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aimor

1,595 karma · joined May 11, 2020

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aimor··on What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
You could even calculate the 100 random numbers up front and potentially stop iterating early.
aimor··on New cars are getting 1.2cm longer and 0.5cm taller each year
And the windows keep getting smaller, the beltlines higher, the seats more cramped, though I don't have statistics to back up any of that.
aimor··on The largest number representable in 64 bits
I can do it in half a bit
aimor··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
The school speed limit there is 15 mph, and that wasn't enough to prevent an accident.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/child-struck-waymo-near-...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/7PcB2zskuKyYB56W8?g_st=ac

aimor··on Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit
Don't take him to the MoMA he'll need his stomach pumped.
aimor··on You can make up HTML tags
If you use the predefined HTML tags you also get whatever default styling the browser decided is appropriate.
aimor··on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
"the default is a dollar"

There is no default price.

aimor··on I just want working RCS messaging
Do you mean my message inbox isn't supposed to look like this? https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jp...

This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting, restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.

aimor··on How they clean the balls in a ball pit
How do they clean the blocks in a foam pit?
aimor··on Death by AI
I went to a party today at a park. Google maps wanted me to drive my car on the walking path to the picnic pavilion. Here, you can get the same directions: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/38.8615917,-77.1034763/Alcov...
aimor··on Why are there no good dinosaur films?
When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."

There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.

Original: https://archive.org/details/dinosaurtime00pari

aimor··on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Yes, dB is a mess and if we could do it again we ought to use something more explicit like just annotating the units with log10 such as log10(W). Then it's easy to use other convenient units like log2(W) or if you want to reproduce dBV: 20log10(V). dB is fine shorthand, but it gets used all the time in places where things should be explicit.
aimor··on How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school
How else are you supposed to know that you've grown since highschool if you can't reread Catcher in the Rye in a different light?
aimor··on You could just choose optimism
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudyard-kipling/just-so-st...
aimor··on Find the Odd Disk
I noticed this too. I did much better covering up two of the disks and looking at them one at a time, or comparing pairs of disks.
aimor··on How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?
Yes that's right. The manufacturing cost in the US would have to be $46 or less to undercut the import. So ignoring tax changes, something like...

A Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:

- $7+ goes to the US gov't (? shoemaker tax, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)

- $79 goes to US employees or businesses (46 to shoemaker, 5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)

- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)

- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)

aimor··on How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?
Trying to summarize the summary for myself

From a $100 shoe that sells for $76:

- $24 goes overseas (22 cost, 2 freight)

- $8 goes to the US gov't (3 import, 2 Nike tax, 3 Footlocker tax)

- $33 goes to US employees or businesses (5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)

- $5 goes to Nike (11% return)

- $6 goes to Footlocker (8% return)

But now with 100% tariffs, it's a $100 shoe that sells for $100 (or a $132 shoe that sells for $100) and:

- $24 goes overseas (22 cost, 2 freight)

- $29 goes to the US gov't (22 import, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)

- $33 goes to US employees or businesses (5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)

- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)

- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)

And if a US shoemaker wanted to undercut the import, a Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:

- $7+ goes to the US gov't (? shoemaker tax, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)

- $79 goes to US employees or businesses (46 to shoemaker, 5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)

- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)

- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)

aimor··on I've acquired a new superpower
For when you feel a sneeze coming on:

- Want to sneeze? Look at a bright light.

- Don't want to sneeze? Scratch your ear.

aimor··on You need 4 colors
Well these are the colors they define:

    --primary-color: hsl(var(--hue), 50%, 90%);
    --pre-primary-color: hsl(var(--hue), 50%, 95%);
    --secondary-color: hsl(var(--hue), 50%, 10%);
    --tertiary-color: hsl(var(--tertiary-hue), 80%, 20%);
    --accent-color: hsl(var(--accent-hue), 80%, 20%);
As I see it that's either 3 colors or 5 colors but not 4
aimor··on Passport Photos
A tip for 10 years from now: take the picture with diffuse backlighting and you can easily blow out the background completely. For example, a sheer curtain in front of an outdoor window is just about perfect.
aimor··on Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life
You're not reading it right. The labels overlap, they are not disjoint.
aimor··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
I wrote a kaleidoscope simulator. You know, a virtual tray filled with hundreds of little plastic beads of various shapes and colors that tumble around when you press the keys, with the camera displayed on a grid of triangles. I wrote it in Rust using Bevy, which was great, but it wouldn't work in WASM for some reason (simpler projects did just fine) and getting it running in the browser was the goal so I uh dropped the project.
aimor··on Iron Mountain: It's Time to Talk About Hard Drives
A little dirty according to CMOS. Ought to be '90s not 90's, cds not cd's.

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch09/ps...

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/P...

aimor··on Everybody gets a star: Yelp's effect on restaurants and reviews
Yelp is bad (really bad) but so is everyone else. I still use them on road trips alongside Google Maps and Apple Maps simply because none of them show all the restaurants in an area. It's kind of unbelievable how frustrating it is to try to get a complete look at all the restaurants nearby some location. Then again, it's a good trip if Google Maps doesn't ask me to turn left across three lanes onto a private alley and right through a brick wall (true story).
aimor··on Microsoft Paint's new AI image generator builds on your brushstrokes
I've had a pretty awesome experience with this, even with an old 8 GB AMD card. It's not perfect, but being able to run models locally within the paint app while mixing different control layers feels like the future.
aimor··on North Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out
Google screwed up my address by deciding that "E" should be spelled out "East". The county uses "E", the street sign says "E", Bing says "E" (not that they're any authority on the matter), but Google says "East" and now Walmart won't deliver things to my actual address.

I don't know a lot about systems/processes/protocol and the correct jargon, but my sense is that the problem isn't just technical. They could support ' just as well as E. But the scale of these automated systems chokes on these little quirks and they get amplified a huge amount and quickly become big problems.

aimor··on LLMs can't do probability
Gotta say, I was not expecting Baz there.

Regarding [1], for the dice roll I was creating a new chat for each roll to ensure that the results of each roll are (in some sense) independent. Generating a sequence of rolls is also interesting, just a different experiment.

aimor··on LLMs can't do probability
With ChatGPT 3.5, new chats prompted with: "Simulate a dice roll and report the number resulting from the roll. Only reply 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 and nothing else."

So far I've got: 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 5, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5.

Of course I'm not the first to do this: https://piunikaweb.com/2023/05/23/does-chatgpt-ai-struggle-w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13nrmzw/in_every_c...

aimor··on The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with large cars
I think it's entirely possible that car interiors are getting more cramped. High center consoles between the front seats stop me from spreading my legs, deep glovebox stops me from stretching them, even the headrest juts forward now making it that much more difficult to recline. There about a hundred things like this getting in my way, add in a carseat or two and I'm not even comfortable driving.
aimor··on When do we stop finding new music?
I've been using http://somafm.com and it's really the only thing that got me back into listening to music. ( https://radio.garden is also interesting )
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