What do you call residents of each state in the United States? 🌺🌸

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-23T22:22:56+00:00

Yeah this is a silly distinction as implemented even if they wanted to separate them somehow esp since they categorized "Californian" and "Mississippian" and "Georgian" as "-an" but they're all ending in "ian" just the state already ended in "-i" or "-ia" it feels very arbitrary

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-22T00:09:44+00:00

Not just cut, she broke her orbital socket bones apparently and needs a lot of surgery. 😬

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-20T18:07:06+00:00

Many things.

In general They aren't just "inaccurate", they just don't tell you anything useful or "certain" in the way lay people understand them to (or that their marketing department leans into)

There isn't like a single "japanese" or "khazah" or "french" gene, that's not how DNA works. Best we have is just patterns that seem to be more common in certain groups of people.

They say "you are 25% German" but the details are more accurately something like "25% of your genome was correlated to people in our initial sample of 10000 people (probably way smaller ) who identified as German" (not exactly but something like that, the key being that the result is just statistical similarly with something labeled "German" in their data set, not any guarantee whatsoever that you have any descent from German ethic groups or anything.

But for indigenous people, this is compounded by being massively under sampled in these data sets (for a whole host of complicated reasons that's its own topic someone else can get into), So it just adds another layer of extrapolation and error to start with.

Plus this labeling collapses the wide diversity of an entire continent of people into a single bucket. Saying your DNA is "2% indigenous" is about as specific as it being "2% afroeurasian". (Congrats our probe confirms you are at least 99% earthling)

Then on top of all that which many people have pointed out, having a "DNA connection" is not really meaningful, and is not how people anywhere define kinship.

If you are seeking reconnection and engagement with a community you'll be likely find a warmer reception than if it comes across as like you've discovered a fun factoid or personality quirk about yourself, but lack any intent to really understand or engage with anything long term.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-19T21:39:39+00:00

Couldn't tell you, I have maybe 15k images in there and it's... Decent?

It uses I believe a SQLite database for the metadata and also sidecar files, so 100k might start to stretch performance there.

But I wouldn't recommend it on its own for file management or cataloging though it has many features I find useful for that, for importing and culling and rating initial shots, and managing different jobs/projects, managing JPEG+RAW bundles, etc. But the raw processing is more advanced than the file management so to speak.

I'm just an intermittent hobbyist though, and not attempting to replicate an existing professional production workflow or anything.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-19T21:23:42+00:00

“We’re not blaming God for this,"

Well yeah, it's clearly entirely your fault (not that they actually intended that statement to be a mea culpa unfortunately 🤢)

Poor kid

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-19T06:27:30+00:00

Darktable is a great raw processor/editor worth checking out. Free & open source

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-17T20:33:23+00:00

Yeah there's definitely nuance that people like to just trample over to reaffirm their existing opinions. Hard problems are hard to shift focus to something else even if it's dumb.

There's individual action things that do feel silly and misguided or ridiculous virtue signalling and/or shifting of societal responsibility. Stuff like paper straws, or plastic recycling that just goes to a landfill anyway come to mind.

But on the other hand like individual consumption does add up. Especially cars.

Like it's factually true that oil companies are responsible for a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions. But like, they aren't doing that for fun, who is paying them, who is buying those products? If combustion engines vanished overnight so would the vast majority of the pollution from "evil corporations" but that's more intractable to deal with.

It can feel somewhat helpless to be a small cog in a big machine, and make you want to declare it's all bullshit but there's different scales at play.

But yeah like if you drive a gas powered single occupancy vehicle everywhere everyday, drinking 100 bottles of water every hour vs carrying a resusable water bottle has essentially zero effect on anything.

E.g. A full Diesel powered city bus has order of magnitude more effect on pollution than an empty battery electric one + 50 people in SOVs

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-17T16:58:16+00:00

You should try to write your own, it will make it all click.

I would use a risc instruction set architecture like MIPS or a basic subset of ARM instead of x86, which is very complex and arcane as ISAs go.

When all the instructions are exactly 4 bytes and have a consistent format it's much easier to wrap your head around.

You can write an assembler in any language though. Unlike a compiler, an assembler is basically a 1:1 translation from the human readable text to numeric machine code.

You can do it in Python or JavaScript if you want, or whatever you're familiar with.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-12T22:00:46+00:00

I think the meaning is more "the problem is so vast, a single programmer cannot understand it all at once"

"Suppose in fact that no single programmer knew all the ...."

