rmunn

Just to clarify, I didn't invent this. I don't think you were attributing it to me when you said "rmunn's mnemonic", I think you meant "the mnemonic that rmunn posted". But just in case anyone thinks I invented this, I didn't. I don't remember where I got it from, it was twenty-plus years ago that I learned this mnemonic, but I didn't invent it.

Like I said in answer to a similar question somewhere else in this thread, I rarely actually need to use this. But there have been times when it's come in handy, such as when I'm away from my computer and someone calls me on the phone to ask if I want to meet them for lunch on the 13th. I rarely remember my appointments by day of the month, but I do usually remember them by day of the week, i.e. I think "the 13th... (two seconds of mental math)... that's a Thursday. Right, I already made plans to have lunch with John Smith on Thursday next week." And then I can tell them "Sorry, I'm busy on the 13th, but I think I'm free on the 14th, let me check." And then I switch over to the calendar app, verify the 14th is free, and switch back to the phone app to confirm that I can meet them on Friday the 14th.

That's how I end up using this most often. (And "most often" is still just every couple of months, mind). I still need to use the calendar app to record my appointments, but it sometimes lets me give people a "no, I'm busy that day, how about (other day)?" response with less of a conversational pause.

So like you, I don't find it all that useful, but it still is nice to have from time to time. And I also just find it fun sometimes to know that the 13th of the month = Thursday without having to look anything up.

Did not know it was called that; thanks for the link. And invented by John Conway (drawing on work by Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), no less? Man, the guy was a genius, wasn't he.

Not that often, maybe one every couple of months. Usually when someone asks me "are you available at (time) on the 31st?" they actually expect me to pull out my phone and load the calendar app. But it's nice to be able to think "Hmmm, that's a Monday, I have that 9:30 AM meeting every Monday" and inform them "I can't do 10:00, how about 11:00?" without having to pull out my phone. (Then I pull out my phone to confirm that 11:00 AM works).

Where I have used it more often is when I am wondering "what day of the week will Christmas be this year?" or "what day of the week will my birthday fall on this year?". It's nice to be able to work those out mentally without pulling up a calendar app and tapping "next month" multiple times. But even that is a rare occurrence.

For keeping track of the "key day of the week" from year to year: as you move forward through the years, it advances by one when you move into a non-leap-year, and advances by 2 when you move into a leap year. This year (2026) those days are all Saturdays. Next year, 2027, they will all be Sundays. And in 2028 those days will all be Tuesdays. (If 2028 were not a leap year than they would be Mondays, but since 2028-04-04 is 366 days away from 2027-04-04 due to 2028-02-29 being added in, that's two more than the nearest multiple of 7 (364) and therefore the "key day" advances by 2).

As I said, I don't have a good mnemonic worked out yet for remembering which "key day of the week" goes with which year. But the human mind remembers trauma, and I will probably never forget that September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. (I clearly remember arriving at work and being asked "Did you hear about the plane crashes?" — both had happened during my 30-minute walk to the office). Which gives me a fixed point I can always calculate from: September 4th, 2001 was a Tuesday, so September 5th was a Wednesday. That means 2001's key day of the week was a Wednesday, and then I can work forward from there: 2002 = Thu, 2003 Fri, 2004 Sun. Then I can add five days for every four years: 2008 Fri, 2012 Wed, 2016 Mon, 2020 Sat, 2024 Thu. Then 2025 Fri, 2026 Sat, and I'm back to current year.

That's not a great mnemomic, because it takes me quite a while to work back up to the current year from 2001. If anyone can think of a better mnemonic, please let me know.

Excellent article, and very useful for programming. For figuring out the day of the week in your head, there's a different (and very useful) trick. It uses the month and day from the Gregorian calendar, rather than the day number, because 99% of the time that's what you'll be wanting: "Which day of the week will August 31st, 2026 be?"

The trick is to notice that in any year, leap year or not, the following dates will be the same day of the week in any year: 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12. (Whether you use the month/day style favored in America, or the day/month style that the rest of the world uses, either way those dates are the same, which is convenient). Which day of the week those dates are will vary from year to year: this year (2026) those are all Saturdays, last year they were all Fridays, next year they will all be Sundays. But in any given year, those dates are separated by 63 days, a multiple of seven, so they are always going to be the same day of the week.

