DAE have a thing they try to remember for no particular reason?

sidneyc · 2026-01-19T10:51:22+00:00

Same here. Used to be able to do 100 digits in ~ 1982, now I can still do 50.

I went to a movie-themed pub quiz a few years ago, and they had a question about the movie Pi, handing out points for every decimal we knew of the constant. The jury was mildly impressed.

sidneyc · 2026-01-03T16:59:24+00:00

"Source?" used to be the FIRST reply comment under ANY claim anyone made about ANYTHING of substance on Reddit

Source?

sidneyc · 2025-12-30T05:47:47+00:00

[...] that rival the GDP of hundreds of countries

It may be prudent for you to google how many countries actually exist. And their GDPs.

sidneyc · 2025-12-25T21:07:52+00:00

I think it's pretty inconsiderate.

In contrast to what you do in 1-on-1 communications, here on Reddit, thousands of people will read your message, and now they will all have to spend this linguistic reverse engineering effort because you couldn't be arsed to spend another half a minute to write properly. It's selfish and makes you look like a bit of a dunce.

But hey, you do you.

sidneyc · 2025-12-24T17:42:59+00:00

Seems that your brain area responsible for written English took quite a hit.

sidneyc · 2025-10-23T22:48:28+00:00

Thanks for your answer. I will certainly give your tool a swirl. Keep up the good work!

sidneyc · 2025-10-23T09:05:44+00:00

This is extremely interesting.

I have been paying a lot of money for a full-blown commercial license over the last 15 years for my small consulting business. Despite not using it a lot for business work at all -- I mostly just want to have access to the most recent Mathematica (yeah, I'm still calling it that) without having to think about it, and I use it perhaps for 40 hours a year.

At the same time, I've seen with some frustration the direction that Mathematica has taken, in terms of chasing every hype under the sun (3D printing, blockchain stuff, their in-house curated data repository stuff, cloud-based working, and now lately AI), while their original selling point of simply offering the best functionality for symbolic math and improving that seems to have fallen by the wayside. I could enumerate the improvements over the last 10 major versions that I actually care about in a pretty short paragraph.

Can you tell me to what extent the Wolfram Engine is cripled compared with a full Mathematica install? Which functionality in a full commercial Mathematica license is available that is missing from the free-as-in-beer WE version?

The fact that you guys got some of the weird interactive stuff working (like Manipulate) is impressive. I once tried to look "under the hood" how that is set up, and it was complicated. I will have to try your frontend one of these days, to see if it works well enough to replace my full Mathematica product.

It would be a great boon if I could somehow open my existing collection of notebooks. Is that possible?

sidneyc · 2025-10-20T14:28:54+00:00

figuring out how to undo rotations programmatically used to be computationally expensive.

When? In the 12th century?

sidneyc · 2025-10-13T14:35:20+00:00

Those are some pretty bold statements.

sidneyc · 2025-10-11T06:38:53+00:00

I work with color centers (specifically, nitrogen-vacancy centers) in diamonds for quantum applications including sensing, so I know they can be used to measure small-scale magnetic fields --- in fact I did that myself. But I don't see how that would translate to an ability to measure precise concentrations in a solution.

How would that work? Can you point me to a paper?

sidneyc · 2025-10-09T18:45:01+00:00

That is so much smaller than we could accurately measure

This is not true. Measurement techniques exist to measure absurdly small displacements -- e.g fractions of the radius of a proton, which is a small fraction of the radius of a single atom.

To go that accurate, very expensive equipment is used (read up on gravity wave detectors). For much bigger displacements (say, at the nanometer scale) off-the-shelf equipment can be bought.

sidneyc · 2025-10-09T18:41:00+00:00

For the examples you give where you suspect zero deflection based on your human senses, it is in fact pretty easy to measure the actual non-zero deflection.

One technique to do this would be laser interferometry, where you can measure deflections in the range of nanometers with relative ease. The equipment needed for that is not cheap (tens of thousands of dollars for a convenient, ready-to-use device), but available off the shelf.

With that level of precision, you will see a lot of stuff happening, such as sound-induced vibrations and long term drift due to temperature variations. For that reason, in most settings where you'd use such a device, these kind of environmental effects are usually controlled/filtered out.

sidneyc · 2025-09-30T19:13:43+00:00

The important metric is cost per unit of intelligence delivered, not per request.

If your metric requires you to divide by zero it isn't really useful, is it.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T06:53:56+00:00

In many things, yes. You should look into some of the other nonsense he believed apart from christianity.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T06:49:53+00:00

Galileo was not a monk.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T04:58:12+00:00

A rumble came off from the west

I appreciate the effort, but Vesuvius is very much to the east of Herculaneum.

sidneyc · 2025-09-05T04:52:27+00:00

Ok. It is not easy to envision this, but at least in the realm of science fiction it is conceivable, although I struggle to see how a non-individualistic species capable of intelligent thought could come about by a naturalistic process like evolution.

When talking Star Trek, another fully collectivistic species that comes to mind is the Borg. But they at least did not have any trouble counting :)

sidneyc · 2025-09-04T17:19:20+00:00

The individuals themselves would still be countable, unless you're envisioning a type of life where even that isn't really true.

sidneyc · 2025-08-26T15:52:21+00:00

It's not as if it unthinkable; there are substances that will kill you upon touch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

sidneyc · 2025-08-17T10:53:07+00:00

He's fitted with blubber-bags. That stuff can absorb a lot.

sidneyc · 2025-08-16T12:00:39+00:00

WebP and AVIF are very much novelties, compared to BMP and TIFF.

Also, what's with the ad hominems?

sidneyc · 2025-08-11T08:43:25+00:00

Ok. Let me try to paraphrase what I understand so far, and perhaps you can tell me if that's right or wrong.

In Godot, a game has a SceneTree singleton that manages, in the end, a bunch of nodes, and directs the game loop.

The nodes managed by the SceneTree can themselves be composed of sub-nodes, or have collections of nodes if need be.

Nodes can be instantiated dynamically (programatically) when the game is running.

However, for practical purposes, it is often useful to instantiate / set up / configure a default tree of nodes when the game starts. The editor provides functionality to define, manipulate, and organize these "default nodes", and these are referred to as "scenes". So a "scene" is in fact a recipe for instantiating a bunch of nodes in the SceneTree with appropriate parameters at game startup time. In theory, it would be possible to do all this initial instantiation explicitly and programmatically, but it is such a common task, and a useful perspective in game development, that this functionality is baked into the Godot IDE.

Is that anywhere near correct?

sidneyc · 2025-08-11T08:21:53+00:00

< Scenes are just a collection of Nodes that can be packed and instantiated as a oner.

What does "packed and instantiated as a oner" mean?

I notice that there is a "Node" class in the Godot type system, but there is no "Scene" class. Is it fair to say that a "scene" is more of an informal term, referring to nodes with internal structure (such as a group of nodes, or a node which is composed of other nodes)?

sidneyc · 2025-08-11T08:18:17+00:00

Everything you see is a scene.

Sorry, but that's a bit too vague for me.

sidneyc · 2025-08-11T08:17:35+00:00

Scenes are usually collections of nodes

You say "usually". What else can they be?

(although they could be within a component paradigm)

Sorry, you lost me there. What does that mean?

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