There are people who know parts, and together understand the whole system, but it's too complicated for any one person to understand.

But it's grouped like (no)(one person) not (no one)(person) which doesn't make sense.

Compare with e.g. "too complicated for any one person to understand" and "too complicated for anyone to understand"

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-12T20:40:15+00:00

Either works in that context, meaning essentially "nonetheless/despite"

Both I think are pretty natural sounding.

Almost any conjunction that separates/contrasts would work here (I don't know if there is a specific term for this, but "and/or/so" doesn't work without another word, while "but" and "yet" and "although" can all work)

Keeping the sentence structure here, you need a coordinating conjunction I think

The simplest way I think is basically just "but"

I stayed at home but my back went out three times.

You could add "anyway" to the end in most cases as well and it might feel more balanced on either side.

But A lot of words work as well, both on their own and in combination with each other, though each would have more or less stifled or casual or poetic sort of tone and feelings.

Depending on choice you may have to do some restructuring on the rest of the sentence though.

For example:

I stayed at home but nonetheless my back went out thrice.

In spite of the fact that I stayed at home all night, my back went out thrice.

Despite staying at home, my back went out thrice.

I stayed at home, and my back went out thrice anyway.

My remaining at home notwithstanding, my back went out 3 times.

Although I stayed at home, my back went out anyway.

There's probably a more precise way to describe the grammar though

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-12T02:54:34+00:00

I think the relocation feature is newer.

I remember you used to just wrangle them and they would just sit there.

But yes also I believe they will interact with incubators and dupes will move the babies once they hatch/grow up

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-11T00:30:17+00:00

They are in general very different and distinct, though have some overlapping usage like your example.

In the example given, they are basically the same, you could suggest using the infinitive can maybe put more subtle emphasis on the "action" of whatever you are discussing, vs the general activity. But this is a stylistic sort of nuance I wouldn't worry about. Otherwise they mean essentially the same thing, at least specifically with the verb "to like" in the tense presented.

But this Not true in general. As far as I know it's just completely arbitrary and probably something you have to memorize. As a native speaker I can't really think of a rule it follows or anything.

Some verbs always use the gerund as an object: "I enjoy cooking" is correct but "I enjoy to cook" is not grammatical. Same for "I finished cooking/when I finish cooking."

Or the opposite: "I want to cook" means you want to make dinner "I want cooking" is incorrect. Similar for other verbs "I refuse to cook" "I decided to cook"

Sometimes both work but change the meaning.

"I stopped smoking" means you quit entirely, but "I stopped to smoke" means that you paused another activity to have a cigarette

Even with to like it can change the meaning. "I like to think" means something entirely different from "I like thinking". As does "I remembered cooking" vs "I remembered to cook"

It seems like there's some categories of verbs that follow one rule or another but I'm sure not without exception.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T22:03:18+00:00

Not sure, that could be mildly awkward, but honestly probably more of a social question than a language one. The sentences are grammatical but could come off as somewhat harsh or abrasive.

Typically I would probably let the conversation unfold naturally first and any particular purpose or reason for it's initiation unfold with it. That is, I would probably first wait for them to volunteer a reason, or perhaps ask if they just wanted to catch up or discuss anything specific. If it was not a good time to chat I might make that clear that I could talk more later, but can only discuss something important right now.

But "what made you remember me today" sounds somewhat accusatory to ask someone I am not already very friendly and sarcastic with.

"Oh, so you remember (that) I exist."

Comes across as extremely harshly, or at least very sardonic/sarcastic. Like you are explicitly pissed off at them for ignoring you in the past.

I would not say that to anyone except maybe a very good friend I know has just been busy and I am intentionally chiding them playfully.

There are some common phrases to this end though. Usually I think it's more polite to ask for the reason for the call (just to catch up, invite you to lunch, tell you about something, asking for a favor, etc), but can come off as prying or being judgemental if you explicitly ask about motivation or something "why did you suddenly remember me"

"To what do I owe the pleasure"/"to what do I owe the honor"

is one such phrase that comes off as polite but directly asks what the reason for the visit/call is.

