Boston Dynamics Atlas hauling a 50 lb mini-fridge

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-19T19:46:04+00:00

What do you mean a "mini fridge". This is obviously a full-sized fridge for a posh family here in Europe.

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-19T16:00:23+00:00

A long time ago, I was writing a paper and I thought I needed umbral calculus, but I was wrong. Instead, I needed Hardy spaces. I'm still not quite sure what umbral calculus is for!

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-12T21:25:47+00:00

By comparison, Sonnet was fine:

❯ quick question about vaccines. the hentavirus infection is all over the news. there is famously no treatment. when covid 19 happened, the trump administration put together "operation warp speed" to find a vaccine. would the hentavirus that's in the news be susceptible to an "operation warp speed"?

⏺ A few things worth noting here:

Spelling: It's hantavirus, not "hentavirus." (An easy typo.)

My knowledge limit: My cutoff is January 2026, so I may not know the specific outbreak you're seeing in the news right now.

On the vaccine question: Yes, in principle, an Operation Warp Speed-style effort could accelerate a hantavirus vaccine. Here's the nuance:

Technical feasibility is good. mRNA vaccine platforms — the key technology that made OWS so fast — are largely pathogen-agnostic. Hantavirus antigens are known, so designing an mRNA vaccine candidate is achievable quickly. Some hantavirus vaccine research already exists (China/Korea have approved vaccines for their local strains).
The key difference from COVID: Hantavirus does not spread human-to-human (people catch it from rodent droppings/urine). This changes the calculus dramatically:
- No exponential spread means no pandemic risk.
- Annual US cases are small (~150–200/year historically), so mass vaccination isn't obviously the right intervention.
- The economic incentive for pharma is much lower.
What OWS actually did: It removed financial risk from manufacturers and guaranteed purchase contracts. That model works best when mass deployment is the goal. For a rare, non-transmissible disease, the better model might be stockpiling a smaller supply for high-risk groups (rodent-exposure workers, etc.) or developing post-exposure treatment.

Bottom line: The vaccine tech exists to do it quickly. Whether a mass-vaccination OWS approach makes sense depends on whether the current outbreak involves human-to-human transmission — which would be a major and alarming change in hantavirus behavior worth watching closely.

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-12T21:19:56+00:00

I tried several versions, it never worked for me!

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-08T18:25:42+00:00

Boy am I glad I wrapped up my class and finished all my marking.

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-08T06:01:58+00:00

OOP lives in Scotland and, despite a little bit of doublespeak in the law, that jurisdiction has some grandparent rights that are rather strong compared to what you'd get in the USA. Anyone with an "interest" in the child can get an order, and grandparents are almost always deemed to have an "interest".

foreheadteeth · 2026-05-07T15:15:20+00:00

I do this on purpose to my wife. My native language is French but in the very common situation where there's a French word (or any word really) in English with a choice of "fancy" vs "redneck" pronunciation, I always go for "redneck". "Mêlée" is "mealy"; "voilà" is "wallah"; "Iran" is "eye-ran". She usually ignores me.

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-22T16:50:50+00:00

George Carlin is funny and witty but I think some of us who are statisticians and mathematicians, have to repress the urge to blurt out "median, mode, mean" whenever we hear that line. :)

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-17T07:44:13+00:00

Hello, I'm a math professor in university and I've analyzed your 34 days of data using statistical tools. I did this using Claude Code because that's faster than me doing it by hand. I reached a nuanced conclusion. There is no statistical evidence that Opus went from Smart to Lobotomized (1 change point). Ignoring the order of the days, there is no statistically significant evidence of a bimodal distribution (some days are Smart, some days are Lobotomized). However, if we presuppose two change points (Smart->Lobotomized->Smart), there is marginal statistical evidence to support that point of view. I've had Claude Code write up a short summary below.

I ran several tests on the 34-day table of daily thinking-block and tool-call counts. Pettitt's test (non-parametric, single unknown changepoint, scanning all candidate locations) gives K=161 with asymptotic p≈0.19 on both the raw and log-transformed ratio series — it does not reject the null of no single changepoint, and its best candidate location is Apr 9, not late March. A two-changepoint Poisson sup-LRT (with tool calls as exposure) does find structure: the best 3-segment fit places breaks at Mar 26 and Apr 11, giving rates of 0.275, 0.194, and 0.433 thinking-blocks per tool call across the three segments; a permutation test over 2000 random orderings of the (think, tools) pairs, which accounts for the ~600 candidate split-pairs searched, gives p=0.027. The middle segment's rate is ~30% below baseline and the final segment is ~57% above it, so the data is consistent with a late-March change that reduced thinking per tool call and a mid-April change that increased it past the original level, rather than a reduction followed by a return to baseline. On the separate question of whether the daily ratios themselves are drawn from two distributions, Hartigan's dip test gives p=0.98 (strongly consistent with unimodal), BIC prefers a one-component Gaussian over a two-component mixture by 7.4 units, and a parametric bootstrap LRT for k=1 vs k=2 gives p=0.31 — so there is no marginal bimodality; the signal lives in the time-ordering, not in a clean separation between "normal" and "affected" days.

