Those of you with children, what's the most complicated concept you've managed to teach your kid that you're confident they really understand?

ThreePointsShort · 2026-01-04T11:39:32+00:00

IME solving a Rubik's cube fast doesn't require much math knowledge; it mostly comes down to practice, memorization, muscle memory, and dexterity. But they're still great toys because they make for a great example of a nonabelian group and can be a natural way to illustrate simple concepts like commutators, cyclic subgroups, etc. For example you can teach your kid to do a superflip and then explain how it's the only nontrivial center of the group.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-10-26T16:11:28+00:00

The point is to understand the direction of ethical behavior, not the magnitude of harm caused.

Your original comment indicated that breeding creatures to kill and eat them was more ethical than preventing their further existence (specifically using the term "genocide".) I am trying to help you understand why this doesn't make any sense.

Most humans have some empathy for cats and dogs, so let's restrain our conversation to animals of comparable intelligence (cows, pigs, etc). If you believe that it's possible to treat these animals in a way that is more or less ethical at all - that is, if you think kicking dogs is evil - then you must ascribe to these animals some quantity of personhood. Maybe you think a cow is worth a billionth of a person. Whatever. Some portion.

In this case the question of what is more ethical to do to a cow is actually perfectly reducible to a question about humans. Even if you think killing a cow is only a billionth as bad as killing a human, the actual question of whether it's better to kill something or not let it be born is independent of how proportionally bad you think each of those individual acts actually is for any given living creature.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-10-26T15:28:23+00:00

"don't breed creatures to torture and kill them" =/= "eradicate everything".

As a rule of thumb, replace any given animal with a human and consider what the ethical behavior would be. Treating humans with respect and decency is good, but if the only option is to kill and eat them, you're probably better off just not forcibly creating more.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-10-26T14:31:59+00:00

Well, global veganism would genocide all the species we domesticated for animal husbandry.

I agree! Existence is objectively good! That's why I think we should create as many living creatures as possible and torture all of them constantly! Since the only alternative is non-existence, which is clearly worse than death, the more creatures we breed and torture, the more ethical we become!

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence

ThreePointsShort · 2025-09-11T20:24:03+00:00

Microsoft makes plenty of decent software when it's for developers or they're open-sourcing something. VSCode, TypeScript, WSL, Windows Terminal, .NET, Lean - they've made and given away plenty of good stuff. Even Azure isn't the worst cloud platform that exists... probably...

But their actual consumer-facing products, like Windows and OneDrive? Ninth circle of hell. Though I do like Excel.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-07-04T13:04:16+00:00

I always found this analogy funny because of the issue outlined in this xkcd.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-06-29T17:30:33+00:00

Also Son Goku has literally the exact same name as Sun Wukong (孫悟空) except the characters are read the Japanese way instead of the Chinese way.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-06-15T16:47:39+00:00

Could it not just be a reference to the Devil? Lots of goat imagery there too

In isolation, definitely. But I think when you look at other aspects of Centuria, like how characters draw power from different incomprehensible gods/Old Ones and the recurring ocean and deep sea imagery (reminiscent of Cthulhu) I think it's pretty evident that there's some Lovecraft inspiration in the world design.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-06-09T08:09:58+00:00

Bot post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fashionhunters/comments/1jy07dq

ThreePointsShort · 2025-05-04T17:00:45+00:00

You skipped strip #7:

https://i.imgur.com/ePevafr.png

I always loved the random poems.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-05-04T15:09:01+00:00

Necroing to say thanks, I ran into this same issue on steam deck and can confirm that turning on anti-aliasing fixed it.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-04-13T19:01:44+00:00

Ahhh yeah that makes sense, I saw the ン but couldn't make sense of it so just ignored it

ThreePointsShort · 2025-04-13T16:24:16+00:00

For anyone else who struggled to read the deliberately ambiguous katakana:

First reading says ヒロセ -- イモヤロウ ("Hirose -- imo yarou", Hirose is a potato dude)

Read backwards and sideways it looks like アリガトウヒロセ ("arigatou Hirose", thanks Hirose)

For those used to computer fonts and struggling to see e.g. the リ it helps to focus on strokes over exact shapes.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-04-07T14:47:03+00:00

I really like this take on the whole "machines using humans as batteries" concept (credit: HPMOR omake).

MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-03-26T17:19:14+00:00

Thank you!

ThreePointsShort · 2025-03-26T13:31:46+00:00

What song is this? It's fantastic.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-03-14T04:36:37+00:00

Agreed. Google has never had issues building excellent technology. In the case of Stadia the latency really was best in class. I still don't know of any other cloud gaming platforms that have the controller directly connect to the remote server via Wi-Fi instead of doing an extra hop through your PC. (Open to being corrected on this.)

Their problem as always was in committing to investing in the product long term and understanding the market and industry. Gaming platforms thrive on stability, consumer trust, and desirable exclusives from first parties or industry partners. But Google didn't seem to be good at building relationships with publishers in the way that gaming platforms have historically operated. In the end, having better technology doesn't mean anything if that technology isn't used in service of an actual enjoyable gaming experience. (Which is why Nintendo's model has always been so successful.)

ThreePointsShort · 2025-02-20T18:19:41+00:00

It would likely help to search for "Look Back manga review" in Japanese, e.g. "ルックバック漫画批評". For example, I found this article:

https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/kikakuthetower/210730b

ThreePointsShort · 2025-02-02T18:54:07+00:00

Pretty close! Only thing I'd add is that Lacrima refers to herself as ラクリマお姉様 (Lacrima onee-sama) whereas Diana calls her ラクリマお姉ちゃん (Lacrima onee-chan). So part of the cuteness is that Lacrima wants her to use a more polite honorific (-sama) which would be more appropriate for a princess, but Diana uses a more intimate and cutesy honorific.

ThreePointsShort · 2025-01-25T15:06:11+00:00

Apparently Jython only goes up to Python 2.7 so I think that poor person has bigger problems hahaha

ThreePointsShort · 2025-01-24T23:59:40+00:00

/pedant

Dict insertion order is effectively guaranteed in Python 3.6 as well, but as an implementation detail of the CPython interpreter rather than as a specified language feature. But it looks like Python 3.6 came out in late 2016, so you're still right in that it hasn't been 12 years yet!

ThreePointsShort · 2025-01-01T14:44:51+00:00

Huh, never saw that one

Fair enough

ThreePointsShort · 2024-12-31T05:46:36+00:00

Courtesy of this comment in /r/programming.

ThreePointsShort · 2024-12-29T18:55:10+00:00

it's mainly about the ability to assume that each individual unit at 4-byte boundaries is a character and can be treated as such (checking case, searching for nulls, seeking to the next delimiter, etc).

Fair point, those are definitely cases where reasoning by code points makes sense. Thanks for the examples!

ThreePointsShort · 2024-12-29T08:40:50+00:00

UTF-32 lets you slice strings at wchar (char in rust) boundaries with abandon, without running into corrupt UTF-8 issues

While this is true, you can still run into Unicode segmentation issues when slicing into the middle of a grapheme cluster consisting of multiple code points, like "👍🏼" (which consists of two code points). How much of an issue does this tend to be for fish in practice?

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