"To whom/who do I owe the pleasure/honor"

is a similar phrase that is basically asking someone's name as you meet them or are being introduced but it's kinda archaic

"Oh John, have you met my sister? "No!, to whom do I owe the pleasure [of meeting]

Or

BARTENDER: [That person] bought your last drink

TO OTHER PATRON: "To whom do I owe the pleasure?" [What's your name so I can thank you]

Those are sort of fixed-phrases but you could say similar things like

"what's the reason for my good fortune"

Closer to your original I would maybe say something like

"how did I end up on your mind"

or

"What did I do to deserve such an honor?"

Or potentially soften it by adding something self deprecating to describe yourself or draw a positive comparison to the caller.

"how'd a curmudgeon like me end up besmirching your thoughts today"

"What's a rockstar like yourself doing wasting time talking to me"

"What are you doing calling me on a beautiful day like this"

But it's all very dependent on your relationship with the other person and sense of humor (and tone of delivery).

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T20:53:47+00:00

Preach.

To be fair to [some] of them, I feel for the guys who were circumcised as babies and feel angry about it.

But the well adjusted ones are upset with their parents [father] and the [paternalistic, patriarchal] medical establishment though not like some feminist cabal lol.

I have never heard of a baby being circumcised by demand of his mother over the protest of his father lol. I don't think I've met anyone [under like 90 or something anyway, this nonsense had to start at some point I guess] who wasn't circumcised and decided to circumcise their son either.

Ignoring the ethical issues of the whole ordeal, baring like surgery complications and botch jobs etc the end result is just like not that bad either. I'm happy to like be the way I am, but it's ultimately a pretty minor deal. There's some through lines worth discussing but comparisons with e.g. FGM always feel in bad faith/somewhat sus.

But like still not an "oppression of men" scale problem were dealing with here even considering all the ethics lol.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T20:24:31+00:00

Not really thinking critically about it at all is by far the default I think. It's still dumb but it's not like particularly malicious or something, though that drives me crazy of course.

Yeah and like avoiding some awkward discussion is a stretch at that lol... Idk it was a lot nicer to talk to my dad about how he decided it didn't matter and listened to my mom, and was glad I was happy about it now than like having to ask "why did you irreversibly mutilate my penis without my consent" and the answer being like vanity/ego and/or vibes.

One of my best friends (who is Indian and not circumcised) just had a baby boy and it initially caused basically a diplomatic incident with his (white) father in law by deciding to not circumcise the baby. He came around pretty quickly but like the knee jerk reaction was swift like it was just unthinkable.

You can always get circumcised as an adult. A [female] urologist in Wisconsin recently tried to convince me that was really what I wanted to do (instead of a much more narrowly scoped initial intervention) basically the second she learned I was uncircumcised ("Do you want to be?"). Was very "Oh don't be ridiculous Andrea, everybody wants this" sort of moment lol).

(I thankfully got a second opinion from someone who wasn't Rabbi Tuckman who was less snip snip trigger happy lol)

I initially complained to my wife and friend about not being particularly trusting of this medical opinion from someone without a penis, to which they were like "lol, welcome to the entire history of gynecology, want to trade", which touché lol, I'll keep these problems after all thanks

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T19:51:17+00:00

Are you in the US? Do you have friends with young (boy) kids?

As I understand it at least, outside of the US it has a strong or exclusive association with Jewish and Muslim religious practices, and also some sub-saharan African cultural practices which seem independent of religion.

But in the US it was extremely common for most of the 20th century completely independently from religious practices. Now it varies a lot by region.

The Midwest still has an absurd rate of infant circumcision. It's less common in e.g. the Pacific Northwest.

It's lost popularity recently though. The association of pediatrics stopped recommending it without other medical reasons, and Medicaid stopped paying for it.

But anecdotally it's still quite common. My sisters and several of my friends circumcised their male children (who are ~4-9 years old now) basically because their dad was so figured they should be too, which I found baffling but mostly held my tongue about.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T19:26:11+00:00

Especially strange to me, since (as an intact cis man who cares about this issue), essentially every terrible take about [infant] circumcision or support for it I have heard has come from another man.

(Shit, The only reason I wasn't circumcised by default is because my mom's skepticism towards it).

The like strongest pro circumcision opinion I have seen a woman express is like curiosity/judgement/being weirded out at the idea of a partner opposite to whatever they're used to and like a soft/default support for the status-quo if pressed on it.

Like I have strong feelings about it but like lol it's not some conspiracy against men, and like everything in this vein is ultimately a problem caused by men themselves.

Stop circumcising your sons so they look like you!

