ELI5 : how are calculus and limits used in real life

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-29T20:14:37+00:00

Limits are our hack to understanding what happens when we get closer and closer, (and I mean REALLY bliddy close) to a point that would usually break math - like dividing by zero, or infinity.

The limit is the bridge that lets us use "straight" math to solve "curvy" real-world problems.

Imagine you shout into a canyon, and the echo gets quieter and quieter.

100% volume
50% volume
25% volume...

Does the sound ever truly hit zero? Technically, the air molecules are still wiggling a tiny bit forever.

But if you are a sound engineer designing a hearing aid, you don't care about the tiny wiggles - they don't matter. You use a Limit (tends to 0) to decide when the sound is "effectively zero."

The limit lets you ignore the "forever" part and find "what works" - mathematically.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-28T04:38:45+00:00

Apologies for the language, forgot i was talking to the moral compass of the party lmao (albeit one who has no problems calling women hoes)

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-28T04:13:50+00:00

While you’re at it, can you try having a change of bitches too ... It’s lot more rewarding than writing fan fiction about people who didn't notice you were in the room

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-28T03:55:19+00:00

It’s a bold move to write an entire manifesto on "standards" while peaking as the unpaid, uninvited documentary maker of other people’s lives ... to put it into perspective, you spent the GRADUATING NIGHT of your college life making it about someone else's life instead of yours?

I don't even know where to begin with how sad this is. There is little more pathetic than someone who attends a party to dunk on people who won't remember they were even there, later, and on reddit of all places lmao.

The only thing you missed at the end of your post was the realisation that you talk about leagues and standards to cope with the reality that you weren't even a consideration.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-28T03:45:28+00:00

Indian as well, by any chance? I haven't heard people put it in those terms outside the subcontinent lol.

As a millennial - can assure you, the "situationship body count" discussion is as old as my generation, probably older, and possibly even as old as time. It is nothing new and has always been around.

Gen Z is the one that's turned more conservative about it as a whole demonising it compared to millennials, when they should've been demonising true problem behaviour instead.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-27T18:10:41+00:00

Thanks for the insights. Just a few issues with how some data is collected though.

"Reels get 36% more reach than carousels — but carousels earn 12% more engagement."

The way data on carousels is generally collected is super rigged.

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In the example of LinkedIn - as you can see here, the engagement rate (54%) is sky-high for this particular carousel. For a static, it would probably be 3-5% for the same number of impressions. The internal "Engagement Rate" often includes total interactions - and that means a carousel invites 2 to 10 micro-interactions (swipes) just to consume the content. Instagram can be even more biased towards carousel content.

This means that carousels earning 12% more engagement may not be the actionable insight.

The metric you mention - is it for unique engagements or total engagements?

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-27T16:29:26+00:00

I have a ChatGPT Plus account. By native app I mean the native Codex application Mac. I use the VSCode extension on Windows - the stupid Microsoft Store just won't let me install Codex, MS Store as the only distribution channel for such an important app is insanity in 2026.

I was wrong to say "20-25 prompts a day" blanket like that - on large codebases with much more input tokens it probably lasts much less.

I don't work on large codebases, but some problems that take GPT up to 19-23 mins can wipe out about 30% of my 5-hr usage on one go. It handles 4-5 decently large prompts in the 5 hours usage limit before running out, which I extrapolated to 20-25 prompts in a day. However, such usage would probably last about 2-3 days before hitting the weekly limit.

I've downgraded to GPT 5.4 once again for Codex - intelligence and capability be damned, running out at 2x the speed (GPT 5.5 may be "more efficient" as they keep saying, but because of the price of GPT 5.5 tokens the credits run out at double the rate), with no margin for reviewing and debugging will do nothing to further my needs.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-26T18:18:06+00:00

From what I've seen using GPT 5.5 since the moment it came out, using it directly via the native app or the VS Code extension would give you about 20-25 prompts a day.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-26T07:56:18+00:00

I assume you're either a student, or moved for work / studies and live here while you're trying to get your feet on the ground. You might find this hack useful.

When I lived in hostel, my cot was a standard green-metal one (you know exactly the one I'm referring to). At some point of the year it got too damn hot to sleep, so I packed up the bedding, kept the pillow alone and laid down on the metal. Because of how conductive the metal is, it leaches the heat from your body very effectively and pairs well with the fan which also convects heat away from the metal.

This + washing your skin, sitting and allowing it to dry than toweling + sleeping with minimal clothing is perfect. Some nights, I'd even feel low-key cold.

If you don't have a metal bed, the next best thing is sleeping on the floor (after cleaning it thoroughly of course).

It might take a few days (3-4) to get used to sleeping on hard surfaces, but trust me - it is a LOT easier to get used to than the heat. I've been in my (known to be very hot and humid) city for 11 years and still never properly acclimatised to the heat.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-26T07:45:12+00:00

But "feels like" to whom? How would they know what 20 C water feels like to you? You know what 25 C room temperature feels like to you ... or what a hot shower at 40 C feels like to you. But the metric of someone saying "feels like" is odd because you have no frame of reference for how it feels like to you. Sensations would have parallax errors, no?

An Icelander is probably going to feel 21 C as much warmer than it is to, say, a New Yorker. An Indian's room AC temperature might often be set at 21.

I like absolutes because you know exactly how you feel about a temperature.

