j1mr10rd4n

I think you're looking for crepuscular rays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays

A spectacular phenomenon for sure, and I suppose loosely related to lunar phases by virtue of the fact that they both require a very distant source of illumination.

^ THIS!

The moment I really _understood_ it... I got a real physical sense of this part of the solar system.

And when you add in the fact that it takes ~5 days (with current human-rated propulsion) to travel from earth to the moon, combined with footage from missions like Artemis II, you can make it even more intuitive.

When I'm out stargazing I also enjoy mentally switching my frame of reference, and instead of thinking about "sunset", imagining being at a certain latitude on the surface of a rocky ball rotating underneath the day/night terminator.

> is easily demonstrated by, say, two balls and a lamp,

...have done this many times for friends! A torch and a yoga ball work nicely ;)

To me, this article conflates lunar elevation and phase. Together with the use of ambiguous terms "up", "down", "above", and "below" makes it difficult to understand the author's intent and what their software is meant to visualise.

Lunar elevation (aka "altitude" in celestial coordinates) is sidereal, so the maximum range is determined by the viewer's latitude. The moon's orbital plane is not perfectly aligned with that of the sun-earth so there's another component there, but this only varies +/- 5 degrees of the sun's declination.

Lunar phase is synodic, so there's no significant variation in the observed illuminated portion with the moon's elevation over one night.

The full moon occurs when the moon is on the opposite side of the earth from the sun, so it rises at sunset, transits the meridian at midnight and sets at sunrise, (+/- a few minutes for seasonal variation).

Here's a nice visualisation of the lunar analemna - the figure described by the apparent position of the moon over a month - from Mt. Laguna at 32.8 degrees north. https://www.hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/20250212/

I also found this page with a decent explanation of the apparent effects of orbital cycles. https://www.cyclecalcs.com/learn/synodic-sidereal.html#faq

From the macOS 27 release notes in the System Settings app:

  System Improvements
  Discover lots of little ways your Mac is even enjoyable, like faster and smoother experiences across the systems.

Doesn't anybody proofread copy anymore?

/end-rant

<applause!/>

There's another good reason that hasn't been detailed in the comments so far: expressing intent.

A test should communicate its reason for testing the subject, and when an input is generated or random, it clearly communicates that this test doesn't care about the specific _value_ of that input, it's focussed on something else.

This has other beneficial effects on test suites, especially as they change over the lifetime of their subjects:

* keeping test data isolated, avoiding coupling across tests * avoiding magic strings * and as mentioned in this thread, any "flakiness" is probably a signal of an edge-case that should be handled deterministically and * it's more fun [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.01680

You should definitely also read "Permutation City" by Greg Egan[1] if you haven't already! Amazing book...

[1]https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "know"?

For example, I "know" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really "understand"?

I've been "taught" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integrated circuits, instruction sets, symbolic logic, state machines, assembly, compilers, high-level-languages, code modules, editors and formatting. I've "learned" more along the way by trial and error. But have I in effect ended up with anything other than an internalised store of concepts and interconnections? (c.f. features and weights).

Richard Sutton takes a different view in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel[2] and asserts that "learning" must include goals and reward functions but his argument seemed less concrete and possibly just a semantic re-labelling.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

> learning when I can be doing something more efficiently

hardtime.nvim[1] (or vim-hardtime[2] if you're old-school) do exactly this but within your editing session. There's an associated blog post[3] explaining the rationale behind some of the workflow choices and you can of course bring your own.

[1]: https://github.com/m4xshen/hardtime.nvim

[2]: https://github.com/takac/vim-hardtime

[3]: https://m4xshen.dev/posts/vim-command-workflow

LISPy REPLs are awesome.

Babashka is another amazing tool for interacting with a shell with clojure (or a very close dialect thereof).

https://babashka.org

some amazing auroral displays seen from tasmania over the last couple of nights https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-24/strong-naked-eye-auro...

i'm getting intermittent 200/500s - australia

Rich Hickey's talk about this is enlightening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

I was just racking my memory and searching through my library of interesting links to find exactly this! Paul Chiusano gave a nice introductory talk at strangeloop last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCWtkvDQ2ZI

I thought Renegades of the Empire was a fascinating look into the internal machinations at Redmond and a bit of DirectX history too

https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...

Some recent posts have been talking about what happens to classical encryption in a post-quantum scenario. This article demonstrates a system capable of creating and distributing quantum keys at megabit-per-second rates.

phys.org link here https://phys.org/news/2017-11-high-speed-quantum-encryption-...