sylver_dragon

You can delete them?

Step one: Document, Document, Document.
Step Two: Did we cover documentation yet?
Step Three: Complain, with documentation, to the apartment management.
Step Four: Document.

Recordings such as video and audio are useful. Just keeping a log of all such interactions can help as well. But, you want to have the documentation to prove your side of things. If things go really sideways and you end up in court, the judge won’t give a fuck about what you say, only what you can prove. Be ready to prove your claims. As we say in the DFIR world, “logs or it didn’t happen”. Then, start complaining to management. And document (keep a written log, you probably won’t be able to record) your interactions with management. All logs should include date, time, who you spoke with, what you spoke about and any actions which management said they would take or actions you said you would take. If it’s an option, keep your communications with management in email. Both the sending and received emails will be timestamped and the headers will provide a reasonable record showing that the emails were to or from management controlled email servers and addresses. And they log what was talked about quite nicely.

Ultimately, the goal is to move this from being your problem to management’s problem. And it’s possible that your problem neighbor is also someone else’s problem. If management has three tenants all complaining about the same neighbor, they have more impetus to take action against the problem. Of course, this assumes a neutral management, which can be an open question. But, this is likely the least costly way to resolve the issue.

Not humming, but I do make noise intentionally. I’m a big guy and understand that I could be threatening to women in the wrong circumstance. I also walk fairly quietly just as a matter of the way I walk; so, I’ve scared folks on more than one occasion by “sneaking” up on them unintentionally. So, if I think I am doing that, I’ll land a few footfalls hard and flat to make my foot slap the ground and alert the person of my presence before I get too close. I also try to give space to strangers while walking. Things like moving to the other side of the sidewalk/street, slowing down or speeding up to pass. Basically, trying to not look like I’m stalking them.

And then imagine what is creeping around, above that tapestry, waiting to get you while you sleep.

Anyone can build a bridge which stands. It takes a engineer to build a bridge which just stands, while not costing an insane amount of money.

That said, engineers throughout history were incredibly smart and shouldn’t be discounted.

Spaceballs?!?!

I never get any responses, until like 3 days later when I check my spam folder and realize my scheduled interview appointment came from some random server that got deleted as spam mail.

It sucks, but this is kinda on you. Spam filters are pretty terrible at what they do. And with everyone and their dog adding “AI” to their security tools, it’s only getting worse. There is a fuckton of spam being sent to email addresses all the time. And the spammers are doing their level best to make that spam look more and more like legitimate emails. So, the terrible spam filters and crappy AI are hard pressed to filter out all the crap and not catch legitimate emails. And this problem with false positives is one of the reasons a lot of spam still sneaks through, most of the filters tend to err towards false negatives over false positives. Still, false positives will happen. If you are expecting an important email, you’re going to need to dive into the cesspit which is your spam folder regularly and make sure that email didn’t end up there.

As for the issues around job hunting, ya that whole process can suck. Depending on your skillset, experience and job criteria, the pool can get pretty small pretty fast. And online job hunting means that companies are getting hundreds of resumes for postings. On top of that, companies have stopped training and don’t do anything to build internal talent pipelines. So, if you are earlier in your career, you get stuck in a loop of not having experience, so no one will hire you to get experience. It just sucks and I don’t have an answer for you, only to keep plugging away and understand it’s a numbers game. Eventually the dice will come up for you, but that “eventually” can really, really suck.

Do note that I made a mistake in the original post, but the conclusion was still the same. I forgot to divide the Expected Value (EV) for all dice by 6 (the number of faces).

If you could design a die with average face value of 3, min face value of 0, max face value of 6, what would be the best die?

I’m not sure how to prove this empirically, but playing with it on my whiteboard I get a sense that the die 444222 is going to have the best EV, under the given constraints and my value assignments. The real kicker is “average face value of 3”. Given that constraint, you will never be able to create a die with a positive or even zero EV using my values. Consider die 333333 and each face’s value:

This die has an average face value of 3 ( (3 * 6) / 3) and we can consider changing any face up or down. But, in order to keep the average a 3, moving one face up one number requires we move a different face down one number and vice-versa. For example, if we push one face from a 3 to a 4, we must also pull one face from a 3 to a 2 to balance out the average. And because the value for positive value numbers (4, 5, 6) starts off one doubling behind the values for the negative value numbers (3, 2, 1, 0), going any further than 4 in the positive direction on a face means that another face will be pushed down far enough to cancel out the benefit of going to a 5 or beyond.

