PopeDotNinja

RealLifeLore made an entire video about it, including mentioning that making the video meant he could get busted if he visited Thailand.

https://youtu.be/9coptltk27s

I’m excited for a future where one could take a Tesla on a tour of the Karakoram Highway. I’m also wondering how well a Tesla handles driving through water in a city like Karachi, where it can flood pretty bad.

I needed this advice in September, hehe :) I lost 7kg in 3 days!

I wonder how viable this business model is without a 747, which will be ending it’s production run soon. I’m sure used 747s will be around for a long time, but at maintenance costs go up, parts availability goes down, etc. Eventually the 747 will not be viable, and I’m not sure there’s a suitable replacement.

Yup. $12 for 4 days, driving 8 to 14 hours per day. I had to cover his food and lodging, but we just shared a hotel room I was gonna rent anyway and food was cheap.

For comparison , I talk to a Kareem driver who nets $10 per day after expenses, and he drives 13 hours a day, seven days per week to support a family of 4. And my friend hired a part time for maybe 60 hours per month and she asked for $40/month.

My rear never felt raw. I used almost no TP during my entire trip to Pakistan. Basically I just took a targeted shower many times a day, and didn’t need to rub my bum raw.

I googled “rental car Islamabad” and found a rents agency. I called them and worked out a deal to pay cash upfront with any special security deposit or insurance. They put me in touch with the driver. Basically I just went for it.

No problems at all.

Just go to the Waga gate, walk in backwards, and say you’re leaving.

On a more serious note, I was surprised to learn how little travel there is between two countries right next to each other.

It’s crazy to me to think that the USA has some gorgeous, tall mountains, and the mountains in Pakistan are twice the height!

I call it an ass blaster XD

I gave him a really nice tip :)

I’m an American, and I visited Pakistan on a whim back in September. I was able to spend a few days in the north. I can only say the north of Pakistan is incredible. There’s nothing that prepares you for seeing 8000+ meter mountains for the first time.

There’s no shortage of people offering tours, but I made my own plans. I rented a Toyota Hilux 4x4 for 4 days at $50/day, and they insisted I hire a driver because they didn’t trust me to drive solo (which in retrospect was wise of them because of language barriers, road conditions, police/military checkpoints, etc.). The driver quoted me a rate of $3/day (not a typo). I drove from Islamabad to Hunza and back in 3 days (I could only get one day off work, lol). It was way too much driving, but the trip was still incredible.

To make the trip extra fun, I had the worst case of food poisoning w/ diarrhea that I’ve ever had for the entire time. I developed that the night before I was scheduled to drive off. So in the morning I picked up some Imodium and baby wipes, and just stopped every hour or two. I somehow managed to avoid shitting in my pants, but I don’t know how. Nearly every bathroom in Pakistan, which might just be a hole in the ground, has a handheld bidet, which is a power washer for your backside. No matter how messy it got, I also walked away from a pit stop with a fresh backside.

Here’s some pictures of the traveling, sans pit stops...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/tZ3scbSFbPbxQCpG7

It’s been said that history is written by the winners. I guess you could also say history is written by the people who pay for it.

Not only did I run out of money, I ended up homeless!

TL;DR -- don't run out of money.

That's ~8 San Franciscos!

I learned not to use Dropbox for things like Git repos. I'd have a fresh copy on one computer, and then have an older copy on a different computer. Sometimes I'd accidentally overwrite the newer code w/ autosaving on the older code. Now I'm skeptical that I'll be able to keep everything properly in sync on any sort of network-ish file system that is wrestling for control with my local file system.

It's OK to say "I'm sorry you didn't get your payday" and "your company's exploitation of my data sucks big time" to the same person.

One thing to keep in mind is you shouldn’t use your employer-provided computer for coding up your side project :)

One day the USA is gonna start getting slapped with sanctions for all the stuff it does. I don’t think they’re prepared for that.

The Saturn mission Cassini had 72 pounds of plutonium on it. The Pluto mission New Horizons has 24 pounds of plutonium to power itself.

Why is that? Children are not permitted to use WhatsApp?

I suppose the upper limit would be becoming the economy itself. Imagine monetary policy being set by https://treasury.amazon.gov.

The toughest parts of my software career have been managing relationships with my peers & working on my own attitude. For too long time I thought I could code my way out of any problem and/or win any argument with the technically more correct solution. I was super wrong. No amount of knowledge about how to write a weight balanced binary tree prepares one for the day to day grind of working with actual people.

If you had a 50/50 chance, would you go for it? I guess your answer shows how much you really want it. No shame I’m not wanting it THAT bad.

Did you actually try applying? I think they are looking for candidness and some distance between you & the chronic. If you say you used to smoke, but quit two years ago and don’t miss it at all, that’s different than wearing a 420BlazeIt t-shirt to the interview and saying you haven’t smoked in almost an hour.

It would have to cross the event horizon eventually, or the black hole would be this black dot that never grows and is surrounded by the worst traffic jam in galactic history.

Hehe.

In September, I was in Hunza, northern Pakistan. The mountains are so tall, like 7k to 8k+ meters tall, I couldn’t even get a GPS lock most of the time. Even with a downloaded, offline map, it Google Maps was less than useless for navigation (still worked OK as a “paper” map).

I’ve done enough naive exploring using only Google Maps to know that you have to use your best judgement. For example, Google Maps has guided down plenty of roads that end up being barricaded on the far end. Sometimes it guides me the wrong way on a one way street, which happened today (and I missed the no entry sign). And like this story, taking some suggested roads were at best calculated poor life choices.

Just yesterday I see drove onto a Google Maps recommended muddy dirt road road (like a dumbass) with my rental car just in the Mexican jungle. I thought I could make it, until I couldn’t. I got stuck in mud about 5km, walked through mud to the highway, and learned all about hitchhiking in Mexico, and asking locals for help getting my car unstuck. Good times.