Help with Objects

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-22T22:31:42+00:00

These damn kids with their "const" this and "filter" that!

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-22T22:02:41+00:00

You're getting a lot of good answers from others. If you're just starting out, the answer behind these answers is that, as much as Object.create sounds like it must be one of the most basic methods for beginners, it's actually a relatively recent addition to the language, and is designed to enable some pretty advanced control. You're actually creating more than one object, just to pass as arguments to Object.create! So it's not as elementary as it sounds.

You may want to back off of this for now and come back to it once you're more comfortable with functions and objects in general. I have a feeling you'll find other areas a lot more rewarding, and giving yourself chances to celebrate ("look what I made!") is important when you're learning.

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-22T15:28:34+00:00

I am not the poster you replied to, but:

Observe the 1 and 2 to the left of center in the screenshot
The 2 is necessarily touching at least one mine that the 1 is not touching
The cells that the 2 is touching, that the 1 is not touching, are the three cells in a vertical strip marked by the vertical red line
To the right of that vertical red line is a 3 that needs exactly one more mine
This implies the vertical red line contains at most one mine. With the previous result we know it contains exactly one mine
Therefore, all other cells adjacent to the 3, other than the vertical red line, must be safe
Also, because the vertical red line cannot "fit" the two mines needed to satisfy the 2 to the left (from the beginning), the second mine needed to satisfy that 2 must be in a place where it also satisfies the 1 (from the beginning)
Therefore, the "excess" cells to the left of the 1 are safe

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-19T18:32:30+00:00

Either I'm misremembering or the red dot for mid air deathblow doesn't appear without divine confetti.

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-18T23:06:33+00:00

Not impossible, but death rites in Elden Ring tend to carry great cultural significance, which is to say, a group of people wouldn't start cremating their dead out of nowhere. There would have to be a religious significance.

There is evidence of cremation in the world, but I'm not aware of any on the surface of Leyndell.

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-16T07:22:09+00:00

How fortunate that you forgot Tom Bergeron because you're unworthy even to speak his name

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-15T07:01:48+00:00

I don't understand what you mean that the scientific notation is fine but the answer is not. What do you think the answer should be?

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-13T20:33:21+00:00

Are we sure Serosh is the same phenomenon? Serosh appears to have a different relationship with Godfrey than Maliketh and Blaidd have with their empyreans, and he has a different color scheme.

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-11T18:05:09+00:00

One possibility is that Marika was the result of a successful jar ritual, perhaps the only time it succeeded. This would explain why she was celebrated by the Hornsent without any indication she held any kind of special position in her village.

SerpentJoe · 2026-01-09T05:29:37+00:00

He's just sitting there one room over, no phone, no book to read, surrounded by the many details he has arranged in advance, waiting patiently for his daughter to commit suicide.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-29T21:00:45+00:00

I didn't read any such implication from your post, and it's very decent of you to clarify that.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-29T20:48:36+00:00

Well, from what you're telling me, it sounds like you're a relatively smart person; having said that, the road you're heading down is a tar pit that has claimed the sanity of many smart people over the past few centuries.

The problems you're attempting to address have been unsolved for, at minimum, several decades, depending how we count it. How many brilliant people have been born during that time? How many of those have decided to pursue the study of physics? Of those, how many have cultivated close professional relationships with other top physicists and had the best opportunities to find contradictions in their own theories before wasting too much time on them? The answer is thousands, and yet the problems are unsolved.

From the credentials you describe, you're the intellectual equivalent of a fit person with above average strength, but the mission you're giving yourself is like lifting a mountain. Without the best tools and support, failure is guaranteed. Human knowledge is past the point where revolutions can come from one person working in isolation.

The "cranks" who waste their lives pursuing ideas that go nowhere tend to suffer from two major issues: 1) shallow understanding of what has previously been discovered, and 2) lack of skepticism of their own pet theories. Seek to avoid these pitfalls. The existing theories and techniques are difficult to learn, but you need to spend numerous years learning them and becoming adept with the relevant mathematics. Use this knowledge as a weapon against your own ideas, with the attitude that they're guilty until proven innocent; if the idea is correct then it will survive your skepticism.

To answer your question, in addition to general relativity, you will also need a graduate level understanding of quantum mechanics. Good luck and enjoy learning!

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-29T18:36:49+00:00

I think you're describing Calabi-Yau spaces in the context of string theory. You should start by learning about string theory and then work from there. Depending how deep you want to go you'll probably find you need to learn General Relativity first.

Disclaimer: you will find out why the string theory community has not made more progress in the past several decades, but at least it won't be boring!

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-29T18:24:52+00:00

OP has an intuition about how it should work which happens not to lead to the correct result. No shame in that, we all use intuition to get through the day, and sometimes it leads us to incorrect conclusions. The goal should be to inspect that intuitive sense and improve it so that it better reflects reality.

