firethief

Apparently it was no longer enough to frequency-scale the lower-utilization human brains.

> The coin toss example given here seems tautological. Why would my unfair coin have to abide by some norm of probability? If I were designing such a coin, it would obviously include a mechanism for tracking state such that if the last toss was heads the next would always be tails.

If a stateful coin is permitted, the problem is indeed trivial; but if we start with the assumption that the problem isn't trivial, we can assume a "passive" coin more in line with the intuitions most people would have about coins.

That can get arbitrarily close to true, but I think it is false

Addition is O(log n), so the naive version is O(n log n).

Gauss would have used a pre-[1960](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm) multiplication algorithm, with complexity at best O((log n) ^ 2).

Using an algorithm discovered in 2019 (cf. Harvey and van der Hoeven), it's possible to multiply in O(log n * log log n), if you have a lot of time. This is presumably optimal.

> This is binary all-or-nothing thinking. It considers 90% the same as 0%, since both are not 100%.

Thinking is not just "binary or not"; there are degrees. If exposing that group of people would be 90% pointless, it's not much less out of the question than if it were 100% pointless.

It's a known long-term-battery-health issue. The catching-on-fire part is not normal.

Not quite. Ages are usually counted from 0. ln(0) is undefined, but after that from the first moment after birth until some time in its 52nd day, a dog's age is negative in dog-time (that's probably why it's considered important for the puppy to remain with its parents during this period; a negative-aged dog on its own is like a naked singularity). Then from day 52 to the end of its first year, the dog will age from 0 to 31.

The other end of the scale is surprising too: 200 human years is less than 116 dog years.

Ok, so if clean water is unavailable for more than a few weeks, hop on down to the clinic and trade some ammo for a thyroid checkup? If you're planning for the end of the world, then yes you'll want a backup water plan. For realistic emergency scenarios iodine is a practical water treatment option.

Thru-hikers use it for six months at a time. It's safe enough for emergency use for someone with no preexisting thyroid issues.

> I'm having a hard time convincing myself to leave iTerm for Alacritty, just for a speed boost.

I've never understood why anyone would want a higher-throughput terminal. Better latency I could see, but throughput? I'm not Commander Data. I can only read so fast. If my shell is dumping text at me faster than my terminal can render, it's because I catted something I shouldn't have.

It couldn't be that stupid-sounding by accident. I think the name is a defense against people feeling like it's a pretentious thing to order at McDonald's.

> I wonder if the Apple appstore (at least watchOS/tvOS) approach of using bitcode as the one-time artifact and then turning that into concrete instructions later would be possible for an entire Linux distribution (Gentoo II).

I could see this happening with WASM once its system interfaces and SIMD intrinsics mature... "write once, run anywhere"?

I use NixOS for the same reason. Cleanliness is empowering.

I used to have diskless machines on my network set up the non-nix way: system directories full of tftp and pxe stuff; root directories constructed by an OS's installation procedure, and then customized somehow to work with an nfsroot. Later on, I wanted to make some changes but had no idea how. I hadn't taken enough notes of where everything came from and what it was doing. The files were still working, but without having documented their intent, I had to scrap it all. But documenting intent is laborious and fragile; you have to include enough detail that future you (or someone else) can follow your logic, and worse: keep all that in sync with the reality.

Since then I have fully committed to the Nix way. Now, the contents of my tftproot are built according to a declaration in my configuration.nix: the root directory in my TFTP configuration specifies a dependency on a PXE package, with some configuration applied. Not only don't I have to look through the built directories and try to remember what everything is, I never think about the built directories. The insight of declarative configuration is: if you fully document your intent, the system can take care of realizing it.

When I want to change a program I have written, I edit the source code (where all the intent is) and recompile it. NixOS is that for systems. I will no sooner go back to mutation-based system management than start changing my programs by taking a hex editor to the binary.

Another way you can use nix-shell: with Nix, shell scripts can declare their dependencies. For a random example, I have a script that extracts chapter information from a DVD. Its shebang looks like this:

    #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
    #!nix-shell -i /bin/sh -p ffmpeg_4 lsdvd python3

This is the equivalent of "#!/bin/sh", but with some package dependencies. Without nix, this script would implicitly require lsdvd to be available, increasing the complexity and fragility of system administration: if you scp the script to a different machine, the script is broken there until you install lsdvd. Even on one machine, you have to keep lsdvd installed (and remember what you have it for). Nix takes care of all that: when you run the nix-empowered script, it will make sure lsdvd is available in the script's environment. I keep an extremely minimal set of packages install system-wide (and nothing installed to my user environment), and declare dependencies in the places they're actually needed. I no longer think in terms of installed-or-not; everything is available.

