bitcrafter @ bitcrafter @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the "internal" energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being "internal" is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

Sometimes this can help, but lately I've been running into the opposite problem where people have been following this advice to such a degree that one cannot ever figure out what is going on without having to constantly jump around to find the actual code involved in doing something.

Because some of us are bitter at the trees for generating so much pollen at this time of year and want revenge.

"This isn't us encouraging you to gamble-it is us asking you to think about how bad you would feel years from now if you learned that you could have made a ton of money if you had only placed a bet right now! It's completely different!"

No, it will be too busy making paperclips to even notice us, except as a nuisance getting in the way of it making paperclips that needs to be eliminated.

Yeah, I miss living in Australia where you didn't have your own waiter but on the other hand that meant that it wasn't rude to flag down any of the wait staff if you need anything rather than being restricted to having to go through a single person.

Ah, yes, the good old git off --my lawn command.

Yes. My rule of thumb is that generally rebasing is the better approach, in part because if your commit history is relatively clean then it is easier to merge in changes one commit at a time than all at once. However, sometimes so much has changed that replaying your commits puts you in the position of having to solve so many problems that it is more trouble than it is worth, in which case you should feel no qualms about aborting the rebase (git rebase --abort) and using a merge instead.

The way I structure my commits, it is usually (but not always) easier and more reliable for me to replay my commits one at a time on top of the main branch and see how each relatively small change needs to be adapted in isolation--running the full test suite at each step to verify that my changes were correct--than to be presented with a slew of changes all at once that result from marrying all of my changes with all of the changes made to the main branch at once. So I generally start by attempting a rebase and fall back to a merge if that ends up creating more problems than it solves.

I’ve only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.

I experimented with it in University--I actually got a screwdriver and pried up and rearranged all of the keys on my keyboard within a week or so of starting--but after graduating I noticed that I was still slower at typing on Dvorak than I was on QWERTY so I gave up and changed back.

I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?

Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.

The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something's mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.

I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well.

The Bhagavad Gita spends a lot of time extolling the importance to spiritual life of controlling the senses with the goal of restraining them, and in particular this is a precept of the Krishna Consciousness cult.

Try reading before you down vote.

Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:

Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.

I think that if I'd realized that you meant to say "retrain" here instead of "restrain", I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

I’m not the one you asked, but what I like isn’t really about PHP itself, but the fact that I can get dirt cheap hosting with PHP and MySQL.

Oh, wow, I looked a little into this and hosting really is dirt cheap! That is a benefit that I genuinely was not expecting.

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven't addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not "as a rhetorical flourish", so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?

Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

It isn't worded as a "rhetorical flourish"; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a "rhetorical flourish" with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.

This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.

Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.