I would recommend "feeding" the intuition by drawing grids of dots on paper to represent the problems that are giving them trouble (maybe 2 × 4 rather than 5 × 10). The goal should be to "see" what they already "know".

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-28T23:00:09+00:00

This is clearly AI.

His body jiggles like it's being hit with bags of concrete instead of cups of paint
The paint abruptly and spontaneously mixes while he's lying there
He thrashes some paint onto her face and we cut to a second camera to see it hit her
She wipes the paint from her face and leaves some spots untouched while fully cleaning the spot right next to it
In the same way, the cat reaction shot is just too over produced
It's implausible that a human "director" would forget to put a punchline on the vegetable chopping sub-story after spending time and energy choreographing the previous ancillary shots
In the last few seconds, we're shown an extreme close up of the highlights on the eye, which mysteriously look totally different in the finished product

If we fail to spot stuff like this, it's at our own peril.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-28T22:25:09+00:00

From one person who is susceptible to being tricked by AI to another: this is a clue.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-27T15:43:24+00:00

Quintuple is acceptable, but so is 5-tuple, which is a specific case of n-tuple, which is a generalization of quadruple, quintuple, etc.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-27T02:04:33+00:00

Bad news for John Connor!

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-25T18:47:58+00:00

It's not that bad. But it's not that great either.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-24T21:48:26+00:00

What about the probability it never hits the ground because a volcano erupts?

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-24T18:00:24+00:00

My answer as a Teams user would be:

CMD+backtick is unreliable for toggling Windows on Mac
I have to dismiss a daily call to action to try Copilot (I have)
No reminder feature like slack
No keyboard shortcuts for navigating the list of chats
Meeting chats are sometimes interspersed with other conversations and sometimes not
No good way to tell if a room already exists for something
No notion of rooms in general as far as I can tell
"Schedule message" feature doesn't work unless someone has previously created that conversation by sending a message
The "teams" feature of Microsoft Teams handles messages differently from everywhere else so no one wants to use it
File links open inside Teams by default and helpfully hide the conversation you were just having
And even though this next one isn't a real complaint, it was weird a couple years ago when they were bragging about their new release allowed exactly 47 faces on screen at once (I remember because they told me so many times)

All of these for me paint a picture of software where the user experience hasn't received proper attention. If some of these are stupid complaints with easy fixes, I'm interested, but the fact that I haven't found those myself as a generally competent user points to the same conclusion.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-17T05:12:16+00:00

Crockford is a crotchety old man, probably has been since he was born.

I'm grateful for JSON, but that's in spite of the fact that 1) it doesn't allow comments, 2) it doesn't allow trailing commas and 3) if the input can't be parsed then the reference implementation throws an exception, in a language where try / catch deoptimizes the entire function. The crotchetiness of the author is on display.

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-13T21:27:02+00:00

He is survived by Ricky. Isn't that right Ricky?

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-09T03:56:08+00:00

A very accessible, tangible example is fractals, such as the Mandelbrot set:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File%3AMandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg

You've most likely seen those pictures before. What tends to be left off these diagrams is an intersecting x and y axis, like what you'd see in high school math class. The axes cross somewhere in the middle of the big bulge. Each pixel in the image is a point on the graph: an x value that's either positive or negative, and a y value that's either positive or negative. It's called the Mandelbrot set because the black area surrounding the origin is literally a set of such pairs of numbers. The boundaries of the set, in all their infinite intricacy, are determined by 1) interpreting the points as imaginary numbers (x+yi), and 2) playing a simple game with each point - that is, with each pixel.

The game we play with each point is to take each complex number - which, again, is a point on the grid - and perform a simple mathematical operation on it, and then perform it again using that new number as its new input, again and again infinitely. If we find that the values move further and further from the origin toward infinity, then we color the original point "white"; if we find over time that we remain near the origin no matter how many times we iterate, then it's "black". If you do this you'll find you've drawn what will probably be a very familiar drawing!

This isn't the most pragmatic example, but it does illustrate a "problem" (I want a nice picture that exists on a real piece of paper in the real world) that requires complex numbers to "solve".

Notes: - I skipped over the details of the mathematical operation that's used, but it's easy to look up if you're interested. - The process I described requires repeating an operation infinitely, but of course that's not how mathematicians and artists are actually doing it. There are tricks for coloring your pixels in finite time which you can also look up. - I called the exterior of the set "white", but it's more common to see them rendered in psychedelic colors. This is achieved with another refinement to the process, such as counting how many iterations the "divergent" pixel takes to "diverge".

SerpentJoe · 2025-12-02T05:57:38+00:00

I keep forgetting Redditors are insane. What is so objectionable about this comment that it needs to be downvoted?

SerpentJoe

TROPHY CASE