To look at it another way (the way I did on my whiteboard), let’s just consider a two sided die (a coin flip). Using the same values for each number, we can consider a 33 coin. This has an EV of -1 ( (-1 * 2) / 2) and an average of 3 ( (3 * 2) / 2 ). Now, move the numbers, but keep the same average of 3. Moving to a 42 coin changes the EV to -1/2 ( (+1 + (-2)) / 2 ) and the average is still 3 ( (4 + 2) / 2 ). The EV got better. So, let’s take another step in each direction. We get a 51 coin with an EV of -1 ( (+2 + (-4)) / 2) and the average is unchanged at 3 ( (5 + 1) / 2 ). And going to a 60 coin takes us to an EV of -2 ( (+4 + (-8)) /2 ) with a average of 3 ( (6 + 0) / 2 ). This means that the best coin for this scenario is a 42 coin. Taking that coin idea back to the die, you can think of the die as a bunch of linked coins. If you want one face to be a 5 the one face must be a 2, which would be worse than having the pair of faces be a 4 and a 2. So, to maximize the EV, you want to create a bunch of 42 pairs.

Of course, we could fiddle with multiple faces at once. What about a 622233 die. Well, it gets worse. EV is -2/3 ( +4 + (-2) + (-2) + (-2) + (-1) + (-1))/6).
Maybe a 522333, EV is -5/6 ( (+2 + (-2) + (-2) + (-1) + (-1) + (-1)) / 6). Again, since lower numbers get a more negative valuation faster than higher numbers get a positive valuation, you just really don’t want to let numbers get any lower than necessary. The 42 paring just happens to hit a sweet spot where that effect isn’t yet pronounced enough to cause the EV to drop off.

So ya, while I don’t know the maths to prove it. I’m gonna say that the 444222 probably maximizes the EV under the given model.

Option C “222444”.
I coded successes as positive values and failures as negative values. I arbitrarily used a doubling for each greater success/failure level and came up with the following value coding:

This results in the following expected values for the offered dice:

A: -2
B: -1
C: -1/2
D: -1

All dice are bad, option C is the least bad. And this kinda makes sense. For option A, you may have a fantastic success, but you are also just as likely to complete crash out. And a “crash out” should happen after very few rolls. Option B is a slightly less extreme version of this, but any gains from the 5 results should be more than wiped out by the 1 results. And those should be happening with similar frequency. Option C is again the same thing, but with a slower circling of the drain. 4 results let you recover some, but the 2 wipes out that 4’s benefits and more resulting in a slow decline. And option D is just straight out bad, every result is a failure.

It seems that the only good choice is not to play. ;-)

EDIT: I realized, I made a mistake in my original numbers, I forgot to divide by 6. And this is why coffee should come before math. The conclusions are still the same, but the numbers are different. I’ve corrected those.

I’m going to go with option C with the following reasoning:
I’m going to assigned (somewhat arbitrarily) the following values to each outcome:

0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

• | - | - | - | - | - | - -8 | -4 | -2 | -1 | +1 | +2 | +4

This codes failure outcomes as having a negative value and success outcomes as having a positive value, with the value doubling for each increase in success/failure. So, the expected value for the 4 options are:

A: -12 B: -6 C: -3 D: -6

Meaning all of the options are bad, but the least bad is option C. And this makes some intuitive sense. You have an equal chance of success or failure and while no success will be all that spectacular, you will also never suffer a spectacular failure. Die A seems like an interesting choice, but you would expect to suffer a catastrophic failure about half the time and that may end your ability to keep rolling. Die B is a slightly less bad version of die A, and may be an ok choice, if a 1 result doesn’t result in you no longer being allowed to roll. Though, if you are not able to stop rolling whenever you want, a 5 outcome is likely to be wiped out fairly soon. Die D is just straight out bad. It always results in a failure; so, there is no point playing.