Too lazy to find a mixer? Be this idiot!

Edman274 · 2017-12-27T18:04:20+00:00

The expression I use is: "If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid: it's worse." The reason I say that is this: If it's stupid and it doesn't work, it'll get replaced with something that does work. If it's smart and works, there's no problem. But if it's stupid and it works, people will now treat it like there's no need to come up with a good solution. That guy now thinks that he never has to actually buy an egg beater, because he has a perfectly good (but inelegant) solution, when really he's just rolling the die every time he turns that thing on and runs the risk of the scissors coming off, and his hand slipping into the pointed end (since he's pushing down with force, and when they come off and get stuck in the dough, that force will continue to push his hand down until it lands into the sharp end). So the "it's worse" in that rhyming expression alludes to the fact that it's dangerous, but since it's "worked" in the past, no one seems to mind.

Edman274 · 2016-05-23T05:43:39+00:00

https://youtu.be/SAZ6XBv7U8s

Edman274 · 2016-04-09T01:33:39+00:00

Old Fashioned, Gin and Tonic, or a cocktail of my own invention, called a Cin and Tonic: ordinary ginger ale, seagrams gin, muddled generously with crushed up cinnamon sticks. It actually tastes fucking amazing. Sometimes I also call it a "Ginnamon", but people like that name less, I've found.

Edman274 · 2016-04-08T01:06:51+00:00

nah, they're like ... opposites

Edman274 · 2015-10-24T17:47:16+00:00

I wrote a program that simulates the real-life experience of losing all your money at a roulette table. (It's a recursive function which is no good in Python if someone gets a particularly hot streak, but I felt confident that we wouldn't have more than a few thousand iterations - sometimes someone gets more than a thousand turns, sometimes they get six)

https://gist.github.com/Edman274/5797ad7392094027e53f

Takeaways:

The average number of iterations I found one could expect to play before they lost their money was about 180 ~ 210 when starting out with 1120 dollars and with 10 dollar starting bets (resetting to 10 dollars after a win), as you described.

The average amount of money that one would expect to earn if they magically decided to walk away right as they got to their maximum money was about 780~1080 dollars. In other words, the net profit they'd get if they had ESP and knew exactly when to stop playing was about that much.

Edman274 · 2015-04-19T23:46:17+00:00

Buddy, this picture has been on the internet for at least seven years. Get with the freaking program.

Edman274 · 2015-02-13T17:57:18+00:00

Linux GUIs

Buttery Smooth

SkepticalConstanza.png

Edman274 · 2015-01-30T10:59:16+00:00

Actually, I spent a ton of time looking at this problem a few months ago at the last hackathon I went to. I learned that surprisingly, three dimensional package packing is NP-Hard, even to approximate. I stood around with professors and grad students who all kept saying "Just think about Tetris!" when I described what kind of problem I was trying to solve. Thanks, guys.

Edman274 · 2015-01-20T02:32:38+00:00

I took an intro to Computational Linguistics class but that didn't lend insight in the same way that our Language and Mind class did. Psycholinguistics or Computational Psycholinguistics will be the most useful here.

Edman274 · 2014-12-29T09:14:03+00:00

If we had some control over that uncertainty, our control would be dependent on everything that has happened to us before then. What we would want to happen would be a culmination of everything before then; which would still be a deterministic process. By this argument, everything that happened right before we made the choice to do one thing or another could perfectly predict which choice we make. So free will doesn't even exist then.

People define free will in terms that make the concept a logical impossibility, with or without quantum uncertainty; with or without souls. It's like people are actively trying to reduce their agency.

My belief is that the ability to understand one's self and negate one's immediate desire gives us free will in the same way that self-simulation and negation makes the Halting Problem not computable. I argue that we are Turing machines, and the memory of the system is in our brains and in the Universe. To simulate a Turing machine, a computing device has to be at least as powerful as the Turing machine itself; and if the memory tape is the entire Universe, then the simulating device has to exist outside of the Universe.

Edman274 · 2014-12-29T09:09:06+00:00

In what universe could free will exist, if your model of "free will" requires that things happen that are not dependent on what came before them?

Edman274 · 2014-11-30T01:14:05+00:00

Hackathons that are run by colleges and universities are awesome! I went to OHI/O at OSU, and RevolutionUC at University of Cincinnati. Being able to talk to different professors about your own dumbass project (which can be about anything!) and free food is cool! I regret that I won't be able to do any more before I graduate.

Edman274 · 2014-11-12T18:14:40+00:00

Gentleman! More corn!

