Thanks!

I’ll tell you the strategy that worked for me last time (quit for ~2 years), and that I’m using this time.

• Switch to a vape. Lung capacity increases immediately, and you get rid of the bad smell. If you haven’t vaped, give yourself some time to get used to the different habit (no cigarette packing ritual anymore etc)
• Buy a 0 nicotine vape or two, or find a local place you can get them easily. This is your “inside” vape.
• Buy a refillable vape and get nicotine liquid roughly equivalent to the full-nic vape you switched to from cigarettes. This is your “outside” vape.
• Start restricting the locations you use the full-nic vape. I work from home, so I don’t vape full-nic at my desk, I walk outside to do it. You want to break the absent-minded vaping+work or vaping+tv habit.
• Step your nicotine intake down over as long a period as you like, but don’t ever step it back up. First time I quit, I did it over about a year. That’s a little extreme. You could probably do it over a few months.
• Once you’re on 0 nic all the time, either stay with that, or gradually wean yourself off the habit as well. This is much easier without the chemical addiction.

Good luck.

I poked around and couldn’t find a repo link. Can you point me to that?

My patron saint

I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.

Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.

Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.

No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.

If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.

If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.

Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.

But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.

None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Women are you doing the same thing for me

I wonder if you could make a donation platform for artists that also provides torrents. You would have to tie up the money pending proof of identification from an artist who participated in creating the work, then release a portion to them. I’m just speculating here but it seems like something that could be made.

Joe Rogan vibes

Thank you. I’m not an expert on how accelerometers work, I’ve generally just used them in robotic and mobile applications.

The most basic way to measure movement is with an accelerometer. It’s a little component inside your phone that has a small weight with a known mass connected to springs. When the phone moves or rotates, the weight moves, and the tension on the springs changes. The tension is either constant (you rotated your phone and are now holding it in the new position) or temporary (you moved in a direction and stopped). There are other ways this can be done, but this is the most conceptually simple.

Steps, length of step, distance moved, and heart rate can be estimated from analyzing the movement in various ways.

For example, to detect a step, your phone might see movement slightly up and forward, then down, then a jarring impact. Heart rate can be estimated based on your entered weight in an app, your speed of movement, how long you’ve been moving, and averages for people of your weight moving in those ways. This is a very inaccurate way to measure your heart rate, however. A better way would be by a sensor located on your wrist, arm, or chest, which is what smart watches often do.

Movement measured by an accelerometer can quickly become inaccurate, because small errors add up over time, so for movement over longer distances, phones generally use GPS (communication with a satellite positioning system) which is accurate to within about 5 meters.

If GPS isn’t available, but the phone is connected to multiple cell phone towers, then it’s possible to triangulate the position of the phone given the tower locations. If we know the distance and direction to the towers, and the position of the towers, then we can find the location of the phone by basically adding an offset to one of the tower locations.

There are other, more niche ways to measure positions without triangulation or GPS, but they’re generally used for autonomous robotics - laser positioning with reflectors, ultra-wide-band positioning with special sensors, or visual positioning with cameras surrounding the region in which the robot will be working.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

When I deconverted, I found it to be really hard to get past the fear. The thing that finally did it for me was the idea that a truly benevolent God wouldn’t have an issue with inquiry, and a malevolent God wasn’t one I wanted to follow. Fear is definitely a factor that keeps people in the church.

There was a time when I thought that the arrival of easy global communication and information would lead to the decline of religion, but I don’t anymore. Christianity may have declined to some extent, but a lot of the people leaving the church(s) have just replaced it with vague spirituality, homebrew beliefs, or other looser faiths.

These days I’m much more inclined to take seriously the idea that supernatural belief is instinctual. Materialist atheism will, unfortunately, probably remain a fringe belief.

Many religious people do argue that there is an instinct toward religious belief - the “God shaped hole”, if you’ve heard the expression. There are stories of people feeling an intense sense that there must be some higher power, or something more than their daily life, although obviously they won’t fixate on Christianity without prior exposure.

I doubt that a potential future reward is going to allow a person to hold up under torture in the now. I think some Christians probably refuse to recant under torture because their sense of self is rooted in their religion, rather than because they expect a reward. Of course, paradise is part of those religious beliefs, so it’s hard to tell.

Religious people have been tortured horribly and killed for their religion while refusing to recant their beliefs, and religion is very much a choice. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that this argument isn’t great.