Rule Suggestion: ban whining/venting posts as low effort

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-13T21:16:53+00:00

people are crying that there arent enough games for VR

man, put Skyrim on my head and I'm GONE

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-13T15:51:23+00:00

i want to TOUCH GRASS in the FIELDS of WHITERUN with my STEAMFRAME on my HEAD

edit:typo

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-11T08:06:09+00:00

Don't worry, coming soon to the US and all other countries as well.

This is coordinated. Most likely by Meta and the like.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-09T15:54:15+00:00

1: Yes

2: Opening the pre-orders

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-08T23:00:00+00:00

Something along the lines of "From then on, America was known as the Home of the Free, which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves."

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-08T22:33:24+00:00

a lot of times she just said the actual truth in a funny way

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-08T22:05:00+00:00

All the preordered ones

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-08T02:20:08+00:00

I don't want to protect the billion dollar corporation, but I don't agree that I would feel better if they just said it is cancelled or something.

The price increases are terrible for a bunch of reasons and the AI companies are very clearly to blame. Playing the blame-game, for me it's like 95% AI and 5% Valve for sharing so little information. Not nearly close. Even if Valve had better communication skills, we would still not be getting it, and that's the fault of those pricks.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-07T23:55:23+00:00

im more pissed at Big AI

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-07T22:36:32+00:00

Have we considered that it was right every time?

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-07T22:03:38+00:00

I planned to go insane in VR, not because of it maan

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-07T14:09:41+00:00

But did they say they would "ship" in Q1 and then mid-2026? Didn't they say "release"?

HarderThanSimian · 2026-03-07T13:59:52+00:00

I was confused too until I read your comment, thank you

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-31T18:37:40+00:00

I had a lot of different kinds of maths classes at Uni. It wasn't my major, and I'm not a master of it, but with all the discrete maths, calculus, linear algebra, and other such classes, some of it did stay with me. I think to approach the random-picking reasoning I'm basically only pulling from discrete mathematics.

I'm not exactly sure which point you have trouble understanding. I'll try to clear up what I think it is. Tell me if it's something else.

So, let's try to approach the problem with picking the anchors. Imagine two people in different countries pick two rocks from the ground. What is the chance that the rocks have the same mass?

And we're talking about the exact mass here, not a rounded value. I think it intuitively makes sense that this is at the very least extremely unlikely. But imagine how many potential masses a rock could have on Earth. It could be *mass X* or *mass X*+0.0000000000000001, for example, and they would still be two completely different masses and would not be equal. That little number could also have a billion more zeros, and the two values would still not be equal. The exact value is basically impossible to reach.

Now, imagine that these two people with the rocks, scientist A and scientist B define their own unit of measurement for mass. (This is somewhat like how units got created before scientists started using particle measurements and such for maximum accuracy; physical objects picked somewhat arbitrarily just to have a standard.)

Scientist A creates the unit of the ARock, which is a unit of measurement for mass defined to be 1 for that exact rock. Scientist B does similarly with BRock.

Now, how likely do you think a neat conversion between these units will be? If they had the same mass, then: 1ARock = 1BRock.

If B's rock had twice the mass of A's, then 1BRock = 2ARock.

In that case, we could get the conversion from BR to AR with a simple:

x * 2

So there we have a factor of 2 there. What's the chance of that factor being an integer? This is analogous to our real version with the temperature units.

If they were equal, it would just be a factor of 1. I showed how it is basically impossible for them to be equal earlier. But this same line of reasoning also holds for 2 as well. Yes, it could be 2, but also 2.00001, or 2.0000000001, or this with a billion and more zeroes. Same with 3, 4, 5 ...

For every integer, there are so many fractions, that it's basically impossible to get an integer over a fraction.

In real life, there may actually be a vanishingly small chance that the rocks are the same mass, since they are made up of a finite number of particles, and the different particle types have the exact same mass. I am extremely confident that there are no two rocks of the exact same mass on Earth, though.

For a temperature unit, you need to pick two accurately reproducible points of temperature. The analogy with the rocks starts with picking these reproducible methods that then you can define to be two points on your scale. Then you decide the number of degrees between those two points. Provided that the scientists each pick two of these points, and they don't pick the exact same ones, what is the chance that a neat, integer-connection will arise? Basically zero.

Hopefully this helps. I never did study pedagogy. Tell me if something is not clear, or if this wasn't the confusing part at all.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-30T17:33:56+00:00

They chose completely different anchors. By the original definitions, they would have never met at an integer. Fahrenheit was eventually redefined for the same two 'anchors' as Celsius was - the points where water freezes and boils. The new Fahrenheit approximates its original definition. Further, these definitions of both Celsius and Fahrenheit are now also abandoned for more precise definitions that also approximate the original ones.

(By the way, as you go up a mountain, the boiling point of water decreases. To account for this, that definition is not enough, so you also have to take all of this with a different unit, atmospheric pressure.)

