters are having).

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I *sort of* have enough money left that if someone came by today and offered to sell me the other two I could take them up on it, but only if they were willing to take their payment primarily in Nocturne eggs. I was able to pay in pure gems for the first two (after a last-minute visit to the currency-exchange booths on the trading forum), but that wiped out most of my liquid currency.

Not all of it, though: I'm still in a decent position to take advantage of Lightning's upcoming dominance (well, if nobody snatches it out from under us at the last minute, which IIUC actually happened recently for the first time in a very long time: I did not notice the Dom Watch crowd going wild until after the fact, though I did at least sell my exalt fodder *partway* up the price slope rather than missing out entirely).

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