hazbot

I remember as a kid doing:

100/3

ans×3

on different calculators, and at the time being baffled at how they often said 99.9999999.

My android calculator app gives me 9.00000... and lets me scroll through the decimal expansion, it's zeros at least to 1000 places, so presumably the calculator's answer is exactly 9.

I wonder if our calculator apps are doing some symbolic computations? Or just have >>64 bit precision (which I presume is the default for excel/python)?

I think your analogy is pretty apt. However, even though I don't think you can give corporations a free ride just because 'people could choose not to use the product', this is not an absolute! 'People could choose not to use the product' does hold a lot of truth.

True, but that didn't stop me from finding parts interesting, and just generally enjoying the earnestness.

I like the focus on tools to assist the human, rather than automating merge conflicts. Even if you come up with a new clever algo that reduces merge conflicts by x% from where we are now, how do you decide that these two pieces of now non-conflicting don't interact with eachother to produce undersirable behaviour? Unless you solve that pretty well, I much prefer the pattern of keeping a human brain in the loop.

I was chatting to a speech pathologist the other day, apparently when they were being awarded their degrees, the entire class submitted the IPA transcription of their names to be read out at the graduation ceremony.

I don't think there's not a universal theory of AI for lack of trying - it's just really hard and non obvious.

e.g. physics and chemistry took centuries of empirical fooling around to develop the highly predictive theories we have now.

I think one of the points of this article is that we need to think deeply about what our empirical foolings around are actually telling us.

This got me thinking about what we could and could not do if we had a magical a energy-unbottlenecker, say an infinite capacity battery with arbitrary power output.

These become much cheaper:

- Transport: synthesise fuel from CO2 + seawater. Or charge a battery. - Water: electrolysis of seawater. - Food grown anywhere: Light + water + fertiliser can be made from commonly available materials. Soil is a bit trickier, but I think you could bootstrap up with composting. - Global warming: pull CO2 out of the air. - Raw materials (concrete, metals): all cheaper to extract with free energy. - producing medicine

Still really hard: - making new treatments - inflation of housing prices - escaping earth's gravity (need bounce per ounce) - world peace - writing books - politics

Every time I see one of these threads I think "maybe Python isn't the best choice if we still need threads like this". But it's just so useful...

I just started using a PC I built in 2014 again, also with a Haswell processor. Like you say, still pretty snappy.

But honestly I was a bit sad it hadn't become hopelessly obsolete.

CGP Grey has a interesting video on this:

Americapox: The Missing Plague - YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

paraphrasing one point in the article: "Back in the good old days ads were great".

Probably the legions of garbage ads have simply been forgotten about, and we only remember the greats. In the same way that the average quality of golden-oldie radio stations is better than new-stuff stations.

A lot of the local markets in Australia are further away from the NW corner than Singapore!

The on-disk format you would probably want to use with xarray is netCDF - which is generally n-dimensional gridded data, and some metadata about what those dimensions are, the units of the data, and other miscellanies.

One way to think of xarray is as a really nice in-memory representation of a netCDF file with some pretty powerful methods for manipulating that data, in much the same way that you can think of DataFrames as a really nice in-memory representation of a csv/table with some powerful methods.

I use xarray for working with satellite imagery and weather model grids - it's a million times better than the fragile MATLAB code I used to use.

I just shipped about £25,000 of personal effects - they wanted to charge me 5% for insurance!

I’m really glad seeing the estimates for container loss in this thread that I decided to just wear the risk myself.

You’re 100% correct in your interpretation of the strict grammatical meaning.

I think maybe ‘not giving a shit’ existed as a turn of phrase first, and ‘giving a shit’ is sometimes used (incorrectly in the grammatical sense, but ok in the colloquial sense) as the complete negation/opposite.

By my reading, the authors say this was done with subterfuge to try and hide who did it.

It probably is possible to come to a solid conclusion about whether the virus was engineered or not by looking at the genome (I certainly don't have the technical skills to judge this article).

But assuming it was indeed engineered, determining intention (e.g. made to look like it was not engineered, or obfuscating who engineered it) is another level of extraordinary. There would be so many ways to misread the data as evidence of subterfuge, when maybe what you're seeing is just how they routed around technical problems.

I discovered starcraft2 when it became free to play. I find addictive in a similar way to my LoL days, without the toxic teammates.

It's super fun and engrossing, but I have to admit I occasionally get flashes of worry about is this how I want to spend my time? To be fair, I get the same thoughts about my job.

I feel ya! 9-10 hours optimal over here too. New baby is making that impossible.

"We're losing money on every sale!"

"Don't worry, we'll make up for it in volume."

I moved to Scotland 2 years ago. After one year I switched providers away from Scottish Power. They sent me a final bill (snail mail) for £0.05, but their internet and phone payment systems kept breaking on me. When I finally got through to a human they told me “our system can’t accept such low payments”.

They forgave the amount. Weeks later I got another snail mail letter saying I was £0.04 in credit.

Every interaction I had with them was farcical - I wouldn’t touch them with a 10ft pole.

I would be very surprised if the waste heat had any significant impact more than a few meters/yards from the container. Water has a really high heat capacity and the oceans are large.

Almost all the energy that is heating up the ocean is coming from the sun - we've just put a thicker blanket round the earth to trap more heat. Waste heat from human activity is a tiny part of the global energy balance.