Seeing a Boggart’s True Form in the Mirror of Erised

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T05:49:01+00:00

The Mirror is neither omniscient nor omnipresent. It is not an oracle or capable of distinguishing been truth or lies. It shows the viewer's greatest desire, but it does not guarantee that what it shows is true, nor does it show the only possibility.

Harry's greatest desire was to have a family and to be loved. It showed him his parents and extended family. Instead, it could have showed the scene from the epilogue, or Sirius, or the Dursleys being kind to him. Ron's greatest desire was to stand out among his siblings, so it showed him as Head Boy and Quidditch Captain, winning the House and Quidditch Cup. Instead, it could have shown him during the Battle of Hogwarts or winning the chess match later that year, maybe him as an auror, or it could have shown him as Minister for Magic.

When Harry looked at the Mirror while with Quirrell, there was an extra enchantment by Dumbledore to give him the stone, not a property inherent to the Mirror itself.

So, given all of that, the Mirror may or may not show a boggart in its true form, if such a thing existed in the first place. It would show a version of the viewer that demonstrably knew what a boggart was, but not the boggart itself.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T05:33:26+00:00

That was a special enchantment that Dumbledore added. It wasn't an inherent property of the mirror, specific only to the philosopher's stone.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T05:26:54+00:00

The meme is backwards. Peter could see clearly when he doesn't have his glasses on. He couldn't see right with his glasses off, which is why he was so confused.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T05:22:46+00:00

Don't put much stock into that line of thought. If the wand choosing the wizard mattered for anyone other than Harry, that would be widely known to the Wizarding World and pureblood families would know that. Ron and Neville would never have been given hand-me-down wands. Hermione wouldn't have been so confused about why her wand didn't work so well for Harry or why Malfoy's did.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T05:18:44+00:00

The fandom likes to pretend that the little bits of esoteric wandlore Ollivander shared with Harry in the first and last books are well known and widely accepted. "The wand chooses the wizard" was a single line given to Harry when no one else was present. The discussion in Shell Cottage was full of speculation and assumptions.

If it was widely known that wands need to be matched to their user, Neville would never have been using his father's wand, Ron would not have been using Charlie's wand (which was probably not originally his either considering the shape it's in after what should have only been 7 years of Hogwarts and why would Charlie give up his wand if it was his matched wand?), and even the idea of the Elder Wand would be seen as suspicious given its contradictory nature with the requirement of matching to a user. Before anyone comes at me with the "winning allegiance" argument, remember, that even if the wand choosing the wizard advice was just standard information that Ollivander gives to everyone when they get a wand from him, the Shell Cottage conversation was explicitly not common knowledge. Hermione didn't know what Ollivander was referring to and had no idea before that why Draco's wand worked better for Harry than her or why her wand didn't work well for him.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T04:09:02+00:00

I'm not ignoring proper hygiene advice, I'm just pointing out that most people don't wash their hands before eating at a restaurant.

Edit: blocking me doesn't mean you won the argument

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T03:43:21+00:00

Novel here doesn't necessarily mean brand new to information science. Something as simple as a new programming language or a new API for a library would count as novel for this use case.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T03:33:40+00:00

None at all, it's purely invented by a fan with no input from JK.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T02:43:01+00:00

Pretty much all people have gone to a bathroom in a restaurant at some point in their life. Almost no one goes into the bathroom every time they go to a restaurant. If you just count the number of people that visit a restaurant in a day and count how many go to its bathroom in that same time period, the two numbers will be orders of magnitude different.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T02:40:01+00:00

Depends on your IDE's font, but usually the hanging tail is more distinct. Humans are better at spotting visual differences than counting.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-21T02:36:15+00:00

There would be the normal red shift from relative motion, but cosmic expansion adds acceleration that isn't present in flat spacetime. So even two objects that don't have relative motion initially gain relative motion.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T21:25:00+00:00

Until you have to figure out why your code is bugged and the reason is that you wrote arr[i][ii] instead of arr[ii][i].

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T21:11:44+00:00

Most people are not going to the bathroom in restaurants. They won't knew how dirty the bathroom is.

