jon_richards

Declaring it as a new definition was what annoyed me...

Which I found incredibly silly once I leaned about negative exponentiation and could now deduce the pattern.

Similarly, 0/0 became much more tractable to me once I learned L'Hôpital's rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'H%C3%B4pital's_rule

Exponentiation to zero annoyed me as a kid because I had equated "no operations" as zero from the pattern 2x2=2+2, 2x1=2, 2x0=

Declaring 2x2=0+2+2, 2x1=0+2, 2x0=0 while 2xx2=1x2x2, 2xx1=1x2, 2xx0=1 seemed arbitrary.

What helped was learning about negative exponentiation and exponentiation simplification, so 2xx0 = 2xx2 x 2xx(-2) = 2xx2 / 2xx2 = 1.

That said, I clearly still take issue with unintuitive interpretations of "nothing" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/852414/how-to-dynamicall...

Funny you chose that example… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17587293/

Don't forget enums. And lets get rid of the insane := syntax that makes no sense when basically every function is returning 2 values. Not to mention shadowing bugs like this:

  var cursor int64 = 0
  for {
    rows, cursor, err := db.PaginatedRows(cursor)
    ...
  }

Agreed. I’m pretty sure future generations will look at our social media habits like we look at this https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7355737/amp/The-chi...

I’d say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have solidified certain opinions.

See also the dead salmon study https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...

It’s difficult to keep things spaced out properly in microgravity without scaffolding. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

I think the point is that if the speed of light changes, so does the length of the wire.

Already counts in pistol shooting (and probably other target shooting). The slower heartbeat helps.

And the power requirement to maintain temperature scale by surface area, not volume. Same reason thermal power storage using giant piles of sand is theoretically viable.

> the first vending machine was specifically created to serve gin

The first vending machine was actually first century and dispensed holy water. It was actually mechanized similarly to pre-electronic vending machines. https://www.logicvending.co.uk/history-vending-machines

For a given progressive income tax rate with UBI, you can make an equivalent progressive tax rate with NIT.

If A is making $1 and B is making $1000, A has to survive on 0.1% of what the economy produces.

If A is making $1001 and B is making $2000, A has to survive on 33% of what the economy produces.

Even if inflation could be exclusive to basic needs, causing A’s costs and B’s costs to both rise by $1000, the economy now heavily incentivizes more competition around satisfying basic needs. All rent going up equally regardless of unit size means it’s time to start building or converting luxury apartments to multiple low income apartments.

Wikipedia has a nice graph showing how UBI and NIT are effectively the same thing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

Also not accurate. Chimps have extremely powerful numerical working memories. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(07)...

Sweetcorn is a specific maize meant for human consumption, distinct from popcorn or feed corn (which is also used for ethanol production, becoming "distillers grains" that are also fed to livestock).

I was very disappointed on my last trip to Iowa to see that most farmers weren't even bothering with cover crops.

Texas averages 36 inches of rain and 2 inches of snow each year. Ohio gets 40 inches of rain and 28 inches of snow.

Also texas has 683,533 lane miles of road vs ohio's 262,492 and a GDP of $2,563,508m vs ohio's $872,748m. Seems like they aren't putting that land mass to good use.

I’m still mad about the time I was told to mock a payment gateway in tests even though they had a testing environment and then got a slew of bug reports from people whose company names had punctuation (and thus failed the name validation the payment gateway was secretly running).

> that group was still technically employed by Gainax when Gurren Lagaan came out

Huh, TIL.

Gurren Lagaan is surprisingly meta. One of the big problems with the fight-focused anime formula is that they constantly one-up themselves, eventually power spiraling to unsustainable levels. So Gurren Lagaan's plot revolves around an energy literally called "spiral power" and how unsustainable it is.

I just use:

||reddit.com/^$document,important

@@||reddit.com/*$document

I put a rule in my adblocker to block the reddit homepage but not individual threads (because that's often where google takes me).

Massively helpful, but also concerning how months later I still automatically try to go to the homepage every once in a while and run into my adblocker.

By asking that, you just guarantee your synthesized consciousness will be miserable.

Wouldn't it just be the inverse of the Schwarzschild radius? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

What fascinates me is that if you had enough cotton candy, it would be a black hole. I don't mean it would collapse into a black hole, I mean even at a uniform density of 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter, it would already be a black hole.

We're so used to surface area scaling at r^2 and volume scaling at r^3 and the weird effects that can have (never scale up an exothermic reaction), but the maximum amount of matter that can exist in a volume without creating a black hole scales by r^1. Even with cotton candy, that r^3 is going to out-scale r^1 at some point.

It's an interesting thought experiment for algorithm complexity as well. Can you actually retrieve an element from an array in constant time regardless of the size of the array? In the extreme case, the drive containing the array must have r proportional to the size of the array to avoid becoming a black hole. Assuming the query and element travel along the drive at the speed of light, retrieving the element still takes time proportional to the size of the array.

The number of APIs with a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate. Especially if you want to know if a field is nullable.

I'll have to read it!

I've been mulling over a sci-fi setting focused on keeping humans relevant in the context of advanced technology. One of the core ideas is that AIs decay without human interaction. State backups don't prevent it because noticing clues they've been out just makes it worse.

The stars in the American flag aren't used. This is clearly Pride flag sort.