mohn

Whoops, my comment was supposed to say "instead of reframing", but the crucial "of" got lost when I reworded things. Too late to edit now.

Interesting question, a lot of search engine results claim that John Von Neumann was presented with the problem and quickly solved it by summing the infinite series instead reframing it as a constant speed for an easily calculated duration. Plausible, but sounds apocryphal. Here's the oldest reference I've found and verified by reading scans[0] of the source book:

Initiation Mathématique (1906) by Charles-Ange Laisant (1841--1920), number 53. Le chien et les deux voyageurs.

The setup here has two pedestrians walking in the same direction with a dog running back and forth between them. One of them starts out some distance ahead of the other but, because the one behind walks faster, they eventually intersect. It briefly mentions a variation where they are walking toward one another, as in the typical trains & fly version of the problem. Best of luck finding older, I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there!

[0] https://i.imgur.com/vCCFgAQ.png

Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.

[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

Nice, love a good grenade glitch! I owned and played a bit of GTA II, but never knew about this. I like the grenade glitches in the Command & Conquer series where, if you click again to retarget during the grenadier's windup animation, they will ignore the range check and can throw arbitrarily far.

I agree with the sentiment, and the specific wording of your comment made me want to link to the classic bash.org quote[0] which has consistently been in the top 5 for a long time, but I just learned that we lost bash.org... :(

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?...

I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.

1-bit audio output

Hey, with the appropriate overclock, that could be audiophile-grade [0]! I want to see an appliance that takes DSD input and uses it to drive a 2.8224 MHz musical Tesla coil.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital

This reminded me of a Kurzgesagt video from a few months ago on the same topic [0]. I see that the author, Karen Lloyd, was one of the experts they consulted when making that video.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD6xJq8NguY

I enjoyed playing with that webapp [0], bummer that it's down now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

I don't think Google can fix it

Can they eventually throw away Android and replace it with Fuchsia? In the reporting about Fuchsia that I read ages ago, it sounded like it was intended to be an Android replacement but, looking into it again just now, it seems more like an embedded OS for other non-smartphone hardware -- maybe with some (aspirational?) claims of utility on smartphones and tablets.

It sounds like GP would benefit from satellite internet bypassing the firewall, but I don't know how hard the Chinese government works to crack down on that loophole.

In the US, HIPAA grants you the right to access your own health information [0]. I recommend asking providers to burn the DICOMs to a DVD (or send your images to you via an online portal, if they and you prefer) whenever you have medical imaging done.

[0] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/right-to-access/in...

For anyone wanting a better image of the "Modern model of the Lehmer Bicycle Chain Sieve" than what is embedded in TFA, it can be seen on page #4 of the Spring 1983 Computer Museum report (which is also a PDF):

https://tcm.computerhistory.org/reports/TCMReportSpring1983....

there is a pretty famous former M$ performance engineer who worked on Xbox and bunch of other large projects, he has webpage about how he tracks down bugs and performance issues, don't it have it handy unfortunately.

Bruce Dawson's blog, Random ASCII?

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)

Ahh, yes indeed.

Cool project! I'm very interested in accurate preservation of the behavior of these old systems (chip decapping and scanning, FPGA reimplementation, accuracy-focused emulators) and using Ghidra to reverse engineer old games, especially on the 6502 and m68k architectures. Just an enthusiastic spectator at this point, but I hope to contribute something to the field eventually.

A sidenote: the action at 0:19 in the 50x-speed demo is intriguing. I've played many hours of Super Mario Brothers and watched various tool-assisted speedruns of it, but I don't recall seeing a Goomba reverse direction like that instead of just plowing into Mario. Is that a game glitch that you intended to show off with your recorded keyboard inputs? I haven't played in a long time, so I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that such behavior is common. I didn't find an obvious reference to it in the TAS info here [0].

Edit: there is precedent for that Goomba behavior [1].

[0] https://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/SuperMarioBros

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Mario/comments/add1fx/changing_goom...

I was researching the Armatron last weekend and was surprised to learn then about the single-motor operation. It's quite a complex system of linkages and transmissions [0] to enable the six degrees of freedom. I suppose that explains why the toy is so noisy. I had no idea that was how it worked, must not have taken mine apart when it broke or I outgrew it or whatever happened.

