Recent content on Matthew Scheffel
I have heard of patriarchy since I was a child, but bell hooks’ book mapped that word onto my own experience. It has been an invisible force hollowing me out. Its agents have been family, friends, and media - all promoting its myths and enforcing its standards. It begins with shame and humour - shame for the uninitated, humour for the initiated. It hollows out boys into good little soliders…

 
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 This page is auto-generated using my git commit log 
 
 
 
 
 2022-Q4 
 
 Footnotes heading 
 Pizza dough - more footnotes 
 Pizza dough 
 Content edit, add Yew article 
 draft game idea text 
 Add privacy policy for NeuralNote 
 Colour tweak 
 Regenerate content following edits 
 Content edit 
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 td;dr:
 
 
 The \(\sqrt{N}\) sampling technique is invalid, absolute sample size is what matters
 
 
 
 My introduction to the technique 
 In the building automation world installation jobs require technicians to validate that installed devices are fit for purpose, i.e.: “commissioning”. It’s a slow, and therefore expensive process. At…
I’ve been working on the project for years now. It is the most ambitious thing I have ever made. I’m proud of it, but I’m far from done and it has been grueling. Each time I overcome a mountain of difficulty I am rewarded with the sight of the next mountain I must climb. It feels as though I am always on the cusp of “rolling downhill”, if only I complete just another…

 
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Since 2012, it's paid +50% to be invested in American rather than Canadian stocks and bonds.
 Past performance is not indicative of future results, but I'm staying invested in American securities. 

 
 
 
 As I’ve posted about previously , I’ve given up on speculation; I’m convinced it’s a bottomless pit of wasted effort. Still, we…
TL;DR: I’m sharing a couple of build scripts to make it easier to run a custom build of the Godot Engine . 
 Motivation 
 I want to use the godot_voxel plugin, which is a module that must be compiled with Godot. There are
 several other modules that must be compiled this way. 
 This presents a technical risk, which the voxel project puts thusly: 
 
 Since you are…

 
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 Trading is a waste of effort; it is not distinct from gambling. Even if it were, the capital requirements and risks are extreme.
 
 
 
 My last post was about what makes trading so attractive, and so dangerous . It marks when I decided to put to bed the idea that sufficiently advanced software would make me money in markets. It’s a common…
This is a summary of this DEFCON 26 talk on predatory journals [slides] . It’s 2 hours long. 
 I’ve written a teaser summary and table of contents below, if it doesn’t motivate you then I saved you a click. 
 Three investigative journalists investigate predatory journals. It’s a two-phase informal experiment for their documentary (which is part of the video,…
Personal (@matthewscheffel.com) 
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Secondary Market Problems Aren’t Excellent 
 I bought a used Elektron Octatrack DPS-1 on Reverb in the spring of 2023. The condition of the device was listed as “excellent”, and it seemed that way. By the time I had the hang of the device, I noticed the audio connections were spotty. Volume was inconsistent, and messing around with the connections gave me static and changing…

 Current fundraising link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mscheffel 
 Legacy fundraising link: https://liberapay.com/mscheffel/ 
 
 Both are valid, and it doesn’t make much difference which one you pick. The former is the new link because it offers one-time donations on top of recurring ones, which I hope will make it an easier “ask”. 
 Costs to run the server…
Motivation 
 I have a Arturia KeyStep Pro that I am using to sequence an Arturia DrumBrute Impact. They KeyStep Pro has a dedicated sequencer for drums (“Track 1”), but the keys are not labelled. This makes it a bit cumbersome to know which key to hit if you want to add some more cowbell, or whatever. 
 Solution 
 I made a simple overlay that can squeeze above the keys;…
This is a selection of projects I have developed and shared publically. 
 Nova Scotia Power Outage Tracker 
 A WASM application written in Rust that uses Svelte for its frontend, available here . 
 Motivation 
 Nova Scotia Power makes current outage information available via a map . However, I was curious about the distribution of outages across the province and across time. With…
Source 
 If you’d like to use the Korg NTS-1 with the DirtyWave M8, you’ll need the MIDI
CC codes in hexadecimal. This table is converted from this source . Korg also has a MIDI Implementation Chart that contains the parameter addresses, but it does not give any hints about the required values for different selections. 
 To create this table, I manually copied the results…
This is my pizza dough recipe which I offer with no uplifting life story about the importance and comfort of pizza; presumably you already agree about that. 
 Ingredients 
 Represented in a way I find helpful when following this recipe. 
 
	 
			 
					 Amount 
					 Unit 
					 Ingredient…
My 6 years of experience working with customers taught me to keep it simple when necessary. I learned the value of filtering deep technical information down to key facts when escalating to higher technical powers. Both of these aspects of technical writing have the same goal: translation and compression. Unnecessary complexity is actively harmful to decision makers. Necessary complexity poorly…
I’ve been a freelance software developer since 2007 and was a building automation controls technician between 2011 and 2017. You can find my GitHub profile here and my LinkedIn profile here . 
 I run a Mastodon instance for the Canadian Maritimes. 
 Education 
 Self-directed 
 I spent most of my childhood tinkering with obsolete, free computers. I learned a lot, and turned some…

 
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 Traders get emotionally high when trading, and that's why they do it. It's not about the money. No one is immune: this is a human problem, not a trader problem.
 
 
 
 
 Superstition is Learned 
 Skinner’s pigeon experiment ( video ) shows how superstition can be created, at least in pigeons. By feeding pigeons infrequently and randomly…

 
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 Don't confuse a precise model with a precise understanding of the real world. Models are toys.
 
 
 
 
 If We Knew Everything, We’d Know Everything! 
 When I was younger I believed in a kind of physical determinism. I thought that if you knew exactly where everything was and exactly how fast it was going, you could perfectly predict…

 
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 If you do what's easy instead of working towards what you want, you'll end up with a life you didn't want.
 
 
 
 
 We are born onto an underfunded and imperfect assembly line dedicated to the impossible task of mass-education and mass-parenting. The steady hum of the line defines our lives and purpose. Either through life circumstances or by…

 
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 Presented are two approaches to rationally size positions when speculating.
 
 
 
 
 I’ve developed an approach for position sizing that allows for conviction-adjusted sizing based on a quantitative measure of statistical significance. 
 I previously exclusively used volatility-adjusted sizing, which is an approach that attempts to keep a…

 
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 It's remarkable that people can communicate at all. It's much easier to 'reckon that you understand others than it is to actually mindfully and actively listen to them. 
 
 
 
 
 Your World is not My World 
 Perspective shapes how we interpret the world, and the world shapes our perspective. If you grew up in an abusive home, it shaped…

 
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 I got attention at work for doing a good job, so doing a good job became my entire personality. It was very toxic and it eventually burned me out. Then I switched to financial security as an entire personality, but that wasn't much better. 
 
 
 
 
 The Exceptionalism Bug 
 I grew up with the American exceptionalism bug. I valued…