And that's not all: look at 5/9, 9/5, 7/11, and 11/7 — those are also that same day of the week! (Again, conveniently, this works whether you're using the American calendar style or the rest of the world). Those odd-numbered dates can easily be remembered with the mnemonic phrase "a 9-to-5 job at 7-11". And voila, you have memorized one "special" day in nine of the twelve months. (What you do for January, February, and March I will cover later).

Now I'll pause and explain why this is useful. Many of you have already made the intuitive leap to figure this out, but it's still useful to see it spelled out. If you're trying to figure out what day of the week a certain date, let's say August 31st, is going to be, then you find the "key" date for that month (August 8th), and remember that this year, those key dates are Saturdays. (I don't yet have a good mnemonic for easily remembering which key date is which for each year; I'd welcome suggestions if you can think of one). So, 8/8 was a Saturday. Therefore, August 15th and 22nd and 29th are Saturdays. Therefore, August 31st will be a Monday this year. All of that is math you can easily do in your head in seconds.

Now, January, February, and March. March is always the same in every year: March 7th. 14th, 21st, and 28th are the "key days" that are the same day as 4/4 et al. But the way I prefer to memorize March is that "March 0th" (which isn't actually in March, it's the last day of February) is the "key day". That still lets me do the mental math for March easily enough, but it also reminds me that Feburary 28th or 29th, depending on whether you're in a leap year, is the "key day" for this year. Finally, for January, I use January 3rd in non-leap-years and January 4th in leap years as the "key day" that I memorize; the number 4 is strongly associated with leap years, so "leap year = January 4th" is easy to memorize, and I just have to remember that it's one day less in non-leap-years, January 3rd.

And so I just have to memorize "January 3rd or 4th" and "March 0th", plus the phrase "a 9-to-5 job at 7-11". And I can easily figure out in my head what day of the week any day of the year will be. For example, December 25th will be a Friday this year: that took me three seconds to work out in my head without looking at a calendar.

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing."

Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politicians who truly wanted "the right thing" and actually gave up personal power when it was necessary, for the sake of having "the right thing" happen. Cincinnatus is the often-cited example, for very good reasons.)

Which is another reason why legal structures such as the American Constitution, which constrains (or would constrain if actually followed, which is a whole other rant) the power of government to certain specific channels, are important to have. They limit what the power-seekers can actually do with that power once they obtain it, and provide ways for turfing said power-seekers out of office if enough people agree to remove them. (Then you probably end up electing another power-seeker, because those end up being the vast majority of the candidate pool... but sometimes you get really, really lucky and get someone like George Washington).

Right. It's actually amazing that large language models can be as effective as they are, given that at their core they are simply matching up word-frequency patterns. But with a large enough context and enough parameters, those word-frequency patterns actually do a decent job of simulating intelligence: I'm able to give rather ambiguous instructions to Claude Code (like "go back to the suggestion you made a while back about (foo) and explain in more detail what the benefits and drawbacks of that approach would be"), and it is able to look through its context, find the part where it suggested (foo), and expand on its suggestion. This is a qualitative difference in human-computer interaction: I can type instructions that are very similar to what I would say to another human being, rather than having to be utterly unambiguous the way you have to be in writing code. It's also good at synthesizing information faster than I could: these days instead of searching MSDN for some obscure API method, I ask Claude "what's the syntax to create a foo from a bar?" and it finds me the MakeBarIntoFoo method faster than I would have (especially because I would have started with CreateFooFromBar and not found it).

But I never forget that it's a simulation of intelligence. I use it for the things it's trained on (generating code) and I don't expect the model to be good at writing poetry, or fiction. Nor do I expect it to have any actual understanding of the things it is actually trained on. Modern models are pretty good at simulating understanding, but even so they will still produce things that a human being would immediately know is wrong, e.g. image-generation models producing hands with the wrong number of fingers, or a person with three arms, or whatever. Those happen less and less often as models have been better trained (and I bet that verification steps are happening behind the scenes to catch and discard some of the classic mistakes), but they still happen.

It's the dancing bear, except this bear is actually managing some really spectacular dance moves. Some of the time. Other times it falls flat on its face. But it's really, really impressive that the bear is actually managing to dance so well.

I've seen two expressions referring to "it's difficult to put the (thing) back in" that are in more-or-less common use in English. The slightly more common one is "You can't put the genie back into the bottle", and the slightly less common one (in my experience, at least) is "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube." (Which actually inspired me to try, and it is actually possible to put the toothpaste back into the tube with careful application of suction, by squeezing the tube gently, touching the end to the excess toothpaste, then releasing the tube and letting some of the excess get sucked back in. But I digress.)

