SvenGeier

signaturefish, 6 days ago to random

Some years ago, I read @cstross 's "The Jennifer Morgue" (good book, second in "The Laundry Files" series), in which a Smart Car with an "EJECT" button was a plot point.

I was idly wandering through Ebay while waiting for the dealership to invoice me for my new-to-me second-hand Smart Car last month. When I encountered someone selling an anodised aluminium "Eject" button that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket, I felt the heavy weight of inevitability settle across my shoulders :D

Closeup of the centre console of the car, showing a red button with an open flip-cover, the word EJECT written on it in white capital letters.

lowqualityfacts, 6 days ago to random

My fan club keeps growing by the day.

lowqualityfacts, 1 month ago to random

Sounds unpleasant.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

ProfKinyon, 5 days ago to random

Using the Schröder–Bernstein theorem to prove that the closed interval [0,1] has the same cardinality as the open interval (0,1) is like using a nuclear reactor to boil an egg.

stefing, 4 days ago to uk

#uk #ukpolitics #funny #tories #ToriesOut #farage

SvenGeier, 3 days ago to random

#tilingTuesday (One image shows a zoom into the structure in the other).
This is approximately from ~2015

image/jpeg

foone, 8 days ago to random

The only cyborg I've seen get it right is Inspector Gadget.

Because I can probably name ten people right now who would go for the "motorized screwdriver in the finger" surgery, yet it so rarely shows up in fiction.

But that's the transhumanist future I'm waiting for

johncarlosbaez, 8 days ago to random

Some mathematicians think there's nothing more fun than adding, but others beg to differ.

ProfKinyon, 8 days ago to random

You: Denominators should always be rationalized!

Me: Sounds good, here you go: (\frac{1}{\pi})

lowqualityfacts, 9 days ago to random

Wow, you learn something new about orangutans every day.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

ProfKinyon, 10 days ago to random

I still think "A and B are equipollent" sounds like it means "A and B have the same pollen allergies."

julesh, 13 days ago to random

Old people, not content with merely destroying the economy for young people, are now trying to actively murder young people

image/png

foone, 13 days ago to random

I was copying a Totally Legal Game Backup onto my roommate's switch and it confused Windows so much that it told me I had the wrong floppy diskette in the drive.

lowqualityfacts, 13 days ago to random

That blows my mind.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

dpiponi, 16 days ago to random

Given a random number generator that generates points uniformly in the unit interval [0,1] can you generate uniformly distributed points in the unit circle using only algebraic functions? In a finite number of steps - so no rejection sampling, loops, recursion. No "almost always" finite either.

Just wondering about sitiations where it seems you can't avoid trig functions.

foone, 24 days ago to random

Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!

I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.

That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.

SvenGeier, 21 days ago to random

camilo, 23 days ago to art Spanish

"Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered... Not exactly a man of the people"

#ghostbusters #cazafantasmas #art #CharlesIII #KingCharles

lowqualityfacts, 22 days ago to random

Wow, that's a lot of combinations.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

pvonhellermannn, 22 days ago to random

Sums up everything #Gaza #AI #ChatGPT #Racism

christianp, 22 days ago to random

Microsoft Teams continues to reveal its true nature as a billion sprint goals in a trenchcoat:

When you attach an image to a post, it's saved at the top of the Sharepoint folder belonging to the channel. (So the "files" tab becomes a cluttered mess, but that's not what I'm cross about now)

As well as restrictions on valid filenames, filenames of attachments have to be unique.

So if you've attached drawing.png once before, and upload another drawing.png, Teams asks if you want to replace the original, or keep both. If you keep both, it adds (1) to the filename.

... unless there's already a "drawing (1).png", in which case it asks you AGAIN what you want to do.

Is there a Big Brain Cloud Services reason it can't automatically find the smallest number that works?

#MicrosoftTeams

gregeganSF, 23 days ago to random

I guess the best way to get spectacular improvements in the performance of your code is to do something spectacularly inefficient in the first version.

I’ve been working on a project that needs to perform computations on a quantity X along with several dozen of its derivatives wrt a parameter t, i.e. X'(t), X''(t), ... This is a form of “automatic differentiation”, but with a large number of derivatives.

There are simple rules for performing basic arithmetic on these vectors of derivatives; addition is trivial, and multiplication only grows linearly with the order of the derivative in the number of terms in each formula.

But the derivatives of 1/X and √X, written as sums of products of powers of derivatives of X, scale horrendously: the number of terms for the nth derivative is equal to the number of integer partitions of n:

1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15, 22, 30, 42, 56, 77, 101, 135, 176, 231, 297, 385, 490, 627 ...

And for a while, I thought, well, that’s just the way it is, I’ll have to live with it.

But luckily that turned out to be very naive! In fact, you can just write down the formula for the derivatives of a product, X(t)Y(t) = 1, and then solve that system by back-substitution to get all the derivatives of Y from those of X. Similarly for the square root, from Y^2(t) = X(t).

So the payoff for being dumb in the first place was the glorious feeling of seeing my code now running exponentially faster than before!