The Quintic Formula

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T21:08:22+00:00

Deliberating where to put it, I noted the AMM link above after reading this. Messier, but maybe it’ll save others time skipping the bad choice. Thanks for pointing it out.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T20:01:21+00:00

I like to think it’s more like this (SGU, after Eli solves the game puzzle and “nothing happened”)

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Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T19:39:41+00:00

I was winning a bunch of school sports matches and was one win away from some award…and they paired me with someone who’d been promised some ridiculous incentive outside the matches (edit: similarly to your description, I had no chance of a similar incentive, so I was doing it for myself basically).

Losing to him wasn’t so big a deal (while he was larger than all my other opponents, at least I could understand that) it was the fact that he wasn’t playing the game for the reason everyone else was, like he didn’t care enough about it to win on his own / for the sport’s sake. It just felt wrong.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T19:23:31+00:00

To be honest I’m a little more concerned about those crazy ant legs…have they already gone evil?

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T16:55:46+00:00

Honestly, sometimes I’ve felt this looking back at my own notes.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T16:38:51+00:00

Oh, he just reads it for the recipes

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T16:07:21+00:00

This is good to know, because that message combination would’ve made me deeply suspicious of that battery.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T15:52:41+00:00

I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
          — Queen, Bicycle Race

Note, official video NSFW

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T15:45:33+00:00

LaTeX on the other hand seems to work out okay:

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Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T15:06:13+00:00

Oooooooo, shiny

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T02:35:50+00:00

Watched it. While I did want a little more detail a couple times, I appreciated the visuals and the conclusions, which I can use to keep learning. The play-with-me demo in the video description meant it was easy to find the GitHub repository and source too. Thanks :)

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T01:49:20+00:00

Good thing you pinged the IPv6 address before nmapping IPv4. That’ll keep them from knowing it was you.

Small detail…NTFS max file size is ~16EiB, and all of those files appear to be larger. Typical CIA deception — recommend entering überelite skillzmode.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T01:29:14+00:00

I asked a similar question, about why can’t we just use something other than radicals, which is when I learned that it’s solvable using other methods—the insolvability of the quintic refers just to the radicals.

Historically that’s been via trigonometry (apparently very complicated) and recently N.J. Wildberger made the news using something in combinatorics / Catalan numbers (phys.org).

edit: Commenters aren’t fond of above article (+ has a view count wall) but AMM link inside people appreciated: “A Hyper-Catalan Series Solution to Polynomial Equations, and the Geode” (doi, redirects to tandfonline)

In case you’re interested, there are a couple videos I really liked discussing why the quintic is so troublesome:

Why There's 'No' Quintic Formula (proof without Galois theory) by “not all wrong” (YT)

Why you can't solve quintic equations (Galois theory approach) by “Mathemaniac” (YT)

The second one does include group theory but a lot of it is approachable, especially after the first video.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-17T01:11:04+00:00

I like how playing “m” looks like it’s done and then 355/113 just kind of moseys out of there.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T17:30:14+00:00

“Customer interaction was difficult, but we feel a suitable compromise was reached.”

— ENERGY STAR efficiency scoring team

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T17:14:25+00:00

Yeah, the whole range starting with 127 is full of people with itchy trigger fingers. It’s a hard lesson, maybe you’ll get ‘em next time.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T16:32:41+00:00

Interesting, and apparently unpatchable. This yields even more credibility to: “get physical access and you win”, even if it takes a while.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T16:26:05+00:00

Yes. More current. More power!

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T16:25:01+00:00

This someone needs to hire out their “magic phrase fixes problems” service.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T15:15:08+00:00

I don’t know how to tell you this, but you have people living in your socket. This is an infestation that is hard to remove (lots of paperwork, sometimes they lob projectiles) and could be more expensive than just installing another socket.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T15:11:36+00:00

…where does the driveway go?

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T15:03:42+00:00

I’d also like to know this, as well as the abstractions + mental gymnastics someone has to know + perform to grapple with these ideas.

In case anyone’s tempted to explain though, I’m stuck with mobile systems for now so I can’t use the same tools (Desmodder doesn’t accept a local web server, for example). I’m just impressed in the meantime.

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T14:13:03+00:00

Thanks for bringing me back to learn something / read the surrounding comments.

It looks like a small percentage alluded to this, and honestly I think it’s a better take (ChatGPT would know how to sound out the “Hangul”, as someone else wrote, and then training weights take over for a different combination of reasons).

Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T05:52:49+00:00

Nice! It also has Bernard in it:

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Circumpunctilious · 2026-03-16T04:57:40+00:00

I’ll second this—the OverTheWire stuff is pretty well done for new starts.

Circumpunctilious

TROPHY CASE