MathMonkeyMan

Here's the [paper][1] on the arxiv.

I found it hard to believe that they accounted for other forces precisely enough that they could attribute the phase change to gravity, but this is beyond me so I trust the result.

At first I thought "they showed that you can measure a particle falling in gravity," which seemed dumb because we already know that particles fall in gravity. But they showed that you can measure a single (aggregate) particle falling in gravity, which is pretty cool because if gravity is quantum then that means that they observed an interaction between the graviton and their rubidium atom.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14535

Maybe part of it is that fully functional notation necessarily preserves certain properties of the computation, while imperative style doesn't have to. For a complex piece of code, all of the hairiness is manifest in a functional style, but can be made implicit in an imperative style. So there's an economy to the imperative approach as things get complex, but in a sense we're just laundering the complexity from understanding the machinations of the code to understanding the correctness of the code.

This is beside the point, and I'm being pedantic, but the unix pipeline and the clojure expression don't quite do the same thing.

The clojure expression reads the entire file into memory first, and then operates on that memory representation.

The pipeline processes the input in chunks. The two `sort`s might read the entire contents into memory, but an implementation like GNU sort will instead, for large inputs, create temporary files for sections of the input and then merge sort them to the output.

You could make clojure do the same thing, but it might not be as "simple" as the pipeline.

I'm a lowly shell, but in another life I aspire to achieve greatness through docker.

typical Jim

No, the plot of The Andromeda Strain is about a low orbit bacterium that clots blood very quickly but is extremely sensitive to blood pH.

Yeah I figure I'm "well educated" and I never took a real statistics class and so never learned the definition of a p-value. I also don't know about the Wars of the Roses or Millard Fillmore. I did learn about Hildegard von Bingen and Laguerre polynomials.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning> affects us all. I'd like to believe education is an antidote, but really the only antidote is... not doing that.

It's phones. Nobody uses computers anymore (for some statistical definition of "nobody"). There's no pressure to make precise and consistent UIs because poke poke poke poke.

That's a nice park. Most dudes I assume piss on the sidewalk.

[This video][1] and the one before it on the playlist are a good no nonsense explanation of the topic.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2vnb_eVGE

Tracing is the most general of them, and the most expensive unless you're careful with the implementation.

Trace spans are time-delimited units of "stuff that happened", with a tree relationship among the spans, and each span can have arbitrary tags (key/value pairs) and events (time/value).

From that, if you chose, you could derive metrics and logs. The trick is to start with tracing and to actually put it in your program, rather than trying to mostly-automatically tack it on later.

Give Rakuten your money!

I went through a whole design phase with ChatGPT on the idea of using an old Kobo as a low-distraction TV remote for my dad. The idea is that it would interface with a computer media server thing, be more legible than a traditional remote, and not be an app on his phone that would immediately send him into his phone.

Ended up being more involved than the benefit it would bring, especially considering that these media server programs know how to interface with the traditional remote over HDMI (if you have the right graphics card or a dongle) and show the selection UI on screen like a smart TV.

Anyway, my response is "you don't necessarily have to complicate your e-reader, instead you have the option of making it not an e-reader."

Proud to see that my home state of Florida is absolutely lit up with root fungus.

It's cozy!

"Gödel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman helped me to get it at some point.

On Amazon: <https://www.amazon.com/Godels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel-ebook/dp/B0...>

I might even pick up an ebook version if I can find it somewhere else. Been a while.

mercury vapor lamps are not a thermal light source, though

Mexico is serious about junk food.

The cereal boxes in the stores don't have cute cartoon characters on them, and I tried to send somebody a box of chocolates and it got seized by customs.

Candy is labeled like cigarettes.

I forgot about the AC mains :)

My experience with embedded stuff is very limited -- just some hobby projects on the Pico.

From what I've read, though, the on-board oscillators (there are a few of them) can drift quite a bit. One data point [says][1] several seconds per day.

On the other hand, if what you want is a microcontroller with an accurate clock, they probably make those (just not the Pico).

[1]: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=29255

This is a harder problem than it seems. I've been thinking and reading about it for a side project, but haven't done much testing yet.

