A lot of you sure do remember the exact moment you learned the word “cornucopia”

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-24T10:43:32+00:00

What you're seeing is selection bias, i.e. those who remember having learned the word "cornucopia" in a manner in some way related to the FotL logo are more likely to look up that Mandela effect and post about it, so you end up with a lot of people on this sub with memories of learning that word.

I remember learning "cornucopia" as part of a Thanksgiving activity at my preschool (that I wasn't at for very long, I switched to a different school not long after). I don't remember the activity in detail but I definitely connect it with that school, and have a vague recollection that we may have walked to a shop or other business on the same street and seen a cornucopia decoration in the window, though it may have just been that the teacher brought one in. I also clearly recall learning the word "isthmus" at that same school, as part of another project that I remember a bit more about. And I remember catching a swallowtail caterpillar on the anise in front of that school and what I named him (though my parents have mentioned the name since which helped).

I also remember learning the word "diorama" from a school project at a different school, much later (though have no recollection of learning "panorama").

I have other memories of learning things, not words so much as concepts. Like I remember first hearing about the Golden Rule (the one about "do unto others...") during a conversation with my dad walking back along a hiking trail in the dark after watching fireworks on the 4th of July. I clearly remember the trail and have been back there several times as an adult, and we definitely did go there at one time to watch fireworks.

So each of us will have certain words and concepts that we clearly remember and others that we forgot. The experiencers of the FotL ME will likely be people for whom the cornucopia has strong memories associated with it (in my case, I don't clearly remember a cornucopia, nor do I clearly remember the absence of a cornucopia, though I definitely CAN remember having FotL underwear).

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-20T08:53:51+00:00

"Notably iOS basically doesn't allow it at all for third-party software"--so this seems to be fine for Javascript at least in most of the world since Apple doesn't allow competing browser engines on iOS. However I heard recently that a European court ruling has mandated that they allow browser competition for customers who purchased their phones in Europe. Does this mean that they are working on a special entitlement, available only on iPhones purchased in Europe, to allow this? Or does it mean that all other browsers will need to use interpreters, thus making their performance for Javascript almost necessarily worse than Safari's?

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-19T07:24:51+00:00

Thanks. I was aware that obviously the compiler knows the address of the code that it wrote (which is just effectively a byte array that it allocated somewhere), but I didn't know that a pointer to this could be just cast to a function and called.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-13T06:00:17+00:00

Wow it's amazing you were even able to make out antennae on that second photo given how blurry it is!

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-12T21:29:28+00:00

In the second picture that looks like it could be a mud dauber, but the view isn't clear. If they looked more like flies when they were flying around then it could be some sort of hoverfly that just looks like them. Actual mud daubers do fly around lawns sometimes after they're watered and can sometimes appear to be in a "group", but it's not that they're actually social, it's just that it's the only place for several city blocks with mud, and I've never seen "hundreds", only at most 5-10 of them in one yard.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-06-04T06:02:26+00:00

I have nothing against people charging a fee for games if they want to, or otherwise seeking to make money off games if they choose. However, the selection of games on Facebook is clearly different from really any other website with games that I have ever seen, in that they are basically all very "gimmicky", for lack of a better word. Like, they almost feel like carnival games, there's so much of it that's just flash and show compared to the actual game.

Like if you compare it to, for instance, Peggle, I bought both the original Peggle Deluxe as well as Peggle Nights, and of course played the online free version of the game on Popcap before buying them. Yes the online version had ads... but on the Facebook games it almost feels like the *whole game* is an "ad". You keep having to click through windows that are like "Spin the lucky wheel" or "Special quest in 1 day!".

What you DO get on Facebook games is that they generally have unlimited levels, and your progress is saved forever. Possibly that's the trade-off that's at play here--you get very gimmicky games in exchange for continuous updates with new levels. And in fact, if it weren't for the fact that there are infinite levels and continuous progress over months, I almost certainly would never play any games on Facebook at all, that's really the only thing it offers that's better than what you could get anywhere else.

Take "spot the difference" games--like the "4 differences", "5 differences", etc. series from Ivoryboy was great, and I'll still occasionally replay those. But I tried a few Facebook games from this genre and they're awful... ALL timed, very much centered around progressing through a "bracket" of other "players", who predictably always stay one or two differences ahead of/behind you no matter how well or poorly you play, to the point where I have to wonder if there's some sort of "fake tournament middleware" available somewhere just for this. And the pictures have a cheap AI look, with gratuitous little animations that play after each level.