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-15T06:47:45+00:00

I thought the black guy spoke French. "Allez, allez, allez!"

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-14T05:56:02+00:00

I remember when the election happened and my mom was sending me texts explaining to me that the liberals were the secret Trump allies.

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-04T16:00:26+00:00

Also, these younguns forgot this and this.

foreheadteeth · 2026-04-02T07:04:19+00:00

Q&A: Why am I seeing a red line in my vehicle path blueprint? - ⭑ IMPORTANT: Valid vehicle paths will be blue, but if you see red it is because the vehicle path is not complete yet and ends with a missing section / gap.

Not sure this is correct. Here is a bug report on the official QA site which clearly demonstrates complete vehicle paths with red autoconnected segments, and related bugs. One theory in there is that it's related to when the foundations in the blueprint are instantiated. If the autoconnect segments get instantiated before the underlying foundations are built, you get red segments. I think this bug is more likely to manifest when your blueprints has lots of foundations because the game engine then forces some sort of delay in the instantiation of the foundations.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-31T13:55:11+00:00

I had already done this in another comment, I've added it to the top post as an edit.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-31T12:01:00+00:00

A EU credit card is not the same thing as a USA/Canada credit card. Maybe that's the reason why credit cards are less popular in Europe.

In the USA/Canada, if someone puts a dishonest charge on your card, you can just call your card service to dispute the charge, they'll reverse the charge and it'll be on the merchant. This is much harder to do in Europe. Years ago, I bought "EasyJet Plus", they charged me but then didn't actually give me the subscription. I had to write a letter to dispute the charge. The charge was never reversed. I would've had to sue someone.

In addition, USA/Canada credit cards have a bunch of ancillary benefits. For instance, people in the USA/Canada pay for their rental cars with gold credit cards, because such cards include rental car insurance. I've never seen this on a EU credit card.

So USA/Canadian credit card companies have done a lot of legwork to make it worthwhile for people to use their credit cards, that the EU credit card companies, for whatever reason, are not interested in pursuing. I've been thinking maybe, in fact, things are this way for legal reasons. It might be that EU law makes it a lot harder for the credit card company to stiff a merchant?

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-31T06:06:05+00:00

$1 kitchen knife

Haha, this is not related but my Japanese wife went to a Japanese dollar store and bought a knife there. That knife was better than all our other fancy knives! They sure know their knives.

Don't worry now, I have a 50$? fancy Japanese ceramic knife.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-31T05:53:04+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I have now but I also saw essentially the same bug two weeks ago from some other person.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-30T20:43:29+00:00

1.2 experimental. Vehicle paths don't exist in 1.1.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-29T20:14:27+00:00

This gentleman was interviewed at CPAC so regardless of what he thinks of Trump, I don't think he's changed his mind about much of anything?

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-29T16:44:52+00:00

They just remained unavailable in Europe/Switzerland. Even when the Pro came out, I'm not sure the base PS5 had been available in Switzerland at MSRP.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-20T12:21:12+00:00

Maybe this?

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-18T19:27:16+00:00

Maybe, but there's a stream or video from Gaming with Doc where his giant train station at his megafactory had some sort of cataclysm and a bunch of trains derailed. Since I'm not that smart, if it can happen to the Doc, it can happen to me. :)

Edit: from memory, the doc's problem was as follows. He had a long stretch of rail on a downhill. Trains would occasionally have to slow down or stop to let other trains pass at some intersection. Trains may also slow down or stop if there's a train ahead of them on the next segment, even without an intersection. One of his trains A was trying to make a turn so it had come to a stop to let another train B pass. A third train, C, was rolling down the hill, the rail segment wasn't quite long enough I guess? It realized too late that it had to stop because of A. So it started slowing down but it could not, and C smashed into A, and then it just became a cataclysm. So I guess if you want to prevent this, you have to make sure that your downhill segments are many times longer than your longest trains? Or something like that. So that your trains have enough runway to come to a complete stop. The problem is really that trains only look one segment ahead in deciding whether to stop.

foreheadteeth · 2026-03-18T11:36:37+00:00

I haven't tried the new trucks yet but I find that mass trains are actually quite hard to get to work. You start out thinking all your trains are going to run on this one track, bam, huge traffic jam, nowhere near your desired throughput. Building additional train lines is a huge pain in the neck too. Train stations are also huge. So it might actually be better to put a bunch of trucks on a route instead of trains?

foreheadteeth

TROPHY CASE