My boat is a 1979 Formosa 46, center cockpit cutter-rigged (two headsails) sloop. The design intent was to cross oceans and weather storms, carrying enough provisions for six people for up to six months. This is the sailboat I dreamed of owning since I was a kid. My family were into powerboats, but I hated the noise, stink, and wastefulness. I wanted the freedom from all that. I wanted to just go buy my own small sailboat so I could learn, but my parents wouldn’t let me.

Cut to 30 years later, I finally bought my first sailboat in 2013 and moved aboard shortly thereafter. I had been searching for an F46 for years, but they were all either meticulous and priced ridiculously, or were clapped out and still priced ridiculously. I knew that I would want to make a lot of changes, so I didn’t want to pay the premium on a mint boat. But I wanted a boat that I could still sail and determine what all I want to change.

Cut to 2015. In the same week, my marriage imploded, I spent Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday) and my birthday alone, and I was fired from the software company I co-founded in a hostile takeover. I also found my ideal specimen of F46 and it was in the same region, to boot. I’ll take that silver lining.

I’m re-modeling and rearranging the interior, re-powering with electric drive, taking it down to bare glass and refinishing with modern coatings, re-rigging with Dyneema, fixing all of the engineering errors in the boat design, reducing the through-hull count, installing modern wiring and reducing the electronics (while modernizing the electronics I’m keeping). Modernizing the plumbing. Adding systems for longevity and autonomy (in the context of “extending time between having to visit ports”), e.g. solar, dual water makers, recovering dead spaces, shoring up deck durability, moving chainplates…

These following pics are the same place inside the boat:

Regarding using your boat as an office, there are a few caveats I share whenever anyone starts thinking about getting a boat. All boats leak. Everything you do in a boat creates humidity, and that humidity must be managed. The magical numbers are >55F and <55% relative humidity. Anything outside of that is inviting mold. While having your boat in freshwater reduces maintenance costs and lengthens maintenance intervals, owning and maintaining a boat is still at least a half-time job. And you know what they say about guys with big boats? They have big bills. The little-known origin of the word “boat” is actually an acronym: Bust Out Another Thousand. :D You really have to want this life. And the less that this is your life, the greater the overall expense in terms of opportunity and financial costs. It’s crazy hard, but super rewarding.

Oh, and if you have an engine/fuel on your boat, your boat stinks of that. If you have a holding/blackwater tank on your boat, add in those wonderful smells, too. All of these are mitigable, but they are factors. Just a few things to think about…

Bicycle commuting, but it sounds like you might be WFH. I am a 100% remote worker, but I keep an office and workshop to keep the day job out of my tiny living space. When I still worked from my boat (where I live), I would go for a bike ride through varying loops before and after work just to have that separation of mental states.

When we’re on a passage or anchored out, yoga, calisthenics, dumbbells, TRX (body weight training system), and swimming keep us fit. Among my peers, there is a 1:1 inverse relationship between who does yoga and who has pains of inflexibility.

Another great book for keeping your range and flexibility is “Ten Golden Exercises” by Daniel Philpot.

I always start with the price that I would want to pay if I were looking at/searching for that item at that quality. And that’s the damned price, no haggling. I will lower the price unbidden of the person is super chill and easy to work with. Sometimes I just give it to them when they show up.

Because here’s one of common use cases of selling stuff: you’re not using it anymore, so you’re selling it to recoup some of the investment, right? Otherwise, it is taking up space, consuming your resources, and providing you negative return on value. It’s a millstone for you at this point and any dollar amount is recouping your finite life capacity, to which no dollar value can be assigned.

Yeah, I know there are plenty of other cases… maybe you’re trying to afford an upgrade or afford something else; that’s a whole different issue. Also scalpers and resellers. Fuck those parasites in their ears. My fair-pricing idea can be chum in the water for resellers. Know your customer and don’t do business with these assholes. Once you’ve dealt with your first reseller, you quickly get a read on these bottom feeders.

One would develop Popeye forearms gaming on that thing. Get in your arm, neck, and shoulder day while gaming!

I had a Toshiba Satellite around the time this was out. It weighed 12 pounds. That millstone went everywhere with me. Now my laptop weighs about six pounds minus the brick, and I might carry it from my desk to the settee. I look back at what our devices used to be and always think “Damn, I’ve gotten soft!”

Hello (former) fellow Lehi worker! Although I was remote except for the onsite weeks. I’m not a fan of 99% mobile apps, maybe more than 99%. I didn’t work on mobile, but I am quite sure that it is in fact a PWA.

Different financial institutions (FI) will all have different appearances, because of the nature of how MX is implemented, and whether on desktop or mobile. In the case of my credit union, it’s right here:

The interface of MX Platform on desktop looks like this:

You might see something like this in your online banking home page:

There are two ways that MX can get data from other accounts which you have to explicitly link in your bank/CU interface. The first method is through Open Banking protocols, which are mercifully obfuscated from the end user. Seriously, if you’re having trouble sleeping, try reading some of the Open Banking specifications. :D One selects their FI from the list, and enters creds and 2FA challenge. The other method is screen-scraping, but again this is abstracted away from the end user.