I've actually seen the "genie back into the bottle" phrase used in contexts that refer to secrets, e.g. where "the cat is out of the bag" would actually be more appropriate, so there's definitely some overlap there. For example, I've seen people talking about nuclear proliferation say "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle", meaning that the secret of how to build a nuclear weapon is well-known, and it's not really possible to make it secret again. But I've also seen people use the same "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle" expression referring to a nuclear weapon exploding: once the radioactive material in the bomb has gone critical, there's nothing anybody can do to stop the explosion that's about to happen.

Personally, I like the "genie back into the bottle" phrase better. But some people like more grounded-in-reality phrases rather than fantasy-based phrases, and they prefer "toothpaste back into the tube". Either one works well, though.

I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert areas). I don't have much personal experience with California's government other than second-hand reports, usually from people leaving the state so you can imagine those reports tend negative. But I suspect that if California's government were better, there would be even more overcrowding problems, i.e. that bad government is actually helping the state (in a small, entirely backwards, way) by keeping many more people from wanting to move there.

P.S. Lyrics can be found at https://genius.com/Joshua-tyra-i-am-the-very-model-of-a-bibl... if you would rather read them instead of watching the video.

This has nothing to do with the library of Ashurbanipal itself, but is still worth mentioning. Ashurbanipal's library gets referenced in the VERY clever parody song "I Am the Very Model of a Biblical Philologist", which you can watch on the author's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x2SvqhfevE (video is under 4 minutes long).

Depending on your knowledge of ancient history and archaeology, you may find the song either mildly funny, or side-splittingly hilarious. (And no particular religious position is advanced in the song, it's pure silliness. Putting that out there in case anyone was worried by the title). Personally, I landed on the "hilarious" side of things, which is why I wanted to share this video with you all.

I hope this brightens up your day a little.

It's probably a function of how your brain works whether or not you prefer music or silence. For me, a middle-aged man with ADHD, my brain is constantly wandering off to some other thought that isn't what's in front of me. That's not wholly under my control (though stimulant medication does help reduce the effect). BUT... if I have headphones on and am listening to something (wordless music usually works best, but music with words in a language I don't speak is often just as good), then that gives me some partial control over my brain wandering off. Because when my brain wanders off in the middle of a coding session, it usually will wander off into suddenly paying a bit closer attention to the music I was listening to. And then, since that's not something that requires the verbal-processing part of my brain which is the primary part I use for programming, that part of the brain "gets bored" and looks for something to do, sees the code on my screen, and goes "ooh, that's something interesting" and my attention is back where I wanted it to be in the first place.

ADHD, I've often said, is mis-named. It's not attention deficit, it's uncontrollable attention. Although there are many factors that go into the thing labeled ADHD, a large part of it is usually that the "control center" of the brain (the part that controls "executive function", deciding what to do next and so on) is underpowered compared to most people. (Which, I'm told, is why stimulant medication often has the seemingly-paradoxical effect of "calming down" hyperactive kids: because it helps stimulate the executive-function part of the brain, thereby giving them more control over their own thought processes. Certainly that's how it works for me, though as a middle-aged man I'm no longer hyperactive the way I was when I was a boy). So I manage my ADHD brain in two ways: one, I take medication that gives me more ability to control my attention (though not as much as a non-ADHD person usually has), and two, I play tricks on myself. I know that when my attention wanders, it'll usually wander off to something within the range of my immediate senses: my line of sight, or something I'm hearing. So I give myself things that will catch my attention but not hold it for very long... and wordless music is one of the ones that works best for me.

So really, it all depends on how your particular brain functions.

I think I read a different article than the one from CBS that got posted here, but I can't remember where it was (sorry I can't be more specific, but it's been a busy week for me and it's gone clean out of my head). Anyway, I remember that that article quoted one of the new hires saying that he had always enjoyed flight simulator games, so applying for an ATC job seemed like a natural fit.

I don't know if he was typical or cherry-picked, but it does seem likely that the people who would respond to that kind of campaign would be people who were already interested in aviation, so my guess would lean towards "typical" rather than "cherry-picked".

Again, sorry my memory is vague about an article I read several days ago so that I can't link to the source. I almost didn't post this, but I figured another data point (even a vague one) would be handy.

