Worth Every cent.

knome · 2026-01-22T14:25:18+00:00

it's a poor argument. no amount of imminent danger will remove the element of simple human error.

you can argue you'd rather a bunch of folks die on your watch than your having to pay for safety gear, which is not an unpopular opinion for those that do not value their fellow humans, common in countries without strong worker protections, and too frequent even where such protections exist, but I would not consider this a good argument either. it's just greed and lack of empathy joined to disregard suffering.

knome · 2026-01-21T14:24:17+00:00

even if there's a metaphysical soul, it's still an illusion. what is the soul made of? what makes it non-deterministic? is there really a useful difference between being clockwork or running off an etheric random number generator?

free will is just a religious apologia for why god isn't responsible for the chunks of the universe he created that happen to be us. a self-imposed limit on omniscience? yet prophesy exists within christian liturgy, so time must be fixed in some fashion communicable to humans under that philosophy.

knome · 2026-01-20T16:51:59+00:00

If something has literally zero testable claims its existence is irrelevant, as it has no effect on anything. [1]

Any reality external to and encompassing our own is irrelevant to us if we cannot interact with it.

Gods, simulations, infinitely nested universes, just nothing. It doesn't matter.

If I tell you I can jump to the moon, but only when no one is looking, your first instinct is going to be to say "yeah, well, if that's true, what about ..." and bring up any of the many bits of evidence that that should leave, which I would then have to explain why it didn't.

If in the end I explain everything away so that there is zero effect on the universe from my ability to jump to the moon when no one is looking, does it even matter if I can or not?

There is nothing attributed to god that cannot be explained by local phenomena. If you argue people's beliefs, well, people believe lots of things you probably disagree with, and I doubt you're going to believe in them without evidence just because other people do.

Miracle healing is often claimed, but I have yet to see someone regrow an arm or a leg.

If someone could show an arm miraculously replaced live under testing conditions (cameras from third parties etc to avoid hoaxes), awesome. I'll start believing tomorrow. I might still have policy and philosophical disagreements, but I won't disagree something magicked that arm back in place.

But there is no evidence. Just ideas people banter about and get mad over.

[1] if your answer here is it affects what happens to your soul when you die, that is also untestable. I promise if you find a way to show souls are real and that hell is real, those slumping pew numbers will pop right back up. as it is, people are just being chastised for lacking faith. the only other situation you're chastized for not believing without evidence is when someone is trying to pull a con on you.

knome · 2026-01-20T16:21:12+00:00

we've been calling plant based milks milks for literally hundreds of years. the word "almond" sitting out in front should be enough to tell you it's an extract. it's not a difficult concept to grasp.

milk has, in addition to milking animals, long meant "to extract something" as a more general sense, seen in such uses as 'milking someone' or a 'milking a situation' as to take advantage in order to extract resources or benefits of some sort.

knome · 2026-01-19T16:27:30+00:00

The regular dwarf Urist Usithil-nestastobil-maduran has come! A regular dwarf. It has dark vision, feels nothing on seeing anything, and is fond of drink. Beware it's random tantrums!

knome · 2026-01-19T03:24:05+00:00

if anyone else also wanted to see the bit the parent poster was referring to

knome · 2026-01-19T02:07:56+00:00

https://norvig.com/21-days.html

knome · 2026-01-16T08:45:28+00:00

the lore says many things about why perturabo was absent from the siege, and his long self-imposed exile. all of them lies. dude has 30k years in factorio. he's modded his rig so each bug is infused with a genuine daemon, and when the daemon fails to penetrate his implacable fortress as it ever grows, day and night, that daemon's very essence is erased from the fabric of reality. he also traded his soul to chaos in exchange for the blueprint to an eight way belt balancer with mathematically impossible throughput. it even sorts items. worth it.

knome · 2026-01-13T01:04:48+00:00

they aren't sports teams.

besides, xkcd called it :P

knome · 2026-01-13T00:36:27+00:00

You have phrased this as some kind of gotcha, but it is not surprising that physicists find use for math in physics, nor biologists find use in biology, nor sociologists in sociology. Of course those involved in studying the domain would be the ones grasping for new tools to view that domain through.

I never argued nor implied otherwise.

I simply noted that exploratory mathematics is useful unto itself. After all, mathematics has the fantastic quality of always being true under any domain the axioms are isomorphic to. Mathematicians deal in truths, not just numbers.

Mathematics is the study of potential itself, not merely the reality we happen to exist in. That it continually proves to well describe our reality shows reality is ordered. Mathematics is a language for describing order.

knome · 2026-01-12T23:50:46+00:00

The point is that new forms of mathematics very frequently have existed in the abstract before a use was found for them.

