josephc

@josephc@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does code that's meant to fix one bug break other features?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine you’re writing a book. In this book you need to be perfectly consistent and coherent because the people reading it are so incredibly literal that if there’s ambiguity or inconsistency they will run into your home and defecate on your carpet.

  Short stories are easy enough. There’s only a character or two and you can generally remember what they’re wearing and what they said, but as the stores get longer you start to work yourself into corners and lose track of what you said in the previous chapters.

  Let’s say you reach a scene where the main character needs to hop on a train. You write a scene where they purchase a ticket. But wait, a few chapters ago you said they got mugged! So you decide to cut that scene. Now they can pay for a ticket, but the scene where they said they got mugged is wrong and the scene where they said they can’t pay their bill doesn’t work!

  Computers read instructions and interpret them. They follow orders. Programming raw hardware is tricky, so we add abstractions to make it easier. Collectively we agree, “we’ll put a return pointer here, then push these instructions here and set the program counter here” as the way we call subroutines or send data or something else. If there’s ambiguity in the specification then two people might build two different programs which they both expect to work. One of them will fail. If there are ten people implementing things with an API, perhaps all ten will fail.

  Hyrem’s Law says any observable behavior will eventually become part of a workflow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨narcania of time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah. I only played OoT, never Majora’s Fentanyl.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨narcania of time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is some really good photomanip work. They even got the raster lines on the narcan correct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can’t we swap our minds today?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are 86 billion neurons in the brain and 31* pairs of spinal column nerves with about 7 trillion interconnections. When I pulled that figure it wasn’t obvious if it included connections inside the brain, too.

  *I found one article that said 43 pairs of nerves connected to the spinal cord and 12 to the brain, but Wikipedia says 31.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, it could be a data point added because the researcher was getting really pissed off at the plotting software truncating the axis strangely. Normally you’d remove that after the fact, but…

  Or it’s a data oddity, like someone who specified units incorrectly (mg/mL) instead of (ug/L).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't let your mind be a jar⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s an old trauma inducing video from early Internet days where a man attempts to fit a jar into his butt, only to have it break in the attempt. It’s really utterly horrifying, but I’ll admit to laughing at the reference here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hbd 2 uu⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also left out of the headlines: she exhaustively tested thousands of traditional herbal remedies, not just one. She kept the one that worked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do companies require you to submit a resume but also put the same data into their forms?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It started with basic indifference and became a feature.

  In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.

  This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.

  Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match, then turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs is (wasn’t) easy at the time.

  Having a from to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and following, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How tf do people who work 8-5 M-F get any life done?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to ask if I could work extra and leave a little early or take a long lunch. My current employer is far more chill about it and will let me do so if there’s nothing pressing. Still had to burn a half day of sick time to bring doggo to the vet.

  But like others are saying, “you don’t.” Life is a Sisyphean nightmare of falling behind on laundry, cleaning, legal obligations, etc. Live in quiet desperation and perpetual exhaustion. “Truly the best of all possible worlds.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨stroke confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is definitely a joke. Taking something to an absurd extreme is a valid source of humor and I feel like this does a solid job of parody. Nice little references thrown in, too.

  At the same time, Poe’s Law: “Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What was the internet like before Y2K happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I send you a 24TB hard drive in the mail and it takes three days to arrive, thats high bandwidth, high latency.

  If I send you a 24 character morse code message over the radio it’s low latency and low bandwidth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it is, at some level. The definition of socialism, especially when not contrasted with social democracy, Democratic socialism, or communism, can be very vague, but the idea that a portion of labor is shared back feels like it’s in line with the spirit.

  From Miriam Webster:

  “any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”

  Taxes are just a way of taking some of the value of goods and redistributing them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of options.

  In fact, for most of American history, neither Zuck or Gates would give away any part of their company. They just need to pay their taxes to give back for the gains afforded then by society.

  Do you think either of those folks made their companies on their own? Completely? In a vacuum? Sure, Zuckerberg did a lot of work, but the Internet was made with public funds. It runs on the national electric infrastructure. Employees get there on public roads. The protocols we use are standardized by the federal government. Their employees have public educations. The languages that they use are open source and community maintained.

  It doesn’t have to be a cooperative. Even just going back to the way the US worked before Reagan when we had strong social safety nets, lots of public funding, and general social mindedness would be a step towards socialism.

  I’m not opposed to some folks being wealthier than others; I’m opposed to people starving because we cannot sate the rich.

  I don’t hate money as a tool. I hate systems that maximize it over humanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had a shirt made for you with QR codes, what would yours say when scanned?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d have a canary token url so I could see where my photo ended up and who was looking at it. I’d redirect through to a grabify link, then to an intermediate link that looked like malware but was actually a Rickroll.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Title⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A US $1 weighs 1g according to a random website I found on the Internet. I tested and it’s close enough.