There are a few places to get the current time:

- on-board real-time clock (RTC) connected to a continuous power source (e.g. button battery)

- GPS

- Colorado WWVB signal (60 KHz), Frankfurt DCF-77 (77.5 KHz), Cumbria NPL (60 KHz)

- the internet (NTP, HTTPS servers, etc.)

- mobile internet (e.g. LTE)

- estimate time elapsed between power cycles by tracking and storing IEEE 802.11 timing synchronization function (TSF) timestamps from nearby wifi routers.

All of these are potentially problematic.

The best option is the RTC. Buy a DS3231, hook it up to your microcontroller and a button battery, and forget about it for a few years. The only problem with these (besides the battery) is that they can drift pretty badly. The fancy ones account for temperature fluctuations and are accurate to ~2 ppm, which is one minute per year. Aside from the drift, it sucks to need an always-on dedicated IC just to know the time, especially if you don't always need to know the time.

GPS is nice but it's hard to get a signal indoors, especially in a skyscraper far away from a window, as can happen here in New York. You also need a relatively bulky component and an antenna.

The longwave radio signals (WWVB, DCF-77, and NPL) are neat and old and what "atomic clocks" use, but the signal is tiny and you need a sensitive long-running receiver, either with a gigantic antenna or a slightly less gigantic ferrite rod. Even then, one of those cheap atomic clocks might not sync at all unless it's placed near a window. The WWVB signal is also very weak in certain parts of America and at certain times of day, so your circuit might only get a bit of signal over the noise once or twice a day, which might or might not be enough to deduce the time.

The plain old internet works fine, but then your power budget involves a wifi radio, though you only need to run it for a few hundred milliseconds per hour. You also need a wifi password, which is a pain to configure in an IoT device. Also, you wanted a clock, why does it need the internet? GTFOOH.

Mobile internet is way overkill.

The last idea is something I haven't tested fully, since my microcontroller (raspberry pi pico w) can't keep up with the "promiscuous mode" unofficially offered by its wifi chip. It's a neat idea, though: you're in an environment with wifi routers all around, and you want to guess the time elapsed since you last checked by listening, without credentials, to the chatter. With enough routers and some flash storage you can probably keep track of time, assuming the whole area doesn't get a power outage.

That's my very long way of saying that keeping time is a solved problem but all of the solutions have drawbacks and none works perfectly.

Yep: https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html

I started using them a long time ago to type Greek characters, but then I switched to vscode with a vim extension and it didn't support that keybinding so I lost the habit. Might work with the neovim extension now.

edit: Yep, but you have to add "k" to the list of "control characters handled by neovim" in the extension's settings.

It does have the title going for it.

I shut my computers all the way down when I'm done with them. I like a clean slate when I return.

Is there a difference, though? "You think you know so much because you read a book, but I actually lived it so I really understand it." At best you understand your own experience, and I wouldn't even make that claim about most of my own life. Might learn more about the thing from a book.

Of course, life is about living and you only live once and yadda yadda. Saying AIs don't know something because they weren't really there smells close to androids aren't real because they weren't made by God. That's not to mention that they don't know anything in the vague sense of what we think knowing means.

I don't really have an opinion on the topic, but the framing in the article didn't speak to me. Makes me want to watch the movie again, though.

I've always been a stickler for being specific about which regex language your thing accepts, and whether it is to match any substring, or a prefix, or a suffix, or the whole thing, or a line, or a substring of a line, or whatever.

Here are some of the [more popular][1] ones, and then there are PCRE and Python.

It took me a while to learn that some of the older ones you see in e.g. grep are [specified by POSIX][2].

[1]: https://cppreference.com/cpp/regex#Regular_expression_gramma...

[2]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/basedefs/xbd...

more like over 88.1

The median age in America is about 40, so depending on how you define old the majority could go one way or the other.

I switched out asio's epoll backend for its io_uring in a database server and CPU utilization shot up. Probably depends on usage and the specifics of how it's integrated into the event code.

Patients don't care about all of that medical mumbo jumbo, they just want to feel well.