[0] http://www.jeff-z.com/pinball/toys/armatron/armatron.html

For example Target used to not include groceries until recently.

There was a span of time where many of them didn't, but I was surprised to learn recently that the first ever Target store included groceries. See this 1962-05-03 advertisement[0] for the grand opening.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/vayeLPV.jpg

We've got 27 remaining years until 2050, so a little under 15% per year would yield that 40x increase.

Estimates of:

1000000 space debris objects from greater than 1 cm to 10 cm

130 million space debris objects from greater than 1 mm to 1 cm

For high aspect ratio debris, it's not clear whether the given size ranges refer to the long or short axis. I wonder how the Project West Ford[0] artificial ionosphere needles contribute to these estimates. Apparently the remaining needles are mostly in clumps, so they might not be estimated at the individual level.

I hope we can develop a good method for space debris cleanup. It would be a shame if humanity ends up suffering from Kessler Syndrome[1]. Time to brush up on how to use a map and compass, I guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Part two starts at 1:20 here:

https://rutube.ru/video/89a3426ca5b80b3363b17f30f976efdc/

And here in the "Forest of Rhetoric" [0], anastrophe is just one of the 433 rhetorical figures currently cataloged, many of them with fun Greek names. You've got well over a year of word o' the day material. Epistrophe is another good one.

[0] http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

Adding on in this vein: I'm curious if the late Presidential hopeful Ross Perot wrote any noteworthy software, or if his role in tech was only that of a salesman. He's another case of not winning the races for elected office, but 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 and a fortune of approximately $4 billion in 2019 is nothing to sneeze at.

lol, here's what the standards body has published [0]. Version 9 still in dev, with "recent" releases of:

1992 - French v9.a.e

2000 - French v9.e.m

2011 - French v9.m.q

Don't be deceived by the dates, though. The project isn't dead. The Larousse and Le Robert forks are actively developed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise#D...

Hounsfield pondered whether it was possible to detect hidden areas in Egyptian pyramids by capturing cosmic rays that passed through unseen voids.

I also wondered about this possibility a few years ago and when I searched online, I found an example of muon tomography of the volcanic dome of La Soufrière on the island of Guadeloupe[1]. Cool non-seismic approach to a difficult imaging problem.

Specifically, I was wondering about neutrino tomography of the entire earth, but the low probability of neutrino collisions would seem to make that infeasible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPYhqJ3e-2o

When I first read this comment I was picturing a hot water radiator behind you, so it sounded unlikely based on the blackbody radiation curve for ~320 K.

But now I realize you're probably talking about an electric heater. Given that their heating elements get so hot that they're putting out visible red/orange light, it seems very plausible that an electric heater could produce enough ~940 nm IR to drown out the signal from the remote.

Thanks for sharing! I will try to keep this in mind when I'm troubleshooting IR remotes in the future.

Your source says its numbers are "generated with the unix command line tool ping", which reports round trip time.

In fiber, with light traveling at about (2/3) * c, the minimum latency from SF to Tokyo would be about 42 ms.

I was not able to play the RealMedia streams from BBC, but here's an alternative link to lecture 4 at 15m01s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xttp5GpiVLs&list=PLez3PPtnpn...

It is cool, but having fiber optics poking out of your head is pretty conspicuous.

Chemogenetics (RASSLs/DREADDs)[0] and magnetogenetics[1] allow for more subtle activation. The interesting magnetogenetics results from the mid 2010s were not well-reproduced in the late 2010s, but the physical principle seems sound to me. I'm still hopeful that the technique will see successful application in mammals. Being able to turn the effect off quickly by stopping the external stimulation (vs. having to wait for drug metabolism/excretion in the case of chemogenetics) seems very useful.

Edit: the magnetoreceptors I read about in 2018 were naturally occurring in some turbid-water-dwelling fish. If they don't work well outside the chemical environment of the fish brain, it may be a while before a suitable alternative receptor can be discovered/engineered and used effectively in mammals.

Skepticism about the utility of magnetogenetics is definitely warranted, given how much RF pollution there is in our environment. If your patients have to live the rest of their lives in a shielded room (or wearing a helmet) to prevent unintentional stimulation, then it's not a very good therapy. It could still be useful for preclinical research where you have more control over your subjects' environment, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_activated_solely_by_a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetogenetics