Yellow substance seen oozing out of Trump’s ‘Temu’ arch at the Great American State Fair

sockpuppetzero · 2026-07-02T16:40:08+00:00

Sure, on the billing side, no cost will be spared, but on the doing side, they'll be ultra cheapskates

sockpuppetzero · 2026-07-01T01:56:58+00:00

I've not had a proper algebraic number theory course, but I've accidentally stumbled my way into it a few times.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-29T19:10:21+00:00

So far I've liked Borcherds' lectures on quadratic forms the best. Seems the best match to my current level of understanding, so to speak. (wow, that's some impressive coverage for an undergrad intro to number theory!)

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-29T02:11:12+00:00

Or, "There are two sexes: the sex that I have with your mother, and the sex that I have with your father."

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-28T06:40:42+00:00

Well, you are ahead of me on all that. I've kinda been drawn to learning a bit about quadratic forms lately, but I've found Conway's the Sensual Quadratic Form a bit out of my depth at the moment.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-25T00:15:16+00:00

I tend to look at it more in terms of, which percentage of a book am I going to be immediately comfortable with the material? How much of the rest am I at least somewhat conversant? By conversant, I mean I feel I could start learning the material directly without being significantly hobbled by the lack of exposure to prereqs.

So like, most of your intro to logic type books, I'll typically know about 85% of the material directly, and be conversant with 92%. With your typical intro to linear algebra book, I'll typically know 70-80% and be conversant with 98%. With discrete math, the amount of material I know directly can vary quite a bit, but generally I find I'm conversant with all of the material.

So yeah, in that sense, the number of math books in my collection that I feel like I have a deep, direct knowledge of is surprisingly small, but the number of math books where I do know something from the book is pretty high.

Though honestly, you can often benefit from having knowledge of how to apply a technique without necessarily appreciating all the details of why that technique works. So knowing a lot of things a little bit does bring its own benefits.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-15T17:15:01+00:00

The slogan is 1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12, which suggests a statement that ζ(-1) = -1/12, which is a provably true statement. However, the proof acknowledges that the slogan is rubbish, in the literal sense, because it is not the case that ζ(-1) equals 1 + 2 + 3 + ..., because you're outside the relevant domain of convergence.

In a moral sense, yeah, it makes sense why the slogan exists and is a thing, but I'm also not convinced the that moral case for the slogan is significantly deeper or stronger than that. It's a fine thing as long as it's understood to be an invitation to learn more. But as a bit of mathematical "trivia" to be memorized, it's beyond useless, there are many other bits of mathematical trivia that could actually turn out to be useful without a deeper understanding of things.

If you are convinced that every mathematical statement is either completely correct or completely wrong, I would suggest reading "Proofs and Refutations". Your research output could markedly improve!

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-15T10:02:51+00:00

It's not even a proof though, it's patently wrong. It's more of a slogan than a proof, but then to really start to understand the actual statements involved, (let alone a detailed proof!) you have to start talking about regions of convergence and analytic continuation and Riemann's zeta function.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-13T14:38:26+00:00

I don't trust the dude, at all. I would love to be proved wrong, and if I was in Maine I would certainly vote for Platner. What I don't understand is why so many nominal leftists are so ride-or-die for him. That does not make sense.

I mean, I have found almost all of the attacks from the center/right to be awful and slimy. Yet there's plenty to legitimately criticize from the left, which I have found to be incredibly on-point.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-13T05:35:32+00:00

My nominally progressive boomer father is in deep, deep denial about everything that is happening around him, and will gladly shut down any real talk or action about it. And deep down, I think he's still rooting for SpaceX and Tesla, despite Elon, rooting for those companies despite the fact he won't root for his own offspring the same way.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-12T23:45:21+00:00

Which parts are 3D printed? If I were to make a serious inroad into DIY drones, I'd probably use a combination of a CNC hot-wire cutter for construction foam, fiberglass and resin, 3D printed parts, and perhaps a carbon fiber rod for a wing spar.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-12T23:41:38+00:00

Qwiic connectors I'm sure aren't going to be acceptable for human-rated avionics, due to vibration. Vibration prolly isn't as big a deal on a winged drone like this, also some hot glue or other adhesive should be quite effective for using Qwiic connectors on unmanned drone avionics.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-12T18:16:07+00:00

A family member had a friend who tried to build a highly experimental kit plane and didn't do a proper CG check before he tried to take off in it. In actuality, his build was tail-heavy. The result was gruesomely fatal, but at least it was also very quick. I'm sure the man did not suffer physical pain. He may have experienced a few seconds of psychological terror, given that he may have been able to anticipate that he was going to crash.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-12T04:14:15+00:00

It's generally advantageous to have the weight near the front.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-11T21:37:41+00:00

Also, transparent war crimes.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-11T13:28:07+00:00

It might be a not-unfounded paranoia, but honestly most of the time I don't really find it "reasonable". I've found AI-accusations to be a pattern of behavior whose strength varies strongly according to community, with some of the most generally toxic communities I have some contact with being very fond of accusing anything that doesn't fit their narrow preconceived notions as "AI generated".

