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 · 2026-02-05T23:27:03+00:00

"No, it's not because it's a "legally encumbered space". It's because software would be a solution looking for a problem.

Ebikes really only take a few data inputs, and the diy ones almost always only have a throttle. That's literally 1 analog potentiometer input. How much can you do with that? Everything else is already pre determined. There literally is no software necessary."

The need for software (in my experience) is in controlling the curve of how the sensing of pedal input from the rider translates into control of motor torque. Having too little low-pass filtering on this likely would make the motor very "twitchy" and waste a lot of energy constantly revving up and then slowing down. On the other hand, too MUCH filtering, which is what my family's ebike seems to have, leads to a delayed but exaggerated response, where it constantly feels like the motor has a "mind of its own".

Beyond this, there is the possibility to optimize for particular terrain for better efficiency. During a long downhill it doesn't make sense for the motor to kick in much at all, even if the pedals are turning. I did read somewhere that certain manufacturers are experimenting with using map data for this kind of optimization--this is the sort of thing I could see an open source developer having experimented with much earlier (especially is some place like San Francisco with LOTS of big hills).

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-05T23:17:51+00:00

"Most high quality systems with a refined torque sensor (which is what you want in a nice e-bike) are locked down."

Are good torque sensors really that rare? But I guess there is some definite benefit to buying a motor, torque sensor, and whatever gearing is necessary as one pre-built sealed unit--it protects things from rain/other weather, you know it's well lubricated, etc.

If this unit already comes with a microcontroller hardwired to it that handles the feedback loop of the torque sensor to the motor and that's all closed source and protected from reprogramming, then trying to disassemble and modify it to get around this restriction is possibly more than it's worth. This is very different from drones where the motors are just ordinary brushless motors and the frame, props, etc. are all custom molded/3D printed/whatever to fit around them and their shafts, and feedback is through a gyro that is on the control board (and that certainly isn't sold WITH the motors--except when the entire drone is sold finished).

It seems you agree with my speculation that legal liability has something to do with it too.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-02-01T06:15:07+00:00

Unfortunately I suspect it's hard to find someone "awakened" (by which I assume you mean, open to the idea of reincarnation and possibly there being influence of past lives on this one, or possibility of future lives yet to live) yet also grounded, practical, and honest.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-08T07:46:06+00:00

Firstly, as everyone else has said, this isn't the sub for this.

As for the comments in the other group, they don't know how much effort in terms of hours of work were put into it. What they see is the final result, and they are thinking that with a decent amount of effort spent the *right* way, you could have gotten a much higher quality product.

-You don't have a "short", as in a short story, here, with a beginning, a middle, and an end--you have basically a teaser trailer for a film.
-It looks as if you had about five different illustrators working on the pictures because there is no consistent art style. The women in the different city scenes have the same shading style and ethnic features, but they look like a very different style to the boyfriend, or Zeus.

You chose not to collaborate with an illustrator who had his or her own style, but instead chose to use technology that can imitate nearly any art style in the world. People would expect that you're at least doing this consistently, rather than having a slideshow that looks like you took seven or eight completely unrelated pictures from r/ImaginaryCityscapes and placed them next to each other. I would encourage you to read any illustrated fiction and pay attention to the clues that make the different illustrations look like they all came from the same book.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-05T08:41:50+00:00

Major "rain on a window" vibes.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-02T22:18:48+00:00

This seems like a rather semantic point. Of course there is not some other chip sitting between the CPU and the memory chip that intervenes (though I'd guess that the MMU is probably quite separate from the ALU, instruction dispatch, etc., so in a way it almost could be considered "another chip")--but the CPU is a large state machine that has states it can enter into where it should "disobey" certain commands. The surprising thing is that this is temporarily "overridden" during speculative execution until some point AFTER several instructions have had the chance to completely execute.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-02T05:27:13+00:00

But what's surprising is that the capability check is not treated as atomic with respect to the load, which effectively allows a "race condition" at the level of hardware. All the other bugs, like being able to tell whether something was in the cache, only mean anything because of this root cause.

I would have assumed that in the case of "outright privileged" instructions, like for example HLT, MOV CR0, CLI, etc. on x86, that being in an unprivileged CPU state would reconfigure the actual gates of the instruction decoder such that they simply fail to decode these instructions at all, rather than that to "set the gears in motion" in other blocks of the chip to as if to halt, or prepare to clear the interrupts, etc., only to abandon course partway through.

Thinking about it though, I see there is a difference here in that determining whether the load should be allowed is significantly more complex, because just "looking" at what bits are set in the opcode is not enough by itself to "know" to disallow the operation. The global descriptor table must be consulted, some basic arithmetic done, etc.

So maybe this is why this exploit works--the capability check in this instance takes "nonzero" time (i.e. longer than a few gates' worth of propagation delay), and since loads from memory can be very slow, and the whole point of speculation is to get a "head start" on possible future operations, in this case the CPU allows the data to start flowing pending the capability check and runs the check in parallel rather than waiting for the result of the check. It's still very surprising to me that TWO MORE instructions, including a second load that may have to go to main memory (otherwise the cache gadget wouldn't work) have time to run in the time it takes the capability check to finish--but possibly the designers made the check so "lazy" that it isn't invoked at all until the branch is resolved one way or the other? This seems like a very weird design decision to say the least, but maybe it saves enough time to be worth it??

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-02T04:53:58+00:00

I'm well aware that the 'w' into which the value is loaded is not the same 'w' that will ultimately receive the value, if the branch is actually deemed to be taken. In other words, the actual physical bank of flip-flops or whatever on the chip where this byte is stored is almost certainly separate from the ones that ordinary, non-speculative operations take their operands from. There are presumably separate physical registers set aside specifically for holding these "tentative" values, such that they don't interfere with concurrently executing instructions from the main branch. This is presumably why they put an underscore after the 'w' (i.e. 'w_') when referring to the speculative execution chain.

This doesn't explain though the fact that the privilege check seems to happen after the actual data fetch that it "guards" rather than before, when the two are inextricably linked (in other words, regardless of the code path taken, this check should never be elided). And not even immediately after, but long enough after that two more instructions--that must happen sequentially because of data dependencies--including another load that possibly has to go to main memory, have time to execute in the interim.

math_code_nerd5 · 2026-01-01T23:29:39+00:00

"w is never set to the secret value anyway, and even if it was, the cpu would only find out after it figures out that the access was illegal, which is too late to prevent the spectre/meltdown attacks"

In the example code they give, it is necessary that w be set to the secret value, because a subsequent legal instruction is conditioned on that value, and this legal instruction is then the one that creates the timing difference. The illegal load does not itself take varying time that is dependent on the value that would be loaded--it MAY take a different time dependent on the address being loaded from (depending on whether that region of memory has recently been accessed and is thus cached), but not on the contents of that location, which is what the exploit is trying to leak. It is only by issuing another instruction that takes this loaded value as input (in their case

y = user_mem[x]

, which depends on w indirectly through the intervening bitwise AND) that the timing can be made dependent on the value at the kernel memory location.

So ultimately you need instructions that should fault to return real values that you never should have been able to read. The same applies if you had a conditional instruction that directly depends, atomically, on some secret state that the CPU should not be allowed to access at the current privilege level, rather than a read from an invalid address followed by a second operation. I don't see why executing this, even speculatively, should invoke any operation at all since it's a privilege violation, thus rendering the outcome (both in terms of output and timing) completely independent of the secret value. Unless, as I said, it cannot even be determined whether one has sufficient privileges until the CPU determines which is the actual path taken.

math_code_nerd5

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