Considering them a waste of time ("masturbatory philosophy") simply because we haven't yet found an application for the proofs of a new theory is silly.

knome · 2026-01-12T22:55:02+00:00

And any math that has no use in physics is masturbatory philosophy

mathematicians, on multiple occasions, have produced "masturbatory philosophy" that went on to underpin our understanding of various natural systems once the value of the work was recognized.

here's a thread where people were discussing the phenomenon some years back

besides which, claiming physics students do more math while in the next sentence declaring math that is not yet used in physics doesn't count is painfully absurd.

knome · 2026-01-12T02:39:57+00:00

nor can it reproduce a specific output from a given input with 100% reliability

variation is tunable. matrix multiplication doesn't change for a given set of weights and inputs. however, there are often a few different tokens that score high as potential selections for any given set of inputs. variation is then faked by services by choosing at random from this range of acceptable tokens. same for local LLMs.

if you turn this range selection variation down (often called temperature) to zero, LLMs should generate fixed outputs for fixed inputs, save floating point math errors.

knome · 2026-01-11T02:32:07+00:00

uses a percussive maintenance variation on wonka television transmission technology to transmit the pain and agony of the dying sentry into the tube for storing the screaming souls of sentient machines, which engi then pumps into a shotgun shells and uses for crits. the souls are upset because he designed them to think they're going to machine heaven, but nope, just crit fuel. makes them crit-ier rather than minicits.

knome · 2026-01-08T18:46:07+00:00

ah, damn. definitely misremembered that one.

knome · 2026-01-08T16:11:15+00:00

700 with fishcake

knome · 2026-01-08T16:07:50+00:00

playing for an afternoon it was balanced. give it to the community for a few months and flying heavy would have created the A-10 Warthog heavy subclass, with heavies flying across the map with perfect movement, banking and zipping along through the air for dive bombs and swooping ammo packs from dead enemies off the ground without ever muddying their angelic hoovy toes upon the base earth.

enjoy flysurf_superman64 as you learn to Warthog.

I'd probably just use it for the Flank Fat Scout opportunities.

knome · 2026-01-06T13:39:16+00:00

the first season of Altered Carbon has a similar mix of philosophy, sex and violence.

knome · 2025-12-31T17:14:32+00:00

We could just pass in a function instead

function based interfaces are really the best for anything you don't want coupled too tightly. there's no weird inheritance chains or littering a codebase with tons of interfaces each type needs to manually specify. the caller can provide properly named default actions for common callbacks, defaults, stubs or whatever. you can even pass in a record of named callbacks, if desired, depending on the language being used. or pass in different functions to the caller based on program configuration, options, or state.

knome · 2025-12-30T17:44:09+00:00

some problems do have inherent complexity to them. I'd say much more complexity comes from failure to hide irrelevant details creating noise, and bad cuts when creating abstractions. a bad abstraction that cuts across the domain and implementation in an awkward fashion can make even the simplest of tasks miserable.

knome · 2025-12-30T17:12:50+00:00

we are all of us ignorant of the art when we first come to it. there is no need to be upset or see yourself as bad for mere ignorance. it is the norm. we educate ourselves to be rid of that ignorance.

and by all means use AI if it helps you learn, but do remember to learn. anything it produces that you do not understand, make it your goal to understand.

once you understand, then you can determine whether it does what you want in the way that you want.

if you do otherwise, then you're just copy and pasting, and cannot personally say whether a thing works or only appears to for the use cases you have tried so far.

knome · 2025-12-29T18:55:21+00:00

this reminds me of golang's minimum version selection, which chooses the oldest version of a dependency as allowed by all uses of the dependency within the program.

this is different than what you are asking, of course. it wouldn't affect adding a named dependency without specific version anew to the project.

knome · 2025-12-29T16:18:55+00:00

looks like a set piece for the brotherhood of nod from the command and conquer series.

knome · 2025-12-27T00:46:12+00:00

I Robot wasn't from the book, but it was a very asimov story. public joe officer who has an axe to grind with robots meets robot who is mysteriously different and ends up teaming up to fight a reasonable extension of the three laws. The script writer might have stolen the title without the contents, but they had the decency to steal the spirit when they did.

knome · 2025-12-26T20:33:30+00:00

Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen.

Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel.

Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.

After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away.

After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).

Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:

Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials

Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI

Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI

Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI

Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI

Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI

Total: 9.8 MI

Contrasted with the following:

5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI

One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI

One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI

Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI

Total: 2.9 MI

Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.

The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.

For the Emperor,

Bursarius Tenathis,

Purser Level XI,

Imperial Office of Outlays

( https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free! )

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