mrkgnao

Maybe he just introduced it to Mathcamp? We teenagers can be a bit quick to make claims sometimes :)

Huh, that's cool. I wonder if there's any way I can expand my etymology-fu apart from just picking stuff up randomly or learning Latin/Ancient Greek. (I did read Word Power Made Easy as a kid. It kicked off my interest in these things.)

I was a Mathcamper this year. One of the most common things people said to me when I mentioned that I was a first-timer was that 2015 was the last year Conway attended, and how sad it was that I'd miss his lectures and general presence around camp. :(

There's this wonderful thing (invented by Conway) they do where, in a noisy crowded assembly, one person raises their hand and stops making any sound. Anyone who notices them raises their hand and stops talking. It works extremeley well (and really quickly!), and I suspect it was Conway's general frailty that led him to come up with this.

Is "thaumaturgic" related to "demiurge" etymologically?

Can you get a Spacemacs setup working on NixOS, with layers and so on? In general, assuming one is willing to write a bit of glue code/NixOS versions of patches/ebuilds/PKGBUILDs, can one get one's configuration from $distro working on NixOS?

I use Haskell, so I've been meaning to switch to Nix for a while.

Quick google says it talks about parallel transport. If that's true in any meaningful sense, I'm happy differential geometry science fiction is a thing. :)

I've never heard my Chromebook (Asus, I think a C7[24]0) make any noise, although I do always have a fan running in my room.

Use the colors layer and enable the Nyan cat option. ;)

I come from a lower-middle-class family in Kolkata, and I can say from experience that a lot of older people (my parents!) are over the moon with the whole thing. My mother, in particular, has suddenly turned into some sort of Modi fangirl, saying stuff like, "See what he's doing for the country!" (and variations on that). At some level, it's just the fact that anyone who replaces years of (perceived?) inaction with something striking -- however naive, or well-intentioned-albeit-disastrous-in-the-long-run -- will elicit this kind of reaction.

I imagine for people like my parents, the cost of going to a bank and getting all their suddenly-demonetised banknotes exchanged (which we anyway had very little of) isn't too much. And when some restaurant, say, or a drugstore, is unwilling to accept one of the new 2000-rupee notes, we have credit/debit cards to fall back on. The fact that that people may not have Aadhaar[1] cards or voter ID cards stored safely somewhere, that not everyone has bank accounts which hold >99% (excuse the arbitrary figure) of the money they have, that not everyone has the ability to spend what might possibly be the better part of a day walking to $DEITY knows where the nearest bank is (probably to be turned away because they're out of cash or because the line is a kilometre too long) -- that the very act of going to a bank may not be as trivial or no-brainer-like to everyone as it is to oneself! -- is something we have to work very hard to even imagine. And the cash they have stored is, in many cases, all they have. (Remember what I said about not having a bank account?)

Cash, for us, is what we use for bags of chips and ice-cream and sheets of graph paper and ... bus fare, I guess? Cash, to someone living from day to day, is everything.

edit: yay downvotes, I can tick that off my list

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar

The ticker in the video is almost surreal, dispassionately telling you about murders and nightclubs being shot up, with that in the background.

I never thought about this ... I've always wanted to smoke (the mechanics of the whole thing please(s) me on some level) but I suffer from asthma and a mild disinclination to lung cancer. Mind you, when I say "smoke", I mean the real thing, not vaping.

Don't mind me, though. I hope I outgrow this at some point.

I don't get how having type classes makes the learning curve steeper. It's not like the mere existence of type classes means you have to start writing your own and doing functional dependencies and all that.

For a beginner, it just means being able to write filter instead of List.filter or whatever.

Pux is great!

> an interesting napping technique

Here's Henri Poincaré on how how he discovered Fuchsian functions[1]:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automorphic_form#Poincar.C3.A9...

"Verrrrrückt"

Really inexperienced German learner here: does verrückt have any subtle connotations that crazy or insane don't?

Thanks!

Before I start reading this comment (and I'm excited to!), let me admit that I know what qualia is, and obviously this opens up a whole new can of worms about what pain is, whether our conception of pain matches anything a shrimp is able to feel, whether these two things match on any reasonable scale magnitude-wise, ...

I'll jump in!

I agree, but I'm curious if there is a way to tell "for sure".

Gentoo is none of those, although the main "idea" of Gentoo - the compilation - scares a lot of people away. Suffice it to say that I was somewhat against Gentoo until I put it on an old, failing desktop - it absolutely purrs.

If you stick with a tiling WM and don't install GNOME/KDE/whatever, the compilation is far from being a persistent problem, and I say this as someone on a usually <1 Mbps Indian internet connection. (Except for Firefox, that is. But you can get a binary package for that.) I do worry about unfixable package management trouble in the future, though...

> flat design

I do not mean to nitpick - I enjoyed your comment - but isn't that more the preserve of Windows (post-8)?

> I humanely killed the shrimp using the splitting method which destroys the central nervous system (boiling alive is more painful).

How do we know this?

Now you have a number of problems unbounded in the worst-case.

TIL there is a .wtf TLD.

Why does macOS need sudo to boot?

> It's similar to the guy that decided to connect to the turbofan with his laptop on a populated passenger airplane in flight.

Link?

> The web site has a off white background with black text

I'm genuinely curious noe: how would the descriptions of color help?

Thank you for correcting me, now I know! :)

Both of those words have Levenshtein distance 1 from what GP wrote.

Maybe let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant the one that doesn't sound like a type-error/makes sense and avoids outrageousness?

> Mün

That's almost exactly how Scott Manley says it.