While you might be correct, I wouldn't necessarily assume the "and only if" part of your statement. There might be companies that choose to proactively purchase support contracts. And there are companies that have paid $150K/year for https://sqlite.org/consortium.html access. Which means, among other things, that they get first priority for any needs they have:

> Consortium members have the guaranteed, undivided attention of the SQLite developers for 23 staff-days per year and for as much additional time above and beyond that amount that the core developers have available. There are no arbitrary limits on contact time. The consortium will never be over-subscribed. New SQLite developers will be recruited and trained as necessary to cover the 23 day/year support commitment.

The SQLite home page lists five companies that have paid for consortium access. I can easily imagine that there are more who don't want to pay $150K/year but would pay $1.5k/year, proactively, to get "private, expert email advice from the developers of SQLite" when they need it.

As andrewfinr mentioned, it seems like you might be working with a different definition of "consciousness" than most people are using, hence why their responses appear to be nonsense.

Certainly when I talked about consciousness and the brain, I was going by the most basic, simple definition: awareness. Are you awake and perceiving the world? Then you're conscious. Are you asleep or knocked out? Then you're unconscious.

Now, self-awareness (the ability to reason about one's own consciousness) is one meta step beyond being conscious. Animals have awareness, experience the world through their senses, and so on. But to date, there is no evidence that I'm aware of that animals can reason about their own experience of the world. Learn from it, yes: many animals are capable of remembering past experiences and learning from them (if I push this lever I receive food, and so on). But reasoning about it, thinking about the process of thinking and so on? So far it appears that that ability is unique to human beings. (And contra the paper's authors, I don't believe that the LLMs are doing that. The reasons why would be complex and this comment is long enough already, so I'll defer the long explanation unless anyone actually cares to hear it).

EDIT to add this P.S.: I realized on re-reading my first comment that I wasn't entirely consistent in how I used the term "consciousness". Specifically, when I said that we're not entirely sure how the brain produces consciousness, I was thinking more of self-awareness than of awareness. Sure, we also don't fully understand the mechanics of how the brain takes nerve signals from our retinas and turns that into "sight", but we understand quite a bit of the process. But how the brain produces the sense of self, the sense that "I" exist as a separate being from "you" and all that goes along with that? That's still a deep mystery, and we have (if anything) only the most surface-level understanding of that process. In the rest of my comment I was using the most simple definition of consciousness, as I mentioned... but in that one sentence I slipped into the more meta definition.

Which goes to illustrate how hard these things can be to talk about: any time there's more than one definition for a single word, confusion can arise. I was trying to stick to one definition and I failed; imagine how confusing it can be to have a group discussion where multiple people are mentally thinking of different definitions of the word? There's a good reason why most philosophy texts I read (I took a philosophy minor in college, though I haven't kept up on it) spend the first few chapters carefully defining their terms, only launching into their actual argument once the terms have been defined.

I'm not GP, but the brain is a fantastically complex machine at the cellular level. It's not just electrical activity in neurons, there are also chemical neurotransmitters that play a significant role in emotion, memory, and so on. We understand more about them than we did a hundred years ago, but there's still so much about them where our understanding is limited: for example, we still don't know how the brain produces consciousness (and, in fact, what "consciousness" actually is is widely disputed). But it's pretty indisputable that the brain is an essential component of consciousness: getting your brain knocked around inside your skull (a concussion) usually produces unconsciousness (and sometimes worse), for example.

Now, maybe consciousness is produced exclusively through the electrical action of neurons, in which case computers have the necessary machinery to simulate it. But if neurotransmitters, or other things that we haven't even discovered yet, are vital parts of the process that produces consciousness (and I'm not the only one to strongly suspect they are), then computer hardware, lacking anything that even remotely resembles the action of neurotransmitter chemicals, will be unable to produce consciousness.

I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun referring to a person named in a different comment (rather than the person named in your comment), which could get quite confusing if more people comment on the parent and their comments push yours down the page.

What happens if you try to run Python eggs under Chicken? Do you get Roko's Basilisk? :-)

> He knew to crash on a golf course so the doctors didn't need to walk very far. (Not a joke. That happened.)

The link only mentions that he crashed on the golf course, not why he chose it. (Well, other than "can't make it to the airport, golf course is best alternative"). Personally, I suspect "it's got open stretches of flat land with no trees or buildings" was more of a consideration than "doctors are often found there". :-)

Claw "game" (scam) machines have deliberately-weak grasps, designed to drop the item they've grabbed whenever the arm is jolted — and then it's jolted at least once, usually twice, in the process of bringing it to the output bin. They are designed to drop their packages, so that people will feed in more money.

