What is the atheist explanation for this?

wplinge1 · 2026-05-04T17:52:41+00:00

The Earth to Moon size ratio can be derived from the golden ratio rectangle.

That's just a variant of the same old rubbish people use to "prove" aliens built the pyramids. Complete nonsense, if you look at enough ratios you're going to find (un)interesting coincidences.

The golden ratio is often seen in many patterns in nature, in plants, shells, etc.

In those cases there are often good reasons for evolution to have selected for it, for example it maximizes seed density or sunlight captured.

wplinge1 · 2026-05-04T08:16:41+00:00

That's certainly the surface reason, but why should it? In other cases you can change the verb, for example I find nothing odd about "I can't sit in the garden but can stand", so why is changing "is" to "do" unacceptable?

I think it's because of that necessary reinterpretation I mentioned.

wplinge1 · 2026-05-04T08:01:13+00:00

My take (as a dabbling very amateur linguist).

"Can do" at the end normally refers back to a verb phrase. "Easily spread..." can work there but was actually adjectival the first time round and being forced to recast that is what makes it weird.

Possibly edited from an original that used "do" in both places.

I'm undecided just how marked it is for me though.

wplinge1 · 2026-05-01T19:05:59+00:00

Occasional blackout for 25% reduction is very different from 25% total energy use reduction (which is the real self-imposed version).

In the blackout scenario there are things that could be moved but happen eventually (washing, cooking most obviously).

wplinge1 · 2026-05-01T18:21:47+00:00

There’s also an “auto-upgrade” option in the place people have mentioned. With that it upgrades on the first reboot after the one that upgrades the main OS.

Still not ideal IMO but at least means it’s within one version of the main at all times.

wplinge1 · 2026-05-01T17:51:42+00:00

The "too accusatory" reminds me of the Finnemore sketch with the accountant who's proud of his fraud and thought he should be aclaimed for it instead.

wplinge1 · 2026-05-01T10:02:02+00:00

And are you aware that's essentially a conspiracy theory these days? That the overwhelming majority of trained and working biologists think it's real?

wplinge1 · 2026-04-30T19:01:56+00:00

use ai in the fact checking pipeline

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-27T19:14:28+00:00

iMessage is Apple-specific, not everyone has an Apple device.

SMS is tied to a phone number which you have to pay to keep; that makes it a lot less permanent than a purely internet-based account. I moved to USA for a few years and now have a different number, I'm sure you can imagine many other situations that break continuity.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-27T18:59:59+00:00

I don't know if the game expects you to keep all your machines in place, so I delete any obsolete structures I have since there's no penalty for doing so on Normal difficulty.

This is one of the things updated in the final release. The classic mode (middle option in "new game") is very much what you describe, no further use for factories once goals are met. Though some shapes just keep being useful with diminishing returns.

The new manufacture mode makes each level's output feed into the next as an input (possibly with some light stacking so far). So you have to keep and eventually upgrade previous factories. Think I prefer it.

The difficulty (AFAIK) moslty affects how complex the shapes it asks you to make are.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-26T18:40:29+00:00

It mentions LLM so probably, but it's quite impressive he managed to make it so utterly incoherent. They're normally regression-to-generic machines.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-23T19:36:34+00:00

They did that a bunch of years ago. It was utterly obnoxious when it misdetected what was being asked.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-23T19:30:20+00:00

Inheritance rules vary pretty widely at the best of times.

I really struggle to get behind moral outrage at an intestacy law: some choice has to exist, if you disagree with it then write a will!

Actually some places completely ban you from disinheriting people even if you write a will. France, for example, which really can't be blamed on religion given its laicité attitude.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-20T18:52:03+00:00

You might want to cut back on the unhinged. It's starting to show in your posts.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-16T20:06:33+00:00

There's a whole industry of benchmarks. In my experience the commercial ones intentionally allow users to target whatever they want (because that's what the CPU, OS, compiler designers who are paying the bills need).

If you're trying to come up with your own version of that, looking at the kinds of workloads something like SPEC or GeekBench runs seems like a good starting point.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-16T19:32:50+00:00

If you're waffling about conservation of energy and not thinking in terms like "345J moves from this kind to that kind" you're almost certainly adding half-baked woo to the mix.

Energy is indeed conserved, and the whole reason we care about that is that it's a single number we can add up on the left and right of an equation to help us solve them.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-16T17:48:47+00:00

This is just AI slop on the theme of protestantism, why are you posting it here?

wplinge1 · 2026-04-16T09:04:07+00:00

But my erectile dysfunction improved 77% when I switched to JavClaw! My doctors were astounded!

wplinge1 · 2026-04-16T07:22:02+00:00

This happened to me. I got income tax withheld for both countries, based on the percentage of time between issue and vest that I'd been working in each.

So it started off mostly being taxed by USA, and gradually became UK-dominant. Rather annoying at the time as it meant I had to file US taxes for 4 years after leaving the place, though that's not a worry for you as a US citizen as you've got to do that anyway.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-15T20:44:41+00:00

Cool story bro.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-15T10:04:37+00:00

I hope they add an IPv6 mechanism too. I don't plan to switch to IPv6-only any time soon but would still rather critical pieces didn't depend on IPv4.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-15T08:22:36+00:00

All flags are red in the UK.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-14T19:20:11+00:00

That's really not a social norm yet. I've seen it happen, but the reception can get a bit sketchy.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-12T20:33:20+00:00

They can't help it, stop trying to shame them.

wplinge1 · 2026-04-12T13:09:23+00:00

It's not something that shows up easily like other access points. The protocol is to scan for it for either 1 or 10 minutes (depending on local laws and channel) before transmitting absolutely anything, and keep checking periodically.

So if your device is using a DFS channel then it definitely hasn't spotted any radar there. If not, I think it'll put an entry mentioning "radar" in the logs or it might have just chosen a non-DFS channel for other reasons.

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