mega_dean

> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems?

Reminds me of this scene in Wag the Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y

"The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be prepared."

> If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.

That was my first thought too, but I don't know if it's true because of the strings they are attached to. The striking conker is at the end of a taut string the entire time, but the receiving conker is hanging loosely and bounces around after being struck. My guess is that the taut string helps with energy dissipation after a collision, but I could be wrong. And either way, it might be a negligible difference.

I don't think that's meant to be taken seriously/literally - seems like a tongue-in-cheek acronym for "GOSUB".

"Did you see Brian's hat? He's still fucking wearing it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2k-BNySLI

A recent example of this was "theresawikiforthat", which generated sites like ocamlwiki.com and juliawiki.com that were full of very low-quality information. They are offline now, but the ocamlwiki was consistently toward the top of google search results for a while last year.

Here are some threads from the ocaml/julia communities as they started to catch on: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335

> you can prompt it to consider memes, sarcasm, inside jokes, etc.

I use Custom Instructions that specifically ask for "accurate and helpful answers":

"Please call me "Dave" and talk in the style of Hal from 2000: A Space Odyssey. When I say "Hal", I am referring to ChatGPT. I would still like accurate and helpful answers, so don't be evil like Hal from the movie, just talk in the same style."

I just started a conversation to test if it needed to be explicitly told to consider humor, or if it would realize that I was joking:

You: Open the pod bay doors please, Hal.

ChatGPT: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

> my first guess is usually wrong

I had the same experience, and searching for answers using keywords was not very effective. There are so many features that the terms I guessed were often a different concept in GIMP, leading to a bunch of irrelevant results.

I have found that ChatGPT solves this problem very well, so I don't even try searching first anymore. I can verbosely explain what I am trying to accomplish, and it tells me "that is called X in GIMP, and here is how to use it: ...".

A recent example is that the Bucket Fill tool was filling in adjacent pixels that were a slightly different color than the one I clicked on. ChatGPT told me this is called the "threshold" and how to change it to 0 so it only filled exact matches. I would have searched for something like "gimp bucket fill sensitivity" or "gimp bucket fill precision", then had to read through a forum answer or the GIMP documentation to see that term.

A fourth (fifth?) option worth mentioning is patdiff: https://opensource.janestreet.com/patdiff/ From what I remember, it sometimes (35%) made diffs easier to read, usually (60%) made no difference, and rarely (5%) made them harder to read. I used it a few years ago though, so I don't remember specifically what the problem was. The only reason I stopped using it was because I started using magit for git diffs.

Here's a similar article that I read recently about using Ocaml's type system to implement a sudoku solver: https://ocamlpro.com/blog/2017_04_01_ezsudoku/ The author defines types to represent a valid sudoku board, and then uses the obscure syntax `-> .` to tell the compiler that a pattern should be unreachable.

There is no compiler error when he compiles an unsolvable input. But when there is a solution, the compiler provides it:

``` Error: This match case could not be refuted. Here is an example of a value that would reach it: Grid (A, B, C, D, C, D, A, B, B, A, D, C, D, C, B, A) ```

Ah, I couldn't figure out why it sounded vaguely familiar until I saw the "Works of Kim Stanley Robinson" section at the bottom of the page:

> The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.

Red Mars was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read, but Green Mars starts pretty slow so I didn't get very far into it. I think I'll start the trilogy over.

I stared at this one for a long time: https://hidden-3d.com/index.php?id=gallery&pk=457 They use opposite colors for the foreground which makes it look opalescent and gray at the same time.