I feel like that’s very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.

People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
The more abstract the topic you’re working with, the more accustomed you’ll be to hearing things that don’t make sense at first.

Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I’ve met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.

I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.

My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.

The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.

The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.

It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”

While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.

There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.

Another was the uni-bomber.

There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.

If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.

So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.

The disdain for spreadsheets comes from people who don’t understand data organization, or people who do.

Tabular data? Good.
Schemaless? Unstructured? Probably maintained by eleventy-four random sales people and an account? Being given to me like it’s a gift and expecting me to just magic it into some reporting system? On a recurring basis? No. Please God no.

I can be trusted to use a spreadsheet for my things that I don’t share. Other people need to use something that will yell at them when they give it malformed gibberish.

Oh, and executable logic doesn’t belong in the same context as data. That shit needs to be able to be told apart from the data.

I went and read the commit descriptions.

Previously it was using whatever cursor the theme had loaded and just scaled it up. Now it references the full set of resources for the theme and picks the appropriate one for the size.

So they went with the most correct third option: defer to the standard set by a more authoritative source. :)

Did you forget we were talking about 3d printers?

You compared the people making fun of the drm mandate to people making fun of car registration because you can build a kit car, implying that building a 3d printer was a nearly insurmountable hurdle.

Being able to trivially bypass the drm is exactly why it’s laughable.

Cars, bikes, or your dislike have nothing to do with the DRM mandate being toothless and stupid.

Okay? What does that have to do with the drm mandate being easy to get around?
Is your point that it’s okay to put unenforceable, easily bypassed restrictions on stuff if you think they’re bad?

I’m not sure honestly sure what your point is, because you went a bit too far with the analogy.

Itty bitty ones, sure. And they take weeks to produce a working vehicle, of substandard quality.

This was about regulating 3d printers, not guns. A diy printer, a new drm printer and an old not-drm printer produce the same quality output.

A diy 3d printer is just as durable as a purchased one.

If your goal is to have an unregistered car, or in this case a drm free printer, the law seems silly when you can get one for cheaper than the “proper” one and have it out together in an afternoon if you have highschool level mechanical aptitude.

Making a full on machine gun is literally one of the original cottage industries. They’re hard to design but the actual fabrication can be so dumbed down that you can make it out of non un-common household tools with minimal skill.

Some of the tricky bits are making the weapon fire slower, so it doesn’t jam or get so hot rounds fire before they’re actually in the chamber. Or just keeps firing because releasing the trigger wasn’t enough to keep the recoil from keeping it going.
If your goal is to give everyone in the UK too young, old or woman to draft a machine gun to make the Germans regret invading, then a horde of cockney 8 year olds with uncontrolled machine guns and poor trigger discipline is certainly a choice.

It more like mocking car registration because every neighborhood has a few people who can build you a car from scratch in a day, the city already has several thousand car factories that don’t require registration, there’s no mechanism to enforce registration, and the cost of building a new car is a few hundred dollars. The motivation for requiring registration is also to stop people from driving full speed into fast food restaurants is custom built murder buggys. Yeah, you don’t want people to do that but it’s not like it really happens all that often.

Building a 3d printer from a kit is different from building one from scratch. It’s basically screwing parts together and plugging colored wires into matching slots.

There was a time when I stayed up late working on an experimental recipe. (I was making a treat for some coworkers since we rarely went into the office and some out of state people were in town.). It incorporated some specific and difficult to work around food sensitivities and the random recipies on the Internet all sucked so I was cribbing from patents and research papers.

I ended up leaving notes and bits of recipe on sheets of paper strewn about the kitchen, with my shorthand and symbols freely mixed in. When my wife came down in the morning she said it felt a bit like walking into a puzzle in Myst, with disconnected clues scattered around everywhere, sometimes crossed off or underlined.

I did ultimately end up with a perfectly fluffy oatmilk ice cream (almond vanilla), and some little pineapple cakes I saw someone make in a Chinese cooking video where I swapped the wrapping for a dairy free shortbread cookie.

