dhosek

There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).

⸻

1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.

I was thinking that this was included in the Apple ][ Integer BASIC ROM, but when I checked it was Woz’s own special instruction set, SWEET-16 which gave compact (if slow) ability to do 16-bit coding on the 6502.

These sorts of things are loads of fun to implement to get a closer feel to bare-metal programming. XKCD published a 16-bit “CPU” machine language 15ish years ago and I remember everyone was rushing to do code golf implementations of it, although I think a slower-paced approach to the project is better for the educational aspects.

Sorry, no luck tracking down your ex-girlfriend, but we do have a line on an ivory-billed woodpecker.

Come on man, let us have a nice little alternate universe without peeing in our Cheerios.

There was a sentence early on in the article, “San Francisco has always been a place people came to re-create themselves — running from something, running toward something exciting and unknown, going as far as they could for a shot at a new life.” although I think the tense there should probably be more “used to be” than “has always been” thanks to the same gentrification influence. I feel like much of California has had the same thing happen to it. When I first went to Los Angeles in 1986, it seemed a magical place with so much potential, but the expense and population growth over the last 40 years makes it nearly unrecognizable compared to the place I lived in then (I moved back to Chicago 15 years ago so it’s in the past).

When you read about people coming to California in the 60s and 70s (and somewhat in the 80s), it had that same magical quality that Burning Man had in the early years and has suffered the same kinds of changes. I wonder what the 2026 equivalent of going to California is now, if such a thing even exists or can exist.

Yeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.

His first wife too.

When I first bought my current car, I downloaded GasBuddy, intending to use it to find the best gas prices and the reported prices on the app were uniformly wrong. After the first couple times I used it, I gave up and stopped using it.

Costco has a reputation for treating its workers very well, probably the best option in the retail world.

There are some options, though, that you can’t even pre-order until October.

I figure at least some of it comes from the idea that mathematically, a singularity is a point (e.g., in the graph of z=1/w, there is a singularity at the point w=0, and in the graph of z=(1-w)²/(1-w) there is a removable singularity at w=1 (that is, the function is undefined at w=1, but if you put a point at (1,0), the graph will be continuous and no longer have any holes in it). The fact that both have the same name and the similar behavior of a black hole singularity to a mathematical singularity¹ can lead people to make an incorrect assumption.

⸻

1. I must admit to a lack of sufficient GR education to feel confident in this, but I think that one of the issues that made physicists unwilling to accept the idea of black holes when they were first postulated was that there ended up being a division by zero in the mathematics.

Hmm. I took a look at my claude output and I don’t see anything remotely like that in my responses. Occasionally a bit verbose, but none of this but “here’s the kicker” thing that the post claims, although I also notice that I’m using Sonnet which seems to be just fine.

I’ve been writing code for 46 years. Not once have I had to code a derivative.

And for all the people who are concerned about how sin' 2πx = 2π cos 2πx, in actual code, it doesn’t matter. Let’s say that I’m writing a basic graphing function and I want to be able to display the slope of the sin curve at any point.

I am not going to expose the turn-based units to the user. Caring about slopes implies that I’m doing calculus and thus assuming radians. So even though my internal values are [0,1], I will label them as [0, 2π] (and the actual numeric values on the display may actually be something like [50,450] which is yet another numeric value we don’t display). So to get the slope at π/4, I’ll calculate cos_t 0.125 and display that value.

We do all kinds of unit translations in computing without worrying about it. This is just another case of that which observes that numerically speaking, using turns is better aligned with the underlying numerical algorithm for calculating trig values.

It depends on your context, and is mentioned in the article. The advantage of turns comes from the fact that the implementation of sinᵣ etc. is internally doing a conversion to turns, so by using sin_turns directly, you avoid calculating π/π with every call.

It’s not a call for someone doing calculus or solving differential equations to abandon radians, just for the particular case of getting a numerical value for sin, cos, etc. from a library, having direct access to a turns-based function would produce faster code and also avoid some of the rounding errors that come from that π/π not to mention the imprecision of any angle that isn’t 0.

I have at least one Knuth check¹ from the days when they were actual checks, but to be honest, I’m not 100% sure where it (they?) are. I’m on the mailing list where potential TeX-related bugs appear and it’s crazy the level of detail people go to in looking for any remaining bugs in that software.

⸻

1. I know at least one of these came from porting lesser-known utilities to VM/CMS. By that time, DEK already had adopted a practice of having his secretary print his emails and he’d hand-write a reply and you’d get it in the mail.

Stør was really blatant to the extent that they were successfully sued by IKEA for their duplication. They were eventually bought out by IKEA, probably for the real estate.