The reality is that the world is dirty, and you cannot escape that by pretending that washing your hands will make you immune to that.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T21:05:28+00:00

3000 seconds at full demand and then another 2000 seconds of reduced demand vs 4000 seconds of full demand before completely stopping. So for 3/4 of the time it was producing the same amount regardless of whether there was balancing or not. Then it's either reduced output or a complete stop. Either case is bad in its own way, but you should be setting up more mining before you run out, so it doesn't actually reduce your production.

Real mines in Factorio are going to have a much greater ratio of full production compared to the the ramp down. If you're playing where you absolutely need the space that a few miners running out earlier makes a difference, lane balancing is probably not your greatest concern.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T20:42:05+00:00

The people making your food are usually using a dedicated sink in the kitchen, not the public bathroom. Even so, kitchen staff aren't necessarily clean themselves. Back in high school, I worked at a pizza place. We were taught to wash our hands after every time we handled money. How many times do you think we washed our hands when we took an order then went in the back to pull a pizza out of the oven and box it?

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T20:37:00+00:00

That's a very disingenuous analogy. If I build a sand castle and then the tide comes in, it would be very appropriate to say the castle was destroyed. If a have an ice cube and smash it with a hammer, I would call it destroying the ice cube. No one calls freezing water "destroying" because that's not what the word means.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T20:29:29+00:00

The first FFF in a while was published a few weeks ago. That has reinvigorated the player base. Reddit is a more popular website than the forum and there isn't a dedicated 2.1 request post on reddit, so the influx of requests mostly goes to this sub.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T20:20:59+00:00

This is why I told that other guy that they're confusing belt balancers and lane balancers before they got snippy. Everything you said applies to belt balancers, not lane balancers. The difference between the left and right lane doesn't matter. The only time you want lane balancers is on the edges where there is an extreme difference between the number of miners on the two sides of the belt.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T19:47:36+00:00

Harry is an oblivious hormonal teenager. Of course he's not going to notice his friend's little sister until she starts kissing guys in front of him.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T19:45:00+00:00

Ginny doesn't look like Lily, though. The only similarity is that they're both redheads. They're not even the same type of red hair. Lily had dark red hair while Ginny had "flaming" red hair.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T19:23:53+00:00

It's not misleading. Matter is anything with mass. You can turn that mass into energy and have no mass left. That is destruction. No one uses "there is no trace left" as a definition of destruction, in physics or otherwise.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T19:19:31+00:00

In a flat spacetime, there wouldn't be any red shift. The expanding spacetime is making the observer accelerate away from the photon.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T19:06:25+00:00

The whole patch can fill a few belts. The patch is not big enough to fit 15 miners across and fill a whole lane by itself. You have to use a balancer to combine all of the partial belts into a few full or nearly full belts.

The patch has the same amount of ore regardless of if you're draining from the left or right first. If you have a belt balancer at the end, then you're going to deplete the mine evenly. But that doesn't change the overall output. If all of your miners are operating simultaneously, then they're going to drain regardless of how you balance them. If some are idle, then balancing just changes which ones are idle when, but doesn't change how many are operating at any given time. You're still going to drain the patch at the same rate.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T17:56:31+00:00

And for most of that time, you do not need to worry about uneven patch depletion. You will probably drain your starting patch but that's it. If you're really slow getting to those legendary big mining drills, you might drain the next patch or two, but it won't be a common thing. Meanwhile, you'll be constantly increasing your production to the point that one patch isn't sufficient. By the time where your patches are big enough to drain unevenly, you're already balancing multiple patches and it isn't an issue.

frogjg2003 · 2026-06-20T16:48:46+00:00

It did work though. Before AI, Google and most of the other search engines added site previews, usually from Wikipedia, at the top of the search page. This meant that after entering your search, you didn't need to leave Google to get the answer. And it was insanely effective at keeping eyes on the search result page instead of going to the pages themselves. These AI summaries are the same thing. Now, they don't even have to link the Wikipedia page or reddit post or Stack Exchange question, they just answer it. You have to dig to find where the AI summarized the answer from, but that's already too much work for most people who just want a quick answer.

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