I'm not saying a drone with a claw arm would be the right design. But if it turned out that that was the right design, it would be designed not to drop its "packages", as opposed to the claw machines where dropping the package is the intended result.

For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?

I was expecting something about double-entry accounting and how it can (initially) be non-intuitive whether to mark a given entry as a debit (-100) or credit (+100), especially for liabilities (when you enter a credit card payment in your ledger, the signs aren't what you might intuitively expect when you haven't wrapped your head around the system yet).

Instead I get a nice blog post about a knotty little problem caused by someone's abuse of semantic markup for style purposes. Shows that HTML doesn't have a monopoly on that issue. PDFs are already bad enough as a format for extracting data from, we don't need dumb HTML-inspired tricks on top of that.

Nice job finding the issue and explaining it clearly, OP. Thanks for an interesting writeup.

You just reminded me of a funny story about redundant power supply.

A college buddy used to work at Motorola (I'm naming the company because they wouldn't mind this story being shared) back in the late 90's or early 2000's. They had redundant power to their campus, bought from two different companies, coming in on opposite sides of the campus, so that even if some backhoe operator cut a ground-based power line somewhere, they wouldn't lose power.

And yet, one morning, the power went off all across their campus. After a little investigation, they sent pretty much all their employees home at noon and told them "take the afternoon off, don't come back until tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to do any work anyway". Turns out that although the power lines came in at opposite sides of their campus, somewhere a few miles away both of the power lines feeding their campus ended up running through the same underground conduit. And yes, a backhoe had managed to cut that conduit and break both of the lines they depended on at the same time. They had a single, VERY non-obvious, point of failure, and the backhoe had unerringly homed in on that SPoF.

Maybe the workflows, etc., are inherent complexity, so that any similarly-flexible product will have the same problems.

But the awful client-server architecture, where anything you do takes several seconds of waiting for the client to send who-knows-what to the server and get data back, even selecting something from a dropdown... that is absolutely just Jira. A competing product would be able to deliver much, MUCH snappier UX. Jira is just the crappiest, slowest UI that I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to work with.

Back when I was in college, I took some philosophy classes just for fun. I discovered when I took Symbolic Logic that while everyone else was struggling with the class, I was finding it pretty easy, because chaining together a proof in symbolic logic felt just like programming. It was the same mental steps: you have the starting conditions, there's an endpoint you want to reach, and you need to chain together these fundamental operations in order to get there. (And sometimes you needed to see how to break them apart: if you need to prove P AND Q, then proving P separately and proving Q separately were usually easier steps, and then once you've proved P and you've proved Q then you've proved P AND Q. Which felt a lot like refactoring a large function that did two things into two separate, smaller functions that do one thing each).

Looking through the sample chapter, I'm reminded of my experience with symbolic logic class. It looks like it'll be much the same thing, but flipped on its head: instead of knowing programming and using that knowledge to make symbolic logic easier, this looks like it'll be about knowing symbolic logic and using that knowledge to make programming easier. Seems pretty useful; I'll give the sample chapters a more in-depth read soon.

Even with all the downsides of being colonized by Britain, it was still far better than being colonized by Belgium. Heck, being colonized by pretty much anybody but Belgium was better than being colonized by Belgium. Read up on the Belgian Congo sometime: it was a parade of horrors.

GP was making a relative comparison; pointing out that both were bad in absolute terms does not negate the point. -2 is still greater than -17.

In countries with a sensible legal system, yes. Truth is not a defense against defamation in all countries. I can't know what country you (generic you) are in, so best to look up your local laws on defamation.

The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:

> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.

This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.

What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.

I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.

> Firstly, they didn't spend trillions on training.

Then please argue with the guy who said they did, the guy who goes by richardw and whose comment I was responding to in the first place. He's the one who said "If the US companies need trillions to barely beat Chinese companies spending billions, despite a multi year head start..." and, to the best of my knowledge, you haven't replied to him at all. Instead, you have consistently replied to me, arguing points I'm not discussing, not TRYING to discuss, and arguing with me about points that somebody else made. As I told you in a different comment, PLEASE read more carefully in the future.

I am sick and tired of talking about this by now. I no longer care if you have a good point or not, you have exhausted my supply of good will. Good bye. Feel free to have the last word, you're the only one who cares by now.