rockstarpirate

When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.

Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.

Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.

Once upon a time I got a job working at a swimming pool supply store. For a total of about 15 min during my very first shift I was in the main room putting price stickers on things and whatnot. For the remaining hours of my shift I was back in the chlorine room filling up chlorine tanks. Tbf the pool store was following regulations as far as I know. I had goggles and gloves and the room had a big ventilation fan and all that. But even still, I got chlorine all over my skin and clothes and was perpetually dehydrated from the fumes. Had to run to the water fountain like a million times. Afterwards I decided there was no way I was going to work with chlorine all day every day until it killed me so the next day I came in and asked the manager if there was any way I could do other work and not be in the chlorine room. He was like, “unfortunately that’s the job”. So I told him, “ok I understand. In that case I don’t think this is going to work out. Thanks for the opportunity though!” And I left after only one shift. Shortest job I ever had.

Maybe if the alternative to building a horse barn in 1910 was building a garage that was so expensive only like 5% of the population could afford it.

First all the oil, now all the phosphate.

Agreed. I decided to keep my community on lemmy.world specifically because of the community investment I see being put into it.

It’s specifically the “I’m here to recognize it and acknowledge it and talk about it” part followed up by no recognizing, acknowledging, or talking about anything substantial.

Yeah these are two very different pronunciations in Standard American English. /æs/ versus /ɑrs/

As a result there is a difference in severity as well, akin to the difference between “damn” and “darn”.

she probably just made it all up

Or stole it from the weeping angels on Doctor Who

Serious question: Can somebody explain to me, if an infinite number of universes exist, why do we assume that every possibility must exist within the set? Like, why can’t it be an infinite number of universes in which OP does not win the lottery?

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk.

They’re also a VP of Community. As someone with such a specialized purpose specifically in this area, we should have expected a better performance.

Yeah that’s true. The headline is asserting something that I don’t think Musk has actually said he will do. On the other hand, I’m having trouble thinking of any random idea Musk has had that he didn’t attempt to follow through on.

He also played John Rolfe in “The New World”, meaning he’s also been a boatman.

Yeah I was barely old enough to be called an adult at the time. Didn’t know much. But knew I wasn’t gonna stay there.

IMO it doesn’t really matter what you said the method was for. If you change the format of a string that is returned by a method that returns a string, there’s a risk of breaking user code, even if it’s just in the context of their dev environment.

Philosophically, whether or not the behavior of your API has changed is completely disconnected from whether or not others are using it “right”. If I can depend on a function to return a certain type of value when given certain arguments, and if it doesn’t produce other side effects, then it doesn’t matter what the docs say or what the function is named, I can use it in any context where I need that type of return value and have this type of arguments available. This type of function is just mapping data to other data. If you modify the function in such a way that the return value changes after being given the same arguments, that’s a breaking change in my book.

I should actually read/watch that one of these days.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I have never liked the Cybertruck. It looked ridiculous when it came out and there were various online articles that agreed with this at the time. Though I will grant you that there were also a lot of people on the Elon bandwagon who thought it was awesome. One of my best friends actually put down the deposit for one and he and I had a lively debate about it. It was a controversial thing from day 1. And looking back now, this might have been my first clue that Elon was headed off the deep end.

Surf Ninjas

I don’t know why your comment was downvoted when I got to it. It’s a perfectly valid question. To claim in incomprehensible being wouldn’t do any given thing is just as objectively baseless as claiming that they would do that thing.

Nah this was a deliberately comedic scene in Gautreks Saga where members of a family keep sacrificing themselves for absurd reasons. There is some possibility that something like this could have happened in some parts of Norse society but there’s no evidence it was a requirement for entry into Valhalla (Old Norse Valhǫll).

In fact, whereas the Prose Edda (a 13th-century narrative guide to understanding skaldic poetry) does claim that those who fall in battle end up in Valhǫll, and this is supported by evidence from pre-Christian poems such as Grímnismál, Norse mythological sources are actually littered with attestations of people dying in combat but not going to Valhǫll, as well as people dying outside of combat but still ending up in Valhǫll.

One example of this is the character Sinfjǫtli from Vǫlsunga Saga. Sinfjǫtli is poisoned by his mother-in-law at a party, and his father Sigmundr carries his dead body down to the shore where a ferryman offers to take it across the water. Once the body is on the boat, it turns out the ferryman is Odin and he disappears with the body which is elsewhere confirmed to have ended up in Valhǫll in the poem Eiríksmál.

