What happened to PugJesus?
Comment on And forgot it when waking up
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 15 hours ago
Can someone explain the formula? Is it real? What does it do?
I miss PugJesus :( he would usually explain these things
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
luciferofastora@feddit.org 7 hours ago
He’d been unhappy with some stuff the Lemmy devs do for a while, but when kbin shut down, he moved to lemmy, and when piefed seemed like a reasonable alternative moved his accounts and communities to piefed.social.
Then rimu decided that a handful of most active users with hundreds or thousands of upvotes per day shouldn’t get to have such an impact, so he installed a daily cap for how many votes per user per day are counted, discarding the rest. Essentially, this limits engagement in an attempt to “even out” its distribution by cutting off the top. It’s an opt-out feature for other piefed instances, but on his own (piefed.social), he obviously activated it.
PugJesus, being one of those most active users, was quite upset with the prospect of having to ration his upvotes. By his own description, he’d easily fill out much of that cap just upvoting all the good-faith replies on his posts, let alone if he were to also engage in discussion elsewhere and equally use upvotes there to encourage good-faith conversation. It evidently caused anxiety and soured his experience.
Even if he were to use an account from a different instance, that restriction still affects the communities. Having migrated three times already (idk what the third one was, but given how much effort even one move for a whole community can be…), PJ was tired of it and didn’t wanna migrate again. So he did what rimu wanted:
Stop engaging.
(He’s around, occasionally, but not nearly as active, nor does he post as much. Can’t blame him. Sure isn’t helping that there’s a certain subset of people that hate him for various reasons. He’d probably respond if I summoned him, but I’m not sure I want to drag him back to that topic and make him feel like he has to comment.)
Sources:
- his farewell post: feddit.uk/post/52137875
- a more recent comment: feddit.uk/post/54413451/27149417
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 29 minutes ago
honestly sounds like he got consumes by his hatred. I loved the guy but he had serious issues and would debate anybody who disagreed with him. Sad to see yet another active community member get consumed by hatred and frustration
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 29 minutes ago
Yay my first fediverse drama!!!
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
he left over internet points that don’t mean anything or have a practical effect on anything?
SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space 1 hour ago
it sounds to me like it may have been more about being able to curate the community through active engagement more than an attachment to the end product of such a feature, i.e. total profile “score” of different users’ contributions.
grozzle@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
PieFed did some policy change on… weighting votes for people who vote thousands of times a day, or something like that? PJ said that made him want to change instance again, but he’d done that a few times already and couldn’t be bothered with the process again. (this is from memory, i haven’t double checked while writing)
luciferofastora@feddit.org 7 hours ago
It was a cap. 240, as far as I know. Given that it would make him ration his engagement and caused him anxiety, he was fed up, but didn’t wanna move a third time.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Ramanujan’s pi formula.
Similar formulas were used to calculate digits of pi very fast.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
I see. It makes so much sense now.
Thank you
sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
There are many different formulas for deriving digits of pi, and the history of mathematics has a bunch of people trying to brute force inefficient formulas for pi out to a few digits, as they develop more efficient methods.
Archimedes drew a circle and put some polygons around the inner and outer limits to determine that it was somewhere between 22/7 and 223/71, accurate to within 2 digits. That general polygon method was used by Ptolemy to calculate out to 3 digits, and used by Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi to estimate pi at 355/113, accurate to 7 digits.
The polygon method was very tedious, requiring many, many calculations in order to advance just a few digits.
The Liebniz formula was a breakthrough (discovered by Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama), because discovering that pi/4 was equal to the infinite series 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 . . . meant that someone could calculate some number of digits accurately, and then continue the calculation in a way that reports what is known so far, and can continue down the line towards a more precise result. Still, by itself, it was a very slowly converging algorithm, requiring 5 billion terms just to get to 10 digits of accuracy. Mathematicians got to using other tricks (that, if I’m being honest, I don’t understand) to make it faster.
Then Ramanujan discovered series that were rapidly converging (including the one in this meme) where although calculating each term might require a lot of calculations, it would spit out 8 digits for each term you fed it. It became the preferred method for calculating digits of pi, and when computers were developed, they were able to make use of that computational efficiency. It still remains the basis for how a computer will calculate a few million digits of pi.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Okay that’s really cool actually, thanks for the explanation
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
How convenient, to come up with a formula that spits out 32 bits