One of the features where MX slaps more than anyone else (for now) is identifying the source of debits and classifying them. Underneath the hood, debit and credit card transaction strings are chaos. But even if MX gets it wrong, you can manually re-classify your expenses, and it will apply that to future transactions (optional). I already mentioned the burndowns, but if you have an idea for a saving schedule, MX will provide reminders and factor in your growth. Platform will also provide reminders for almost everything.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sure thing. On which part would you like more detail?

Negative all around. I was replying to OP. The company to which I referred is MX. The public-facing product (API) is actually called Platform, but it’s very explicitly white label software. Customers will generally have little to no idea that they are using MX Platform. It might actually say MX somewhere, but that can be eliminated in implementation.

As others have said, a spreadsheet is the simplest. If you do your banking with a credit union, chances are they make MX available to you in your online banking. A lot of banks use MX too. Their software provides the projections and forecasting you seek, as well as Open Banking connections to all of your other accounts. If you have loans, it also has burndowns of outstanding debts. Extra bonus: MX doesn’t sell your data.

Disclosure: I used to work for MX.

You raise good points. Thank you for your replies. All of this still requires planet-cooking levels of power for garbage and to hurt workers.

Summary death to bicycle thieves, and anyone else actively wrecking the world. I am averse to the death penalty in most cases, but bicycle thieves are actively wrecking their communities. Someone rides a bike because they:

• Have no other option
• Are trying to improve their health
• Are living car-free or car-lite
• Are trying to enjoy the locals with active transportation OR
• Are complying with a court-ordered driving suspension

Stealing bicycles undermines these goals and poisons the community.

Of course, we could easily scale this up to, say, almost all CEOs of megacorporations.

So I read the paper. I’m sincerely curious: how is this new or special? Ground loops have been used for heat pumps for decades, providing both heat source and heat sink. Is what they’re researching qualitatively different from ground loops?

And an additional response, because I didn’t fully answer your question. LLMs don’t reason. They traverse a data structure based on weightings relative to the occurrence frequency in their training content. Loosely speaking, it’s a graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type)). It appears like reasoning because the LLM is iterating over material that has been previously reasoned out. An LLM can’t reason through a problem that it hasn’t previously seen unlike, say, a squirrel.

By the same logic, raytracing is ancient tech that should be abandoned.

Nice straw man argument you have there.

I’ll restate, since my point didn’t seem to come across. All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement. A possible analogy would be automobiles in the late 60s and 90s: Just put in more cubic inches and bigger chassis! More power from more displacement does not mean more advanced. Continuing that analogy, 2.0L engines cranking out 400ft-lb and 500HP while delivering 28MPG average is advanced engineering. Right now, the software and hardware running LLMs are just MOAR cubic inches. We haven’t come up with more advanced data structures.

These types of solutions can have a place and can produce something adjacent to the desired results. We make great use of expert systems constantly within narrow domains. Camera autofocus systems leap to mind. When “fuzzy logic” autofocus was introduced, it was a boon to photography. Another example of narrow-ish domain ML software is medical decision support software, which I developed in a previous job in the early 2000s. There was nothing advanced about most of it; the data structures used were developed in the 50s by a medical doctor from Columbia University (Larry Weed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weed). The advanced part was the computer language he also developed for quantifying medical knowledge. Any computer with enough storage, RAM, and the hardware ability to quickly traverse the data structures can be made to appear advanced when fed with enough collated data, i.e. turning data into information.

Since I never had the chance to try it out myself, how was your neural network and LLMs reasoning back in the day? Imo that’s the most impressive part, not that it can write.

It was slick for the time. It obviously wasn’t an LLM per se, but both were a form of LM. The OCR and auto-suggest for DOS were pretty shit-hot for x386. The two together inspried one of my huge projects in engineering school: a whole-book scanner* that removed page curl and gutter shadow, and then generated a text-under-image PDF. By training the software on a large body of varied physical books and retentively combing over the OCR output and retraining, the results approached what one would see in the modern suite that now comes with your scanner. I only achieved my results because I had unfettered use of a quad Xeon beast in the college library where I worked. That software drove the early digitization processes for this (which I also built): http://digitallib.oit.edu/digital/collection/kwl/search

*in contrast to most book scanning at the time, which required the book to be cut apart and the pages fed into an automatically fed scanner; lots of books couldn’t be damaged like that.

Edit: a word

No, no they’re not. These are just repackaged and scaled-up neural nets. Anyone remember those? The concept and good chunks of the math are over 200 years old. Hell, there was two-layer neural net software in the early 90s that ran on my x386. Specifically, Neural Network PC Tools by Russell Eberhart. The DIY implementation of OCR in that book is a great example of roll-your-own neural net. What we have today, much like most modern technology, is just lots MORE of the same. Back in the DOS days, there was even an ML application that would offer contextual suggestions for mistyped command line entries.

Typical of Silicon Valley, they are trying to rent out old garbage and use it to replace workers and creatives.

Sailors know your pain all too well. The key to preventing this is air movement. The less expensive option is some kind of material to put in between your cot and mattress, such as Hypervent Aire-Flow or Dri-Deck. An expensive solution is a Froli System, which has the added benefit of allowing you to tune the firmness for different parts of your body. I have a Froli under all of the bunks on my boat; condensation and mildew are no longer a thing now. But the price is steep.

And Cascadia too, please.