Scholar Jens Peter Schjødt theorized in Pre-Christian Religions of the North that entry into Valhǫll is predicated on a person being dedicated to Odin, which is something a person could do for themselves ritualistically (there are references to marking oneself with a spear for Odin) or could also be done to you by an enemy who has set out to kill you and intends to “give” you to Odin as a way of showing his own dedication.

But what evidence is there for this being true?

Oo, oo, meat and potatoes?

Yeah it’s interesting because JS is interpreted, not compiled. The proposal allows for type annotations in the syntax but no actual interpreter consequences. On the one hand that makes sense because otherwise you’re in the territory of runtime type-checking which would be a huge performance hit and would sort of defeat the purpose of static types anyway. But that means you still have to rely on your IDE or a linter for this to be useful.

If you say so :)

Well, but if there are other “me”s, then there must be some set of common events that must occur in each universe containing a copy of me in order for that individual to qualify as me. In that case, isn’t it entirely possible that those particular things that must be in place preclude certain other possibilities that make it such that there is no chance that some otherwise conceivable events could occur?

The way I do it, patches are backward-compatible bug fixes. Minor versions are additional features that don’t change existing functionality. Major versions include breaking changes. I totally get that it seems crazy to bump to another major version just over a string format change. But overall the philosophy works well IMO.

https://youtu.be/mZHoHaAYHq8?t=17s

Ok, that makes sense. I would agree that for any truly random circumstance, when given infinite iterations, all possible combinations will eventually occur.

I think it’s one of those “probably close enough to random” type things. I found this: https://quantumbase.com/sse/lottery/

I agree with all of that. But the bigger point is that there are things that can’t/won’t happen that we can’t predict, so this means we can’t assume that “there must be a universe in which X happens to me”.

⊥

I think Cantor would say you need a proof for that. And I think he would say you can prove it via generating a new real number by going down your set of real numbers and taking the first digit from the first number, the second from the second, third from third, etc. Then you run a transformation on it, for example every number other than 1 becomes 1 and every 1 becomes 2. Then you know that the number you’ve created can’t be first in the set because its first digit doesn’t match, and it can’t be the second number because the second number doesn’t match, etc to infinity. And therefore, if you map your set of whole numbers to your set of real numbers, you’ve discovered a real number that can’t be mapped to a whole number because it can’t be at any position in the set.

Some will say this proves that infinities can be of unequal sizes. Some will more accurately say this shows that uncountable infinities are larger than countable infinities. But the problem I have with it is this: that we begin with the assumption of a set of all real numbers, but then we prove that not all real numbers are contained in the set of all real numbers. We know this because the number we generated literally can not be at any position in the set. This is a paradox. The number is not in the set, therefore we don’t need it to map to a member of the other set. Yet it is a real number and therefore must be in the set. And yet we proved it can’t be in the set.

I’m uncomfortable making inferences based on this type of information. But I’m also not a mathematician. My goal isn’t to start an argument. Maybe somebody who’s better at math can explain it to me better.

Right, although this idea is somewhat challenged by the story of Sigurðr who is by all accounts the best, bravest, and most famous of all Norse heroes with exploits that include slaying a dragon and receiving personal assistance from Odin on multiple occasions. Sigurðr Is stabbed by his brother-in-law and is able to actually cut the guy in half before dying himself but is then attested as going to Hel in various ways but never to Valhǫll.

It’s unclear why this is and I haven’t seen much discussion about it in scholarly discourse. There is, of course, lots of discussion about what Hel really is/means. But it may have been something implicit in the story that the ancient Norse would have inferred as being obvious. For example, maybe he lost favor with Odin by rescuing the Valkyrie Sigrdrífa from the sleep curse that Odin had placed upon her.

This sort of an idea shows up in Sonatorrek, ostensibly written by Egill Skalagrimsson. In that poem, Egill is lamenting the loss of his son who drowned in a boating accident. In that context, Egill talks about this tragedy in terms of Odin having broken off friendship with him. As a result, Egill has decided to cease sacrificing to Odin, and the consequence is that he now has a vision of Hel standing on the headland waiting for him.

Twice a day here, plus dentist every 6mos. I floss on and off (mostly off). Never had a cavity.

I think that’s only true if the lottery numbers you end up with are truly the result of random selection in infinite universes.