  As of today 2026/06/02, a gram of gold is worth about $140 assuming it’s minted and the purity is known.

  That honestly surprises me. It means that gold and bills (assuming c-bills) are within an order of magnitude of each other.

  Worst case with bill denominations: half a million. Best case with bill denominations: 50 million dollars.

  Worst case with gold: $140/g less 10% worst case for verification and bulk buy discounts. $120/g ballpark. $60 million. Best case with gold: ~$70 million dollars upper bound for known minted purity.

  So gold has the highest potential return but also the highest overhead.

  I’d probably go gold. Even if I lost 50% due to overhead, I’d be able to pay my mortgage and my brother’s student loans and for my mum to live in a nice place.

  Honestly, any of them would be a life changing amount of money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨understand thy enemy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No. It’s not okay when China does it either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨understand thy enemy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no meeting in the middle with folks who are trying to make a white ethnostate.

  I’ll debate with my friends about lots of things: is it worth adding a new tax? Is the needle exchange program appropriately measuring their numbers? Does it make more sense to build a homeless shelter next to the other one in the tenderloin to keep disadvantaged folks next to their peers or should we build it farther north so we balance people across care facilities.

  These are the things we debate.

  Things like, “do trans people deserve human rights?”, “are concentration camps okay?”, and, “are we cozy with state sanctioned extrajudicial murder?” are not up for debate. The answers are “yes”, “no”, and “no”, and if anyone disagrees with that fuck them. They are a waste of my time and emotional energy. They will never be convinced.

  I’m triaging. My friends and family and community need my limited energy. They deserve it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sex Education⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Pee is stored in the Balrogs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wildfire Griffin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can dump out 10k words of smut in a week of evenings. If you don’t care about quality and can type 60wpm, a 30k word book will only take 500 minutes. ~9 hours.

  Or it’s a slop cannon, like you said.

  I could see it either way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Arxiv bans slop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a strong advocate for trusting your colleagues (and verifying). No disagreement here.

  You should know, however, that free translation tools are AI. It’s emphatically exactly the same technology that gave us slop cannons in the first place. The birth of the transformer architecture came from trying to do improvements in machine translation.

  That might be too tangential or pedantic, given I think we share the sentiment about this dude, but it feels worth mentioning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wild Ones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a myth. Squashing a cockroach won’t release the eggs. They’ll die with the rest of it. The rumor likely emerges from the fact that seeing one means they’ve reached a dense enough population that you’re going to see lots. However, there are plenty of reasons not to, mostly around the fact that it’s largely intellectual. Better to clean, remove sources of water, block points of ingress, and call an exterminator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NASA scientists says astronauts should not masturbate in space⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “CRANK THE THROTTLE!” “STOP CALLING IT THAT!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨17 years*⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The real kicker is it was and is used in productive and constructive ways. It was just invisible until very recently. The ability to search for other photos of your pets in your photos app, the spam filters that keep your email (relatively) usable, the special effects tools that let artists paint out wires were all possible because of machine learning (used to refer to the subgroup of AI) and were made better by transformers.

  If this same tech were released in a post-Capitalist society there would be no need for every single company to ham fistedly shove it into every product that doesn’t need it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HD 137010 b⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean ‘g’. 1g is 9.81m/s^2. c is a speed, not an acceleration. g is acceleration.

  Not coincidentally, it’s the acceleration you experience from Earth’s gravity, but it doesn’t have to come from gravity. Astronauts routinely experience 3gs during takeoff from their rocket boosters.

  If you were in a rocket that accelerated at a constant 1g it would feel like Earth’s gravity, even in space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HD 137010 b⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If we could accelerate at a constant 1g, flip, and decelerate at a constant 1g, the trip would take ~152 years… from Earth’s perspective. If you were onboard, time dilation would make the trip about 10 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just say the word⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do I have to wear the lace all the time? I don’t look good in lace.

  And honestly probably not; not because I have any objections to her being the breadwinner or have any weird ideas about who raises kids, but mostly because I’m not sure I could do it. I’d be a pretty shit father.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pro choice⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Draw goes to the player who moved second?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life pro tip for friends of pharmacists⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know you asked for CSV but it wasn’t showing up right so I saved it as PDF. Can I send that to you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love science⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can think of a few potential cut offs, taking differential calculus to be basic.

  Integral calculus. Multivariate calculus. Differential equations. Epsilon-Lamba calculus.

  But that’s just my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CNC⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good info. Thank you.