Pax is another one that violates the rule that someone pointed out lower. Also Malm is a surname which is another violation of the rule (one of the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was named, if I recall correctly, Stefan Malm). I remember reading the books with my then-wife and she said it was like reading an IKEA catalog. I thought she was referring to the character/place names, but it turned out that the second book had a long section where the titular girl furnishes an apartment from IKEA and—that chapter was exactly like reading an IKEA catalog.

Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).

I doubt that there are likely cases of people having joe.smith@gmail.com and joesmith@gmail.com as distinct accounts, but I would note that for other domains hosted via gmail, in my experience, joe.smith@example.com and joesmith@example.com, say, would be treated as distinct mailboxes.

Many of the “good” simple names were grabbed by folks when registration was free in th 90s.

I’m still annoyed that thanks to a missed payment, I lost quixote.com.

I played around with this a bit, first I did a photo of a cat I just took at a cat cafe, but the black and white cat didn’t turn out well with the dithering algorithm, so then I tried a selfie and pushing the radius up, it came out looking good, but then I tried aiming my iPhone camera at the screen and it didn’t see a QR code, only the face from the selfie. The ones on the main page, though, worked fine.

I’ve found it interesting that cows become beef, sheep mutton, pigs pork, but goats, chicken, turkeys and fish keep their identities when they become food.

My daughter once spent a bunch of time going through all the flag emojis classifying them as stars, animals, trees, religious symbols (and probably some others). We found three flags with maps. Animals were almost exclusively birds, but there was also a sheep, a pair of lions, seahorses, a lobster and a conch.

It influenced others as well. As I recall Ravel was among them. There was a great deal of curiosity of elements of African-American music among European composers in the early 20th century.

Unless that’s changed in a recent version, it was a global setting. As I mentioned before, sometimes I will walk, sometimes drive, sometimes take transit.

I didn’t think of the smell at all, I was wondering what the feel was like. There’s a certain level of comfort that’s expected from clothing that matters. There’s also the question of breathability. Is it going to trap sweat and smells like polyester clothing?

In Mexico, apparently, the scheme is to grab a phone from an inattentive pedestrian from a motorcycle or scooter.

Apple Maps also does this.

It would also be nice to have a configurable transportation choice for the time to leave notice. Because some things I’ll walk to, some I’ll take transit and some I’ll drive and Apple seems to want be to just pick one and only use that.

My other map complaint is that there’s no indication of how much tolls are when comparing toll vs non-toll routes. Because if it’s $5 to save ten minutes, no thanks but for a buck, maybe I’ll do it.

Even a lot of session work. Tony Levin (bass player best known for his work with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, but who’s also played with Chuck and Gap Mangione, Paul Simon, Dire Straits, Yes, … well, more than I could reasonably put here). commented in his book Beyond the Bass Clef, that he went years doing session work without having to read music. Most rock/pop/jazz music is largely improvisatory in its structure. It’s really only when you get to larger groups (say more than about 7 or 8) that some sort of notation becomes essential to keep everyone together and even then, the rhythm section (guitar/bass/drums/keys) may not be working from anything more precise than a set of chord changes.

Improvisation goes back as far as music and even some classical music has improvised elements (cadenzas were traditionally improvised before they became commonly notated, Baroque music scored for continuo essentially provides a bassline and chord changes, albeit the chords given in an archaic form (figured bass) that is not widely known by contemporary musicians.

The most amazing improvisers, it turns out, are professional church organists (think the ones who work for the largest churches/cathedrals, not the grandmas playing a church warbler at the corner parish, but sometimes them too). When I auditioned for the Holy Name Cathedral Choir, I wanted to sing a piece by Massenet, but I had lost my original sheet music halfway through trying to transcribe a cleaner copy so I had a melody line and only a few parts of the piano accompaniment. The (assistant!) organist who accompanied me at my audition site-improvised an accompaniment for the piece that was, in my opinion, actually better than the written accompaniment I had lost.

That said, being able to read music can be a sort of superpower. So many times on church gigs, I’ve had guitar players be astonished by my ability to pull chord changes out of piano/organ parts without notated chords. Certainly, some aspects of music are hard to convey in notation. Swung rhythm is a particularly notable case where you’re playing something halfway between a triplet rhythm of ♩♪ and a dotted rhythm (insufficient Unicode to write a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth). The early transmission of jazz music to European composers by way of sheet music led to them missing out on the rhythmic aspects but picking up some of the harmonic novelties. A common injunction to musicians is to play the music, not the notes.

Oh, I forgot about that, but had seen that in the news as well.

It’s kind of weird that this area that I was only aware of because I like studying maps has popped up a whole bunch in the last few weeks.