Doesn’t matter what era.

First, before using the death note, publish everything you know about the future and its tech. For example, even if you barely remember the periodic table, filling out anything you remember about it would significantly expand humanity’s understandimg at the time. Describing protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, quarks, positrons, neutrinos, bosons, etc would be a century or more ahead of its time. Knowing about radiation at all would save tens of thousands of lives from suffering just from avoidable exposure deaths.

Any modern common knowledge about germ theory, DNA, cell biology, virus structure, or the idea of antibiotics would be revolutions at the time. Just knowing penicillin comes from mold would save millions of lives, not to mention the isolation of stuff like insulin.

Asserting the existence of the photoelectric effect (photodiodes, solar panels), piezoelectric effect (phone haptics, timing crystals), the thermoelectric effect (any digital thermometer), and remembering that computer chips have something to do with silicon puts us ahead 100 years technologically. Knowing the best batteries are made mostly of lithium and something else puts us 100 years ahead in battery tech.

Knowing that rubber is supposed to be black leads to the discovery of vulcanization early and saves us from decimating the whale populations.

Knowing there are massive oil deposits in the middle east, Texas, Canada, and Mexico, or massive gold/diamond/steel/copper deposits in various areas makes nations supremely wealthy instantly after they extract resources.

For our purposes, though, photography need to advance drastically. If you know this is coming and have time to prep ahead of time, you learn everything you can to hasten the invention of the photograph.

Then you get to work with the death note.

In general: you start eliminating the elite class in whatever country you’re in. Slowly, so as not to create a power vacuum that destabilizes the nation.

Because of your scientific predictions that keep coming true, elites keep wanting to meet you to see if you can make them richer. That’s how you gather catalogs of faces.

Once your country moves to a strong collectivist government (socialist, communist, whatever) whose officials are chosen by true random sortition, you move on to the next one. Obviously you may have to do things out of order if there’s an imperialist military threat to your country, but that’s the idea. Keep society invested in the sciences and engineering to advance living conditions for all.

I’m in the US, so I’d focus on the immediate halt of the slaughter of native Americans. Oregon is already a state, so we’d still likely pick up idaho and Wyoming.

That’d probably result in an independent nation of natives in California, arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Oklahoma absorbs the Texas panhandle as a result.

A separate native nation forms in the Dakotas and Montana.

I’m not sure of statehood sentiment after that; it’s likely the Dakotas/Montana vote for statehood as a single state rather than multiple territories- they’re landlocked, so would become a vassal state to the surrounding countries (Canada, usa).

Next, tackle the US’ existing slavery and apartheid systems. The civil war is over, but slavery still exists in the form of Jim Crow laws and such.

The next hurdle to cross is the rampant corruption inherent in the system. This era already had a great deal of progress- antitrust legislation primarily. I shepherd these movements along and make them stronger.

At the end of my life, from 1900-1920, (I’m 36, going back to 1876, so I’d be 60-80) I make sure to eliminate the political figureheads that destabilized Europe throughout the early 1900s. It’s important to stabilize what is now the EU.

Subbed, because the Japanese VA is often the better actor and that carries the performance. If an anime has higher budget dubs, I’ll watch those (not many of those; anything dragon ball usually meets the bar and witch hat atelier is treating English dubs with respect).

If you never respec shart then yeah. Tune her stats to her actual class and you’ll be fine.

This take is US centric, because that’s where I’m from.

I’m a millennial. I feel like I got on the last boat boat out of 'Nam. I graduated college and got my first job just before that mini recession in 2014.

I do feel like if you were mid 20s around 9/11 you got to ride the crest of the last surge of “greatness” in the US; old enough to get your bag while the world changed everything for the people coming after.

In reality, there’s almost always been a 2-4 year period every 10-15 years where it’s actually pretty great to enter into adulthood compared to surrounding age demographics. I feel like I was in the last one, and the next one hasn’t hit yet.

Seemingly great times to be a 24 year old college graduate (comparative to other years):

2011-13 - you narrowly avoided 08 and 14 recessions

1997-99 - you got job experience before the dot com bubble popped

1988 - you’re starting your career with a straight decade of prosperity

1967-73 - you went to college and avoided the draft; you got career experience before inflation and the gas crisis hit in the next few years

1948-50 - too young to go to war, early enough to participate in the largest economic boom in human history

Haha

Every decision I’ve made to write code with poor maintainability was driven by time pressure to deliver

Every bad decision in my code bases were because I didn’t have enough time to do things the right way

With LLMs I get work done about 3-5x faster. Same level of maintainability and readability I’d have gotten writing it myself. Where LLMs fail is architecting stuff out- they can’t see the blind alleys their architecture decisions being them down. They also can’t remember to activate python virtual environments, like, ever.

Infinite loop and hard coded magic constant; this should have a configurable timeout and a resource file the string is read from so we can internationalize the application. Additionally, the use of a goto with a hard coded line number is a runtime bug waiting to happen after unrelated refactors; it’s best to use a looping construct that has more deterministic bounds.

Following a lot of different recipes for the same dish, also Alton Brown

For every woman that doesn’t do anything there is another who wants to blow her partner multiple times a day. You only hear complaints about the former.

Train to busan

Assume 20 years is what it takes to make something classic. Go get classic plates for your 2005 Prius.

I watched a few of her videos just to have something on in the background while I worked. A lot of the takes presented didn’t sit quite right with me, but I didn’t know why. Then I watched her videos on Nietzsche and realized she hasn’t read and actually understood what he wrote, despite claims to the contrary. I blocked the channel. I later found a sort-of response video from some other YouTuber that went through those videos and confirmed she didn’t understand the material by countering each point with actual receipts.

I literally quit playing botw and totk because of weapon durability. It adds nothing to the game except to make it possible I’m in an unwinnable boss fight because I forgot to bring more than five weapons. If I could use weapons for 5x as long it wouldn’t have made me quit; I’d just not like that part of the game. But some weapons lasting only 3-5 hits is fucking ridiculous.

Where

When I detailed cars at a used car dealership for a living, I had a wheel made of the same rubber you find in erasers on the end of an air powered die grinder. It was soft enough to not affect the clear coat, but it was fantastic at removing commercial vehicle decals / stickers / numbers along with the adhesive!

If you want to design and build large-scale industrial plant infrastructure like pressure vessels, piping, pumps, turbines, etc., most of the codes and standards you have to meet cost money to even see -and they are NOT cheap (in the tens of thousands of dollars for a full set).

In several jurisdictions, the standards are incorporated into law by reference. Most people think that you should have free access to read the text of the law that you’re beholden to, but what happens when a copyrighted work is incorporated into the law?

archive.org asserted the law should be free to access. However, they lost a copyright lawsuit brought by the American society of mechanical engineers because they were hosting copies of these standards.

So, to read the law you are beholden to in this sector of manufacturing, you must either pay a private organization ($$$) or memorize it (impossible); you cannot make copies for yourself to reference at your leisure

Bug reports against the Python standard library and core Python packaging utilities. My day job is in QA, so the bugs were easy to read and reproduce; the stdlib ones were all fixed in the next Python patch. Whenever I’m not burnt out I plan on fixing the packaging one myself 🫠

Sometime between 2005 and 2008, someone from explosm (the cyanide and happiness guys) did a thing in the forums where they’d draw a comic panel and the forum decided what happened next by voting in the thread. It’d go on for a few days, and by the end the stories were always wildly off the rails. They did it ~3 times. Sometime later, they lost all of their forums, which included these threads. I’ve always wondered if there’s an archive of those things somewhere. They were absolutely legendary.