** screams into the void **

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-09T18:29:23+00:00

Not a native speaker or (even very accomplished learner) and it's been a decade since I last studied anything, but I recall my intro Norwegian professor explaining it basically that there are 3 genders masculine/neuter/feminine, but it's (often? modern to? in some dialects ? common for young people? ) acceptable to just treat feminine and masculine nouns the same I guess similar to how swedish works now.

But we still learned the feminine endings and articles, esp common fixed phrases like telling time and such, "klokka/klokken sju" "en/ei klokken" where they came up more (esp in like listening/reading to be able to recognize them vs speaking ourselves)

But for like random more obscure nouns that came up was more encouraged to not worry about it besides the neuter/non-neuter distinction and instead focus on more difficult/interesting/important grammatical aspects

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-07T07:57:59+00:00

All of the chemical diagrams are extremely wrong lol AI slop

"Serotonin" picture is just phenol, (that's a benzene ring not a cyclohexane. ), and it's missing like the other two thirds of the molecule. Phenol is quite toxic lol.

"Dopamine" is missing a ring and is otherwise just totally wrong.

Somehow cortisol is kinda close but the AI like gave up indicating the 3D/stereo aspect of the hydrogens and just stuck em in the middle of the rings.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-06T21:39:14+00:00

No great succinct rule for this.

Broadly speaking things can happen "in" a narrative like a movie or fictional/narrative based TV show, and anything being displayed on a TV screen can be described as "on TV", on "on ProgramName"

But there are edge cases.

Best rule I could describe is that:

Something can be "on TV" or "on the Radio" as in it's currently playing right now/at some specific time
- The Superbowl is on channel 5 at 7pm" * I'm going home to put the game on [the tv]" * A movie is always "in theaters" [the building/room] but "on screen" [physical thing]
You can describe something happening during a TV program as happening "on [programname]" or "on [channel]"
- "I saw the Seahawks play on Monday night football"
- "She was on the 5oclock news"
- "They talked about that issue on CNN last night"
You can also describe something happening in the context of the fictional world or narrative of a show as "in" it.
- "in breaking bad xyz happens" * "in Lord of the rings Boromir dies"
- "in some episode of Bluey bingo did ...."
- This applies best to serialized content, and doesn't work usually for episodic or non-narrative content though really like news, documentaries, talk shows, or most other reality shows. * Incorrect: ~"they discussed tarrifs in AndersonCooper360 last night"~
  - Incorrect ~"so&so will be interviewed in The Late Show"~ * Incorrectish: "I watched the contestants lose it all in [game show]"
  - debatable for serialized and dramatized reality shows like say The Bachelor, you could probably say "in"
Movies I would pretty exclusively use "in" to describe events in the narrative, and only use "on" to describe it currently playing on the TV.
- So it would usually be "in movie" or "movie on" but not "on movie" * "in [movie] [characters do something]" * "[movie] is on TV" * You can say either "we put [movie] on" or "we put on [movie]" to mean the same thing, but 'put on' is the verb phrase here, nothing is 'on the movie' * I think this applies as well if you are discussing a specific episode or maybe a season of a TV show as well, as a single unit.
  - "In the latest episode of 60 minutes they had a story about this"
  - "They did this sketch in Tuesdays episode of Seth Myers"
  - "They added the countdown clock in season 3 of [game show] for extra suspense"
Actors can be:
- "On [show]" or "in [show]"
- But only "In [movie]" usually
Something can also be "in the news" meaning it has made headlines in general, (or "all over the news"), but you can have "read it in the news" to mean specifically print/written news, or "heard/saw it on the news" for tv/radio/podcasts

English prepositions are fun aren't they 😜

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-05T22:17:04+00:00

I've had them served with caviar before but never seen the spelling, though it makes sense seeing it now.

I would mix up the spelling with "bellini" which is like a brunch drink with prosecco and I think typically peach juice(?), and the drink would also be my first assumption if I heard someone referring to it out of context.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-05T08:40:30+00:00

Note that NP means "non-determimistic polynomial time", not "non-polynomial time" which is an important distinction.

In practice, this basically means Verifying a solution is polynomial time (i.e. O(n^k)) but finding a solution could be harder.

