Am I the only person that’s extremely put off (and in a way intrigued) by Americans hang up with “race”. Like, even the fact that there are “official” races is very strange to me. In my country we absolutely operate with a concept of “ethnicity”, but that’s not set in stone, and is a kind of mix of “where do your ancestors come from”, “what is your phenotype”, and “what culture do you identify with”. The idea of having a “race” that is set in stone and that people actually care about is pretty absurd to me.

I think you’re misunderstanding a bit: What they did was primitive compared to what we do today, and the comparison is fair since what they did was the foundation for what we do today.

Much like we could call a vacuum tube computer that filled a room in the 50’s a “primitive computer”. It’s not downplaying the fact that that computer was (and is) an absolute feat of science and engineering that very few people alive could replicate. It’s bringing focus to the fact that, despite being comparatively simple relative to a modern phone, it’s what made development of modern computers possible. It’s quite literally a “primitive computer”.

In the same way, this procedure was an early predecessor to modern surgery, so it’s quite literally “primitive surgery”.

Oh, I definitely agree that meaningful whitespace can be a pain, and I’m not a very big fan in general (although I prefer meaningful whitespace like in Python to terribly indented code with regards to readability). I guess my point was just that if you’re having a lot of failures due to incorrect indentation, it sounds like a systemic issue somewhere. While meaningful indentation can be annoying, I think it sounds like symptom of something more if it’s responsible for most of your production failures.

I think the bottom line for me is that if a config file regularly causes errors because of incorrect indentation, it should probably be refactored, since it’s clearly not easy enough to read that those errors are caught.

To me, that makes it sound like you’re writing too much and too complex yaml files manually, and/or that you don’t have good enough CI to catch invalid configurations. Unless, of course, you have very few prod failures overall, and the few that happen are due to yaml indentation, which I still think is a bit weird, since an invalid config caused by incorrect indentation should ideally be caught at compile time (if you’re generating code from the yaml) or by some linter or something (if you’re using it for config).

I’ll agree that significant whitespace can be a PITA (one of the reasons I prefer json over yaml), but at the same time I think improper or lacking indentation hurts readability even more than significant whitespace. Toml basically encourages a completely flat structure, where objects and sub-objects are defined all over the place. At that point, I much prefer an enforced structure with whitespace.

I haven’t played the game, but in the books he definitely uses portals. He just very strongly prefers not to, I have a vague memory of some incident that makes him not trust them.

.vscode would like a word.

But besides that, I just can’t understand why even someone that hates JSON would choose TOML over YAML for a config file.

I’ve never gotten to be good friends with toml. I’ve never liked that the properties of some thing can be defined all over the place, and I’ve definitely never liked that it’s so hard to read nested properties. JSON is my friend.

The people responsible for archiving the gold mine that is old flash games are really doing gods work out there!

When considering a full deck you don’t really need to estimate the number of dealt hands, because any estimate that is anywhere close to realistic is completely negligible compared to 52!

We’re talking: If every person that ever lived became 100 years old and shuffled one deck of cards every minute of their life, the number of shuffled decks in history is still in practice indistinguishable from zero when compared to 52!

At the same time, all mammals are evolved from a common ancestor on land, which means that whales, seals, dolphins, etc. are the evolutionary result of land-based mammals “re-entering” the ocean.

Genetics is a game of dice. Whatever works (with regards to proliferating a certain gene) will remain in the pool. Virus are just a consequence of that statistical fact.

Wat

The possibilities for actuality are enormous here!

To me this is an open question, gonna try tomorrow and report back.

Gonna see if i can cross over to the apartment opposite me by not looking down. This could be a miracle for transportation!

I’m a researcher myself, so I feel like I can weigh in on the “reproducibility crisis”. There are several facets to it: One is of course money, but that’s not just related to corporately funded research. Good luck finding or building an independent lab capable of reproducing the results at CERN. It basically boils down to the fact that some (a lot of) research is insanely expensive to do. This primarily applies to experiments and to some degree to computationally expensive stuff.

Another side is related to interest. Your average researcher is fired up by the thought of being the first person to discover and publish something no one has seen before. It’s just not as fun to reproduce something someone else has already done. Even if you do, you’re likely to try to improve on it somehow, which means the results may change without directly invalidating the old results. It can be hard work to write a good paper, so if you don’t feel your results are novel enough that they’re worth the effort (because they’re basically just equivalent to previously published values) you might not bother to put in the effort to publish them.

Finally, even without direct reproduction of previously published results, science has a way asymptotically approaching some kind of truth. When I develop and publish something, I’m building on dozens of previously published works. If what they did was plain wrong, then my models would also be liable to fail. I’ve had cases where we’ve improved on previously published work, not because we tried to reproduce it, but because we tried to build on their results, and found out that their results didn’t make sense. That kind of thing is fairly common, but not reported as a “reproduction study”.

There’s also review articles that, while they don’t do any reproduction themselves, collect and compare a bunch of comparable work. They usually have some conclusions regarding what results appear trustworthy, and what appear to be erroneous.

That is true. You can have check for certain words and phrases that’s hardcoded in. However, I have reason to believe the feature I experienced was using an LLM rather than a hardcoded list of search patterns.

One of the only “AI” features that I’ve ever actually found useful was the thing that warned me when I sent an email that was missing an attachment. Basically, it was able to deduce that an attachment was likely missing, and showed me a “are you sure you want to send” prompt.

I honestly think that whether people like or dislike them is a bit beside the point. I don’t think I can mention any other family “dynasty” that has had the same consistent political power as the Kennedys over decades in the modern world. And I live in a Monarchy.