My personal tale on this is that given that the brain contains chaotic circuits (i.e. circuits in which tiny perturbations lead to cascading effects), and these circuits are complex and sensitive enough, the brain may be inherently unpredictable due to quantum fluctuations causing non-negligible macroscopic effects.
I don’t know if the above is the case, but if there’s anything like free will out there, I’m inclined to believe that its origins lie in something like that.
I love pedantry <3 I got the “three medals per event” from some Wikipedia page, and I know they love pedantry over there as well, so maybe you should make a contribution?
In 2020 there were 448 events at the Olympics, let’s round up to 450. Each event gives 3 medals, for a total of 1350 medals. The Olympics are held every four years, so that 337.5 medals are awarded in an average year.
There are about 8.1 billion people in the world. On average, 0.000004 % of the worlds population receives an Olympic medal each year.
If this were a completely random yearly lottery, and you lived for 100 years, you would have about a 0.0004 % chance of winning an Olympic medal in your lifetime.
I would count myself lucky if I won that by the time I was 50.
You may be joking, in which case: Fair game.
If not… come on. In what world do you write “(…) I’ll find you. Mark my words.” In that kind of context without being (at least humorously) threatening?
I can’t post my memes on the much room bulletin board for everyone to see unless I print them :/
-Wfatal-errors is my friend
I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I’ve written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I’ve never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.
You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I’ve seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?
Honest question: Are there no limits in the US to what you can legally name your child? Where I’m from a name can be rejected if it can “cause significant harm or inconvenience to the child”. This prevents idiots from naming their child “Traitor” or “Terrorist”.
You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.
As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).
We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.
In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.
You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.
I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.
Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.
I actually hadn’t realised that yet, thanks for pointing it out, I thought I was going crazy with the amount of people suddenly supporting Russian invaders
Lol at the people downvoting this like that isn’t exactly what happened: NATO had wanted Finland to join for years, but they didn’t want to join, for fear of provoking Russia. Putin shows the world that appeasement doesn’t work, and Finland joins in a heartbeat.
Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.
Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.
Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?
Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.
It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.
It’s sad, but countries like Russia show us very clearly why nations that want peace need to prepare for war.
I would love to not need to spend a cent on our military, or weapons manufacturing, but the hard reality is very clearly that if we aren’t capable of mass producing weapons, we’ll likely be invaded and killed.
That’s a major part of the issue Europe is facing now: We’ve scaled down weapons production since the 90’s, and now that we suddenly need millions of artillery shells it takes time to rebuild production capacity.
Hopefully Russia gets the picture soon, that we’ll keep scaling up until every Russian invader is gone, and we can go back to not spending money on war…
Wow, I Wonder why everyone that’s left in the regime that deports and persecutes dissenters says they are in support of that regime?
Ukraine never invaded anybody. Giving them weapons so they can throw out the people invading them, taking their land and molesting their people is a good thing. Russia has clearly shown that the only way to get rid of the plague that is Russian soldiers on foreign soil is to kill them. That’s why we have this war that Russia has chosen to engage in, and which Russia can choose to withdraw from at any time. That’s why Russians are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
I’ve seen this thing where people dislike inheritance a lot, and I have to admit that I kind of struggle with seeing the issue when it’s used appropriately. I write a bunch of models that all share a large amount of core functionality, so of course I write an abstract base class in which a couple methods are overridden by derived models. I think it’s beautiful in the way that I can say “This model will do X, Y, Z, as long as there exists an implementation of methods A, B, C, which have these signatures”, then I can inherit that base class and implement A, B, and C for a bunch of different cases. In short, I think it’s a very useful way to express the purpose of the code, without focusing on the implementation of specific details, and a very natural way of expressing that two classes are closely related models, with the same functionality, as expressed by the base class.
I honestly have a hard time seeing how not using inheritance would make such a code base cleaner, but please tell me, I would love to learn.
Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really “If there’s something that’s likely to hurt you because you aren’t properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it’s likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds.”
If you have a fume hood that’s good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.
As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?
In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I’m taking a restrictive approach in my advice.
For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)
GET THE ROUNDIE!