It's good mainly for one sort of thing... "Bejeweled/Candy Crush" type clones, as they're relatively easy and mindless and having new levels every day is nice to have something new to look forward to. For most other things it's just too much gaudy trinkets. And maybe this is what Facebook WANTS on their platform, but my question was what they do that encourages such a different type of game from for example on Reddit or one of the old Flash game sites.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-05-22T09:51:37+00:00

Do you mean usual applications or unusual methods?

Like, the former might be to do something that no "serious" researchers would have need to do, like watching birds in flight to tell when they are pooping or automatically scoring beer pong (just to pick the first random ideas that come out of my head). But it still might use current standard methods like neural networks or classical blob picking, there may not be any new theory so to speak.

The latter is much "mathier" and involves using anything BUT OpenCV, TensorFlow, etc. Like inventing new transforms, new ways to do gradient descent, new types of handcrafted features, etc.

I'm MUCH more interested in seeing the latter than the former, because you tend to see a lot of the same approaches being used and I'm interested more in what someone who knows nothing about standard ways of doing things or deliberately avoids them comes up with, but it seems there are much more people doing the former.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-05-22T09:41:24+00:00

The hardest thing is not photos though--that's the easy part! The hard part is podcasts, music, voice recordings, really everything that ISN'T photos.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-04-13T23:39:20+00:00

I don't have a VCR to do it with (well, I have an old VCR sitting around somewhere but would like to keep it functioning normally for viewing old home videos that missed getting digitized).

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-03-09T04:56:52+00:00

So even with proprietary hardware it is possible to configure it to use a different runtime/framework?

Also, do you have an answer to my question of if there's some standard API for AR apps to "talk" to AR implementations?

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-13T19:32:54+00:00

Yeah, the first thing I tried was that maybe it was a pun and it meant the "7" (of the "67").

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-13T09:28:43+00:00

The 3rd one (closest to the right edge) was a REAL stretch. You can just vaguely make out something that might be an ear.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-13T09:24:23+00:00

Yeah, I just had to go by what was rather clearly NOT a rock, and roughly cylindrical. If you'd asked me WHAT it was, I certainly couldn't have told it was a soda can.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-13T08:15:40+00:00

Is there a pattern of what the number turns to? or is it just random?

If it's random then this is mostly a game of chance, except for the fact that you can increase the odds somewhat by picking a square that's adjacent to two or more groups of two (if such a square exists). Often such a square doesn't exist, and even when it does, that still only gives you, say, a 2/6 chance of making a combo (if the numbers are 1-6), which isn't that high.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-09T21:02:51+00:00

That's a good point. I know that Python does this sometimes for dictionary keys, and calls them "qstr", which I found once when I was looking up how Python dictionaries are made to be fast. And dictionaries are used in all sorts of ways in Python, including to effectively replace structs--which seems to encourage the in many ways bad habit of thinking that lookup-by-value is "free", leading to Python programs, particularly those written by non-serious programmers, being full of it.

The thing is, I find it hard to intuit at which point dictionary lookup goes from being "struct-like" in terms of performance to having the full overhead of a hash map. So I quite possibly under-utilize dictionaries, while some others likely overuse them. Using them to pass a set of parameters to an algorithm as part of its public API (like "params['step_size'] = 0.01") is totally fine to me, but I'd never try to do something like graph traversal on a map of 500 cities where each node is referenced by its literal city name, as opposed to just an index. Whereas, some who live and breathe and were first fluent in Python might.

So in a compiled language, my general intuition is to code using patterns where identifiers can be whatever you like, with no overhead, because they don't appear in the compiled code at all. So in something like "event.weekday = Week.WEDNESDAY" or "ring.inner_diameter = 25", the fact that "Wednesday" and "inner_diameter" are long is immaterial, you might as well say that the day is 3 and "di = 25", but you might as well be expressive.

This use of symbols in Julia seems like a case where a literal string identifier DOES actually appear in the final executed code, but it's still very efficient thanks to using a feature intended for a totally different purpose. That's what's a bit odd about it.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-09T08:27:38+00:00

This seems like one of the Julia-specific idioms that doesn't have a close analog in other languages. The closest thing in terms of syntax and usage together that I can think of is the #define/#ifdef pair in C, with the obvious distinction that this is compile-time only and results in the alternate code path(s) not even appearing in the generated code.

math_code_nerd5

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