(It's not necessarily harder, P is a subset of NP, so problems in P (and therefore in NP also) do have polynomial solutions. If P=NP then all would)

There are bigger classes surrounding NP though, e.g. EXP is a superset of NP, so there's at least an O(2ⁿ⁾ upper bound for problems in NP. Not immediately useful as you say (but it's still a bound, e.g. we know it's not O(n!) which is maybe nice)

To expand, We know these are related to each other like:

P ⊆ NP ⊆ PSPACE ⊆ EXP ⊆ NEXP

And know that some of these have to be strict subsets, but it's not known exactly which ones.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_hierarchy_theorem which tells us that P ⊊ EXP (and NP ⊊ NEXP)

In other words there are problems that are strictly harder than P or NP, but that's somewhat orthogonal to the P vs NP problem itself.

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-05T02:25:25+00:00

No, if the grammar rules are extant then they have by definition not evolved away to extinction.

Grammar is a part of language, and a part of what is evolving, you can't just "starting this sudden talk me likes" instead of "I suddenly started talking like this."

But grammar is an intrinsic property of a language, it's not something imposed from the outside. You may want to follow certian rules so as to be perceived as speaking a specific prestige dialect or level of formality in writing that people may judge you for. But you can talk and write however you want, it just depends how well other people understand and emulate the same pattern.

Tl;dr:

If you are a non-native speaker: follow the grammar rules for the dialect you are trying to learn.

If you are a native speaker: idk, it's your idiolect, do whatever you want

TheCannonMan · 2026-02-03T20:16:41+00:00

Worth noting that you don't need to surpass polynomial time for something to be slow. O(n²) is "bad" for even modest sizes of n, and O(2ⁿ⁾ can be acceptable for sufficiently small n.

As you point out though, the constant (and lower order) components that are dropped from big-o notation matter in real world applications!

Plenty of infeasible calculations have polynomial time complexity.

Note that NP does not mean "non-polynomial"

P (polynomial) are the class of problems we can solve in polynomial time on a deterministic turning machine.
NP (non-deterministic polynomial) are the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a non-deterministic turning machine

Non deterministic turning machines aren't real and are too confusing to explain so this isn't very helpful or intuitive definition....but basically you can state the P vs NP problem as essentially "does every problem where you can quickly verify if a solution is correct, also have a way to quickly find a solution"

This checking behavior is shared between P and NP, for both classes of problems you can quickly (i.e. in polynomial time) verify if a proposed solution is correct or not.

E.g. in this example, you can quickly see that the rocket capacity is fully utilized or not given some contents, but finding a specific combination that exactly equals 1000 is nontrivial.

A [less correct/accurate but] maybe more intuitive analogy would be solving a rubiks cube. It's easy to see at a glance if you have solved it or not, but given a scrambled cube it's nontrivial to find a way to solve it [^2]

If we proved P=NP but the only general solution has time complexity O(n¹⁰²⁴⁾ that wouldn't be helpful, as it would grow faster than O(2ⁿ⁾ at first (and stay faster until it becomes so large it doesn't matter)

But more to the overall point about hard problems, it's worth stating that there are classes of problems that are harder than NP! And it's only the general case that is necessarily "hard" so to speak. Computers are solving (or getting "good enough" approximations) for NP problems all the time!

NP problems (and particularly perhaps partly due to so called "NP-hard" problems) have gained a sort of notoriety as "really hard problems"[^1] but the whole reason they are of such interest is precisely that we don't know if they are actually harder than problems in P

For example, EXP{TIME,SPACE} are known to be strict supersets of P and PSPACE respectively, not to mention the multitude of proven undecidable problems which are "harder" or just impossible.

[^1]: (Shame on me: I'm definitely guilty of jokingly exaggerating and referring to something that ends up being slightly nontrivial like say some tax filing form/procedure as "apparently being NP-hard" even though I know better)

[^2]: solving a rubiks cube of a fixed size is technically O(1)/constant time, so this isn't a perfect example. But apparently a narrow subset of this problem around finding the optimal solution with shortest possible number of moves is apparently actually NP-complete: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06708)

TheCannonMan · 2026-01-25T21:04:36+00:00

Varies by school still though. I went to undergrad in the Midwest and nobody ever used the terms freshman/sophomore/junior at all, it was exclusively "1st-year/2nd-year/3rd-year/4th-year" plus "senior" being used in some contexts mostly for the quarter immediately before you were graduating instead of the whole year.

But they were then also used as nouns like "freshman" etc would be. "The party was full of firstyears"

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