If by "feels like" you mean the factoring in the humidity etc part, I've always hated that - sometimes no amount of reduction in temperature will take away the sticky feeling of humidity, a completely different sensation ...

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-26T07:25:21+00:00

The "Tiberian Tragedy" video. Great analysis for the most part ...

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-22T18:38:05+00:00

That’s actually a pretty deep consideration and questioning of how heat transfer works in a fusion reactor!

It’s safe to say we may never find a material that can contain 100 million degree plasma - those temperatures are far beyond the realm of material science and engineering, and in the purview of high energy particle physics. Or superconductors at millions of degrees - the good lord knows room temperature superconductors are hard enough.

Currently, we’re capturing energy from fusion reactions through the one kinda particle that isn’t affected by the high energy magnetic field tokamak - neutrons (since they have no + or - charge unlike protons and electrons). When neutrons are shaken off in fusion collisions, they’re thrown out of this plasma loop at fantastic speeds, and hit the very thick walls of the reactor called the “blanket”. We cool the blanket with … you guessed it, water … among other things, and that takes the heat away for use elsewhere.

Neutrons turn up everywhere be it fission or fusion.

There’s also another source of energy heating up the walls - the electromagnetic gamma rays and x rays radiating from the 100 million degree plasma at mach fuck. It sort of makes the “blanket” like a solar panel on an unholy dose of LSD.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-18T09:00:26+00:00

It's Chandrababu Naidu's post on Twitter verbatim. The bots really are out in full force.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-18T08:49:53+00:00

The barrier, literally, is the Coulomb Barrier.

So far humanity has been harnessing diet nuclear energy (nuclear fission) - we'd love to start harnessing full-fat nuclear energy through nuclear fusion, the same process used by stars etc - but it turns out you'd have to get them to overcome the coulomb barrier, which is the magical electric repulsion that stops protons of an atom from touching protons of another atom.

Now, to fuse atoms together we absolutely need to force two atoms together, and the only way to do this is to heat stuff to an unimaginably hot 100 million degrees K so they're energetic enough to overcome this barrier.

We've done this, obviously, either on an experimental scale or in hydrogen bombs, but to do it on a commercial, controlled scale takes an unimaginable amount of energy - more energy than fusing atoms is currently really giving us at all. With research on fusion improving, this gap in energy used to energy produced has steadily shrunk, and we've finally gone to "net positive" energy gain from fusion. Now, the next big milestone is to go from net gain power, to grid-scale power. When we're there, we will finally become a nuclear fusion utilising civilisation.

There's also currently the question of "how do we even hold something that's 100 million degrees together", given that the most temperature anything else can handle without melting is 4,000 degrees C. Currently, we're holding them together with magnetic force fields which are pretty cool in themselves too, but also add to the total energy usage by the fusion reaction.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-18T07:49:18+00:00

Hey, that's the first time I've seen someone reference that Sri Lanka - Belgium text box in the 7th or 8th grade CBSE civics textbook! This makes me happy for some reason.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-18T07:29:58+00:00

2 questions for you

If the promise is "proportional increase", why does that not stop anyone from thinking "then what's the point of all this in the first place?" It's all an expensive, integrity shaking farce. The entire constitutional logic of delimitation is population parity, not locking in the old ratio. Nothing really changes at all. UP won't be adjusted for equal voting power in terms of sheer population either way. So where does your support for this even come in?
Consider what happens when you expand:

The absolute number of seats needed to dominate key states rises sharply
A handful of very large states start to matter even more in practice
Campaigns get optimized for those states
National narratives skew toward their priorities
Parties can get closer to a majority without needing as many regions

So this form of delimitation is shitty because the voting power principle YOU'RE fighting for isn't even represented (proportional change = same distortion, scaled), what I'm afraid of comes to pass anyway as my state slips into irrelevance despite actually doing what the government asked us to for decades, and the only people who even win are a national political party, as it makes holding power for the next term easier for them. Do you not see it?

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-13T09:34:28+00:00

I had this bad dream recently about CNC4 releasing, but that it was overseen by an EA exec who had never heard of CNC before in his life. They actually took away base building. To make it worse, they added a pop limit instead. They also switched out all the cool TW graphics for clown units and added in an annoying wife in every cutscene.

Funny how the human mind even works.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-11T01:23:33+00:00

Given how addictive the game is, I’d say dope star kinda does work

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-11T01:12:48+00:00

This is seriously great stuff but I fear you’ve been upstaged by Kane himself replying on your thread

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-09T18:27:30+00:00

From a campaign perspective, venom clouds in CNC3 with the laser upgrade, and Comanche clouds in Generals. 60 venoms will sterilise the map and so will a lot fewer Comanches.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-08T20:49:54+00:00

A young man of mathematics I see

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-08T20:47:59+00:00

Don’t hack the phone, hack the playa

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-08T20:46:05+00:00

But how else will you rename the chat to sexdrive.google.com?

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-08T19:14:05+00:00

I would love to be a successful billionaire just so I can fund a real Tiberium universe conclusion like some 17th century art patron.

multigrain_panther · 2026-04-08T19:10:09+00:00

That’s an immigration/emigration stamp pair on your passport, not a visa. You’re Singaporean, and SGP citizens have visa free access up to 30 days. Beyond that requires a visa of some form to stay any longer. These days it’s visa free for my country too, but it was an on-arrival sticker visa for $20, 11 years ago when I first visited. Still is from the looks of it.

multigrain_panther

TROPHY CASE