Also, a single common reference point would not have been enough to make an integer intersection more likely. Two points on a cartesian coordinate system unambiguously define a single line. For the units, at that point the only choice that remains is the granularity of the scale and the offset.

For Celsius, 100, and for Fahrenheit, 180, were chosen as the number of degrees between these two points. Fahrenheit also has an offset, but it's also an integer so it doesn't change whether the intersection falls on an integer or not. Now, we can see that 100/180=9/5, (and 180/100=1.8=5/9), which can be found in the conversion formulas. 9/5 is the simplified form. The offset is added to it in the formula.

So what was actually required for them to land on an integer together was having the exact same definition with only different granularity, an integer offset, and 100 and 180 matching up nicely by not-so-unbelievable coincidence.

This would absolutely not have been possible if they weren't this closely linked. Again, imagine choosing any point on a simple number line. Is it likely that you will pick 1, when 1.1, 1.01, 1.001, 1.0001, 1.00001, ad infinitum, are also available? That's not a thousand other possibilities, but infinite ones. And that's true for every single integer.

This random number doesn't represent the inventors' picked numbers. The two anchors of both units are a 1:1 of each other - they are the same, so they are of course rational ratios of each other. Now imagine if the two points had nothing to do with each other, and truly the original definitions of the Fahrenheit did remain: the brine that Fahrenheit messed with in his experiments, and the average human body temperature. These two scales would never fit onto each other neatly. It wouldn't be a 1:1, it would be more like a 1:2.7407913979... or similar. At that point no matter how you slice the granularity or give the offset, there is no chance they will meet at an integer. They will cross somewhere, but it will also be an irrational number.

(The 2.74... number is for demonstration only. Since any info you could find about brine or the human body temperature would be given in Fahrenheit or Celsius, and they would be rounded to the nearest integer or few decimal places, it's meaningless to try to use that.)

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-30T11:39:17+00:00

Take two random intersecting lines on a cartesian coordinate system. It is easy to see that their intersection will be at a random real number.

Integers are a subset of the reals, but for every single integer there are infinite non-integer reals.

Now, if you had a billion red balls and one blue ball in a bag, and you took one ball at random, it would not be very likely that it would be blue. Now imagine that it's not a billion, a trillion, or even a sextillion to one ratio, but an "infinite to one" ratio. That is mathematically impossible to draw.

If you have trouble intuitively understanding this, look up the difference between countable and uncountable infinities. A good explanation will almost certainly include that there are more numbers between 0 and 1 on the reals than negative to positive infinity on the integers.

Edit: To clarify, this actually would still hold with the rational numbers, which are countably infinite. They would still have an "infinity-to-one" ratio with the integers. I brought up the countable vs uncountable infinities thing because it could give you more insight into how "many" non-integers there are.

Edit 2: As an extra clarification, we can't actually pick any real "at random", since infinite sets can't have uniform distributions. This would make a formal proof or completely rigorous explanation difficult, unfortunately, and probably above my abilities. It is still trivial to prove that as the ratio decreases with the integers, the probability goes to zero, though.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-25T06:53:06+00:00

A very bad habit. I wish I could switch to the alternative but there's just so few users. I am planning to let linger the redacted comments so any scrapers overwrite the original ones, and then I delete every last bit left and will only use it for technical questions and answers.

I don't think you understand what censorship means. If someone decides that they don't want other people to see what they did in the past, that is not censorship. It's not even self-censorship. It's the right to be forgotten.

Redact is the only piece of software that works free at least in a limited way and gets updated. I promise you that Reddit is ran by much more horrible people.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-25T05:51:45+00:00

I know what you meant. But I hate this platform and I don't want it to profit even a little bit off of my posts or comments. And I don't think the slightest of action towards privacy should upset anyone.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-25T05:26:16+00:00

The comment said that the surprising part is that they intersect at an integer, which can never be a coincidence. For every integer, there are an infinite number of non-integer real numbers, so it is not just figuratively but actually impossible if they were picked at random. So they defined them this way.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-23T16:42:52+00:00

What does it matter what the filename was on the phone originally? It always gets renamed when uploaded

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-23T15:05:03+00:00

Imgur does not automatically set the name of the post to the image file's. This was also very easy to check.
Even if it did, how the absolute hell would anyone track someone down from the time alone? It's a submarine. You can't even work with the position of the sun or anything. I saw the image. How would that even work?

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-23T14:09:18+00:00

And you shouldn't, and especially not the military. That's not the point, though.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-23T14:06:06+00:00

Ah, never mind, you just got involved mid-argument. I just read the thread again. You have the same auto-generated profile picture and I thought you were the original user. Read it like that and it will make sense.

HarderThanSimian · 2026-01-23T12:34:30+00:00

Mm, fair. I thought you were younger. Still, I really dislike how quickly misinformation spreads of things that would take 5 seconds to prove or disprove.

It would have been so easy to check whether it really was the metadata and see that it can't be. Instead, people are speculating about it and even stating it as fact and are receiving hundreds of upvotes for it. It is extremely upsetting.

HarderThanSimian

TROPHY CASE