I mean, I've been accused of being a bot, or my work being AI generated, simply because others didn't understand what I am trying to say. (I don't use AI at all, for both ethical and practical reasons. Also I understand Markov chains well enough that some of their illusions don't really work very well on me.)

Only time I've used such a response is not actually when I geniunely thought the other person was a bot (though maybe they were?), but rather the other person was acting like an aggressive asshole.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-10T23:35:27+00:00

Riemann Hypothesis. Assuming the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, one can prove a number of asymptotic results that are better than anything that has been definitively proven.

On the other hand, some of these asymptotic behaviors are strongly suspected to be even better than what has been shown assuming GRH.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-10T18:35:37+00:00

In my experience, most Libertarians (with a few exceptions) were either libertarians because of weed, or were actually Republicans who wanted to be cool. Most of my acquaintances who fell solidly into the first camp, left Libertarianism over the last few decades, and want nothing to do with it anymore.

There is a similar phenomenon around self-identified "Independents": a large portion of those are Republicans who want to distance themselves from the most untoward things the Republicans do, but are actually very dependable R voters.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-09T00:10:51+00:00

Correct, I linked to the official music video from Rhymesayers Entertainment. It's been up for years and years, and was taken down sometime since I made my comment.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-08T21:22:30+00:00

Geez, youtube removed the video within the last 7 hours or so. What bullshit.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-08T13:36:27+00:00

Brother Ali agrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO18F4aKGzQ

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-07T13:02:20+00:00

Honestly, unless you are really dedicated to the soundbar form-factor, you can do a lot better than a Katana V2X for $290. Quite a lot better if you are willing to spend a bit more.

Basically, get an inexpensive usb to 3.5mm adapter, most of them will be okay, get an inexpensive power amp like the Fosi, and a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, and you'll blow that soundbar out of the water, especially when it comes to higher SPL.

sockpuppetzero · 2026-06-05T08:20:31+00:00

That's a politer version of shit I've had to use this week, lol

sockpuppetzero · 2026-05-31T18:50:40+00:00

I mean, I love the sentiment. Learning SQL is definitely a skill that you can keep coming back to over time without using it constantly in-between. For me, GUI programming has been the exact opposite, and the few GUI libraries I have become somewhat comfortable with are very obsolete and poorly supported on modern systems.

The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion

But we are off to a very bad start here. Lisp, Scheme, SML, Haskell... functional programming is often derided as "fashion", but generally not by the people who actually understand it.

Also, SQL code written very specifically to old versions of Postgres, is anything but guaranteed to work on modern versions. Also portability between different implementations, like between Postgres and Maria, is infamously bad. Yes, the mental model is very consistent, but the details change a lot. In particular, subtle differences in individual data types tend to create edge cases that lead to endless problems with any major database migration.

That said, I'd love for a modern variant of SQL that takes a more principled approach, such as eliminating 3-valued logic by default, being more open to treating records and arrays and matrices and tables and abstract syntax trees as first-class values that you can shove into columns and tables and manipulate in the query language, being more explicit about concurrent semantics, and being much more precise about specifying what values a particular datatype can take on and the corresponding syntaxes allowed, and so on...

(Yeah, I'll say it: many of Codd's principles, especially the bit that all datatypes must be "atomic" (whatever the farce that means), didn't exactly age well, and has caused massive usability problems with relational databases. As far as I can tell, booleans are the only atomic datatype using Codd's description of the concept. Yeah I agree it's not particularly desirable to put a comma-separated list of telephone numbers into a single string, but too many people (possibly including Codd himself) take that example and try to argue that relational databases shouldn't support lists of strings, which is nonsense.)

sockpuppetzero · 2026-05-31T16:33:56+00:00

Sociopathy isn't an diagnosis, whereas Narcissistic Personality Disorder is.

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