good morning

woke up a bit early due to acid reflux and tried to fall back asleep but didn't

*metal gear guard voice* I feel asleep!

habari gani y'all

today is kujichagulia, self-determination

this should be something that feels very familiar to queer folks, a principle around being able to define, name, create, and speak for yourself to steal verbs from my cheat sheet

I think one of the underappreciated aspects of white supremacy is in how whiteness assumes the unilateral right to define what's objective and true

to enforce its binaries and hierarchies and privilege its cultural ideas as "universal"

without these first definitions the power used to enforce them would very more easily resolve to the tyranny it is

in reality, the definition and the power to force that definition go hand in hand, of course. and both need to be resisted and overcome

but even more than just linguistic fights, self-determination is about winning the power to self-determine

nearly every government on this planet has been bent and constrained to ensure that peoples and lands are organized to ensure continual (neo-)colonial control by the West, when they haven't been razed and occupied to form genocidal settler nations like the United States

we can't all be free to self-determine unless this ends

but in lighter and more personal things, I've apparently have self-determined to being an internal menagerie of snarky animal people bumbling through life

so let's go bumble

kind of lol at the difference of my stridency between yesterday and today

yesterday: we need to like, not fight so much, especially right now, pwease u_u

today: we must resist and overthrow colonization

weighing a few options

I do need to respond to some background check things for the new job because they can't confirm my boot camp job for some reason (I suspect it's just the holidays but my friend who still works there gave me a contact that I can hopefully give them)

it would also be good to go grocery shopping because I'm getting low on things

I need to go get some coffee and breakfast and that's making me consider walking to the coffee stand as an excuse to play Pokemon go

but I'm also just not feeling that strong a desire to commit to any of those as of right now

maybe I'll take this sloth as a sign and go get some fast food to at least get something in my stomach and then come back and do the job stuff and then see what I feel like

perhaps what you think is brainrot is actually brainfermentation

got some fast food and watched stand up maths' secret santa video and feel pretty proud that I was at least on the same trail as the other exploit they explicitly mention

I still think that even trusting people for their own random numbers and shuffling and shunting (chances) is too risky to not require a central authority for at least that

oh yeah also boggling at the fact dropped that the chance that a random shuffle is a derangement, that is, no item is in the same location it was in before the shuffle is 1/e apparently

I would have expected it differed based on the size of the list

the magicness of transcendental constants always surprises me

that taste of math has led me wanting more so I think I'll do some more work on the statistical learning textbook, hopefully getting done with this chapter on linear regression to the lab and exercises

I also know at some point I may need to look into tidymodels because I'm using the rest of the tidyverse out of preference so may as well look into that

Got a section on encoding dummy variables for linear regression written up.

One of the things that feels a bit tough about this textbook is that it's not aiming to go into mathematical rigor, just give an idea so at least for this chapter, it introduced an example problem and spends most of its time illustrating the ideas in what feels like a very "grab-bag" way.

But more, I have no desire to copy the exact example and the details the text points out, because I'm just concerned about the concepts. Nonetheless, this means in a lot of cases that I am just slightly tweaking the example to make it mine while still mostly using the same demonstration.

It does feel a bit more rote than I like, and I hope it will not be a pattern.

There is an earlier version of this textbook that _does_ go into the mathematical rigor, but it immediately started talking about multidimensional calculus and to be honest, I just bluffed my way through that in college for the most part.

Which was another thing I wanted to go learn as well as more deeply learning linear algebra, but I would love a working understanding of the math for this incredibly important field that has infested so much of software engineering.

The math for statistical learning feels too important to approach it with the normal data plumber ways we do in software engineering and yet here we are.