Let it wait

> I specifically like the idea of zero waste stores where you bring your own containers to fill. Not only do you eliminate waste, reusable and sealable containers are so much nicer than what most products come in.

How would the food arrive at the store?

I used to buy food from a store with bulk bins. The store has a program where you can order the bags that they fill the bins from and pick those up directly--strong paper bags, usually around 25lbs. Lately I've found a mill and some other businesses nearby sell these bags of locally grown staple foods. By switching to the "upstream" bags, I've been able to choose local farms I want to support, nearly eliminate going to the supermarket (for produce I have a small, nearly-wild garden and do some foraging), and pay less for fresher food. Would it be possible to eliminate the 25lb bags from the loop? Probably, but they definitely reduce the friction of buying their contents, and they're made from a small amount (square-cube law) of material that makes a good sheet mulch.

On second thought, the choice they've made isn't as sadistic as it sounds. I was thinking of the standard as a contract between the language implementor and the programmer, but actually it is a contract between the language implementor, the programmer, and arbitrarily many other programmers. The stance they have chosen mandates a social convention, that the names of the dead will never be spoken. If everyone builds their APIs with this covenant in mind, it makes it possible to use pointers as unique ids (for whatever that's worth). C has never had much in the way of widely-followed social conventions, so practically speaking, the only way to ensure everyone knows they can depend on other programmers behaving this way is for the compiler to flagellate anyone who steps out of line.

This would be kind of hilarious if true.

It seems like they could have just said: malloc won't give you a pointer that overlaps with the storage of any live malloc'd object. Such a malloc is implementable without too much trouble. But instead, they gave a stronger guarantee--that all malloc'd pointers would be "unique". It would be unboundedly burdensome on the implementation to meet this property, so what do they do? Update the standard to offer the achievable guarantee? No! They add a new rule, ensuring that it's impossible to observe that the stronger guarantee is not met without doing something "illegal". Instead of getting their act together, they have elected to punish whistleblowers.

In the dark ages, that would have allowed a single-pass compiler to reuse registers more aggressively.

Other languages manage to be parsable without the syntactic aesthic getting Lovecraftian. I think the other factor in C++ is the how much has been added to the language while maintaining backward-compatibility.

> Evaporation rate should be proportional to surface area, so the volume of extra water you need to add to make up for that should also be proportional to the surface area too.

This would be accurate at room temperature, but under stovetop conditions wouldn't evaporation rate be determined mostly by the amount of heat energy added to the water?

Fasting has downsides in a population at risk of muscle wasting, and vitamin C induces high oxidative stress in this dose range. What's to research?

Really? How many pounds of it do you think you could eat in a day?

Cars are not an animal, nor are they energy-efficient compared to a condor. And Steve's dead.

For the "gig economy" to become a good example of positive things as far as wadges / benefits and etc goes, the market tech would need to lack power over the workers, whether because of competition or regulation. That's why I'm not saying "look at Uber, Uber is wonderful." I'm saying I can imagine a system with the best of both worlds. The American political/economic climate hasn't got us there.

Cheapness of labor is not necessary for the system the author is describing to work (although it's probably a factor in how that system is able to be the present equilibrium). The system in Quito may be less efficient (i.e. there may be waste, like extra guys with trucks waiting for customers), but it's also less efficient at concentrating capital. Whether wages are "low" depends on the ratio of those inefficiencies. I can imagine a world where the latter "inefficiency" is maintained as the waste is reduced and wages rise. It would require "gig economy" coordination tools to match capacity to demand efficiently, but the market tech would need to lack power over the workers, whether because of competition or regulation.

If people took a high-tech test and were told that that advice was personalized, imagine how much better compliance would be though.

I can't tell if this is satire or an extreme example of the logic motivated reasoning leads to

> Whether it's suburban coyotes killing off family pets (a big problem in my suburb at the moment) or rural clashes between ranchers and wolves, you cannot just let the situation unfurl without official intervention.

This is completely backwards. The solution to cats not being at the top of the local food chain is not to kill anything that would eat them, but to end their participation in the food chain. That cats aren't an apex predator is a good thing, because the destruction of native species they accomplish isn't enough to motivate their owners to keep them inside.

That's explained by the Anthropic Principle. In the universes where the almighty added surfactants, we wouldn't be here talking about it.