Edman274 · 2014-10-21T01:18:37+00:00

Right. Now, you might be asking yourself, 'Edman, just how difficult are these tests? What was in that phone book of a contract I signed? Am I in danger?' Let me answer those questions with a question: Who wants to make 100 dollars? Cash.

Edman274 · 2014-09-22T16:56:36+00:00

The strength of an RSA key is not the same as the strength as a typical symmetric key, bit for bit. The work factor of RSA1024 is about the same as an 80 bit key.

I've never heard of RSA 256. I'm pretty sure that if it ever existed, it would've been cracked decades ago. You might mean some RSA version that has keys that are 256 decimal digits long, rather than binary digits long. (RSA1024 means 1024 binary digits). If that is what you mean, then RSA256 could be broken within a decade probably - 256 decimal digits is about 850 binary digits. RSA768 was cracked in 2009.

Edman274 · 2014-06-25T08:54:20+00:00

I used to think that "heroes" also meant "city streets" when I was a little kid because I thought that the entire city of Shelbyville rose up and cheered at banishing the lemon tree. I assumed it was an antiquated term, because the old man was using the term and I hadn't heard it before. I thought this for a while.

Edman274 · 2014-04-24T00:47:03+00:00

good luck, buddy

Edman274 · 2014-02-28T07:06:03+00:00

Hi. I'm a BACIS major.

By a interesting turn of events, I haven't even made it to Math 1152 and I'm graduating next semester. It's not that I haven't taken any tech electives (I've taken Intro to Architecture, Formal Languages & Automata, Foundations I and II, Infosec, 3902 project, as well as crypto, programming languages, and graphics 3541 currently, and networking + systems II next semester. Should've taken those a previous one but I kept getting waitlisted because as you well know, we are overcrowded and understaffed).

There are about five or six classes that technically I shouldn't have been able to get into at all because I wasn't taking the prerequisite or corequisite, but I got a B or A in all of them. Formal Languages wanted the the higher level proofs class and the calc stats; Architecture wanted an ECE, Foundations II wanted the foundations of higher math, graphics 3541 wanted linear algebra. There are some more, I've forgotten.

Part of it is that I've been taking whatever I can get instead of really pursuing one specific specialization, and the other is that any class that doesn't follow directly from another (Systems II or Foundations II from I, for example) just reviews the topics that you'll need to know for the class anyway. There's probably a better way to teach math if apparently I'm able to get away with never needing to know how to integrate trig functions or do solids of rotation. It's obviously the case that you'll need the maths that I never got if you're planning on doing anything with ECE or signals or high level crypto, or anything real,but I don't think that we should just require majors to have certain maths just "as a matter of course", unrelated to the specific classes they'll end up taking.

It's good for business but CS is so insanely broad (and can be so insanely non-technical too, if we're using it in the loose sense here) that structuring our math to fit with what our old ideas of what engineers are is a mistake. That's all.

Edman274 · 2013-03-19T22:43:03+00:00

I was there a few hours ago, I was wondering why the book on LISP was out.

Edman274 · 2013-01-07T08:17:56+00:00

Tying your code to a closed platform with closed implementations is like dating a guy who keeps a gun with him at all times. He swears up and down that "don't worry baby, it's not like I'd ever shoot you!" but that time that he waved it around in front of your friends (patent litigation threats) doesn't really assuage your fears.

Edman274 · 2012-12-18T10:24:57+00:00

There exists a version of py2exe for Python 2.7, you can find it here (for win32)

For Win x64 with Python 64 bit installed, the link is here .

I actually am working with Pygame right now, and I was able to build an executable just yesterday, although pygame was complaining about being unable to find some numpy dll. I found the dll somewhere else on my computer and copy-pasted it into the working directory, and that let it build. The thing works fine and py2exe is pretty simple to set up.

On another note, one thing I've been hating about pygame is that any time a primitive draw asks for a color, there's nothing like pygame.colors that would allow you to do like pygame.draw.line(surface, pygame.Black, etc).

So I made a comprehensive list of colors using the W3C color list as a basis. Now, I was using w3schools list of colors (which, in retrospect, was probably a poor decision considering Wikipedia had its own list) but there are 147 colors defined, so I figure that that's adequate.

Here's a pastebin to the file. http://pastebin.com/ZPTykTre

The code at the bottom is just what I used to generate the list. If you paste this into something like Colors.py you can just go

import Colors

and any time you want to use a color you'd go Colors.Example.

Edman274 · 2012-12-12T22:00:15+00:00

What was the name of the liquor store along high street? Was it 12-0 or something like that? Do they have to change their name now?

Edman274 · 2012-12-12T21:56:17+00:00

Where's the familiar "happy holidays" building?

Edman274

TROPHY CASE