I also brought a corn flavored confusion that had the texture of a packing peanut, the color of olive oil, and was dietarily void. Not just no calorie, but actually entirely made of indigestible food safe binders. I called them “styrof-O’s”. And vowed never to reveal the recipe after someone commented that they were basically eating disorder chow.

Fruit juice naturally has around 0.5% alcohol. It’s just a side effect of wet sugar.

There’s no legal federal limit, it’s all state law. Some states go by that 0.5%. others go by a definition that includes “things sold as beer” essentially.
"You are holding a container. It is labeled beer. Do not give it to anyone under 21.”

Other times stores just assume and card everyone because it’s waaay easier than nuance and you’re not legally required to sell non-alcoholic beverages to minors.

… That’s everything at home depot. I don’t know that they have a product that isn’t able to be weaponized, and not just in the most literal sense.

It’s common and they were already in place when prohibition ended.

So after a good chunk of time with all the breweries becoming unavailable, they were fast to start selling and it just became a common brand.

Having the three key elements to an alcohol consumed for social purposes rather than taste also helped: cheap, available and cheap.

We’ve got others around, but they’re generally not everywhere.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say they like the taste though. I think the closest I’ve heard is someone saying they like how it’s cold.

The real reason is you don’t. Not in every state. Some defined it by a strict measurable standard. Others defined it to close off what’s depicted in this image. Others defined it to describe what was banned as oppressed to what you measure, so that if you’re selling beer you can’t sell it to kids. No checking labels, no “well, it’s my home brew so I don’t know”. Is it beer? You can’t sell it to kids.

The last one is almost funny because you can almost feel the confusion about why the concept of non-alcoholic beer even exists.

Technically the drinking age isn’t a national law at all. Setting the state law to alignment is a precondition for national highway funding. A state can set the age to whatever they want, but the federal government wouldn’t give money for road maintenance.

As such, different states define a prohibited beverage in different ways. Some set the limit based on a set alcohol limit. Others based on intent or similarity, essentially so that they can prevent advertising alcohol^free beverages to kids and getting them in the habit at an impressionable age.

Most common is the abv limit based on what’s typically found naturally in juices and such, with limited exceptions for religious ceremonies, parental supervision, or accidental ingestion and such. (Technically speaking, if you call 911 because your 3 year old stole a canned alcoholic beverage off the counter and drank a bunch before you noticed and you’re scared, they would be required to also give you and the child legal penalties without that clause).

My new interpretation is that the mirror is saying snow white is the most impartial.

Considering she’s an evil queen, assassinating an impartial child judge still fits with the story.

People in charge of the company I work for are actively delusional.

We had a four hour mandatory meeting to go over our product strategy. The high level vision. For the engineers. No rest breaks. It was announced there would be a test on the materials. Not as a joke.
The top question in the Qa section afterwards was “what is our product strategy?”.
The meeting had roughly 10k attendees.

“AI agents are going to become so pervasive that we’ll need to put a computer on every desk in every office. I’m serious: have you tried to buy a Mac mini lately? They’re just not available”. “Datacenters in space”.

We think they were announcing a new product dashboard, but we’re not sure.

A huge amount of freakout about how AI will make everything different and better that most people on the ground don’t agree with, but we’re mandated to reorganize stuff according to the theory of how it should work in their vision. Teams that change and shift every few weeks. No fixed goals in the week to week timescales. Less planning, more demos, and development goals dictated by higher ups AI agents.

When it all shits the bed they won’t be the ones getting fired. They’ll be the ones collecting the same paycheck and talking about how “limited restructuring” is hard for everyone, but market forces dictate.

I’ve never been under the impression that my work makes the world a better place. I’ve always sold a product that goes to companies that do stuff that might help someone else help people.
It’s someone else having a goddamened coke bender on 50k people’s livelihoods with no consequences that has me down.

I won’t disagree with what you said, but I’ll disagree that it’s the same point I was making.

My point was that there isn’t a technical solution to traffic congestion. You need less fluid or a bigger pipe. What you correctly mention is why a bigger pipe won’t work for humans when it does for water.

And out of pure pedantry, I’d disagree purely because my analogy said “non-newtownian liquid” - those don’t expand. :P it’s more like a hyperactive toddler manically jamming silly putty into a PVC pipe.

Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.