scratchee @ scratchee @feddit.uk

Posts

2

Comments

131

Joined

2 yr. ago

For anyone who doesn’t know (as I didn’t), metapedia is pretty clear Nazi apologist crap, just to save you checking/ending up on a watchlist.

Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.

True enough, it would not be a wise economic or political move

I specifically didn’t ignore that. My entire point was that a driver that refuses to drive under anything except “ideal circumstances” is still a safer driver.

I am aware that if we banned driving at night to get the same benefit for everyone, it wouldn’t go very well, but that doesn’t really change the safety, only the practicality.

If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)

To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.

You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.

If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.

That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.

Londoners looking at this article in utter confusion

Our society runs on our stomachs

It sort of still works if you imagine they’re talking about the descendants of the dinosaurs which form the primary meat of human society (chickens)

I’ve certainly been there, shocked to realise my personal slice of reality was unusual. At least in this case, it’s a good problem to have.

But surely equality has been achieved in the last few months, this all feels so very January. People are so much more open minded now than in those dark days of the past. Why waste time even discussing such outdated attitudes that totally and completely disappeared in February and are certain to never return?!

It may be in a scientific paper, but this is more of an anecdote about the various issues the author encountered, rather than something intended to be actionable and clearly delineated as you’d expect in the body of a scientific article. Therefore a more literary style is appropriate for this section.

My mental model is that bullet points are for when you expect a reader to go over the points with a highlighter, prose for when you want to produce an emotional response. This feels more like the latter.

Advertising company finally gets memo that threats to the function of the advertising ecosystem are actually also threats to them, eventually.

Took them a while to do that maths.

Ironic that his polite human-scale protest wouldn’t have gotten much attention if the police hadn’t turned it into national news.

Agreed, I’d be entirely fine with legal enforcement of the ISO definitions in advertising, no need to air historical dirty laundry outside the profession

Yeah, it’ll definitely be worse using a less complete constellation, but at least you can probably trust them to not fuck around and ruin military operations out of malicious political flailing, or whatever it is that Musk is doing constantly, so that’ll be a nice change of pace.

Agreed, but do you pick the de-facto standard of the entire industry (minus storage advertising) or the de joure standard of an outside body that has made a very slight headway into a very resistant industry.

The reality is that people will be confused no matter what you do, but at least less people will be confused if you ignore the mibibyte, because less people have even heard of it

You’re not actually wrong. The Goa'uld were indeed far too slow moving, and it was their ultimate weakness, they weren’t able to keep up with the pace of change around them, even despite a lack of competition in their evolutionary niche.

Or possibly because of a lack of competition. Another object lesson in the dangers from having a lack of biodiversity in our ecosystem.

I once had to stay in Birmingham after a cancelled train. On leaving the station I was accosted by a drunk demanding cigarettes, who started swearing at me after I admitted I didn’t smoke. That’s my only experience of Birmingham, I have to assume it’s typical.

Technically, the kernel doesn’t compile with pure standard C, they require strict aliasing to be disabled, so that alone doesn’t seem to be strictly required.

Not saying that standards aren’t useful, but they’re not some dividing line separating the true languages from the joke languages, they’re just a useful document that earns a language a few “good language” points, but those points can be earned other ways too.

For example, rust has pretty good versioning, so even if the devs did totally wreck the language in the next version, it’d maintain compatibility with older code just fine, which sort of invalidates your point, unless you’re worried that the devs turn malicious, but the language is open source, so I imagine that would get it forked pretty quickly.