Bigger/faster the bullet the easier it was for water to stop.
For bullets that’s probably true because of their light weight, but heavy shells from the big naval guns of battleships (12" to 18" caliber) actually carried a long way through water and sometimes hit and damaged target ships below the waterline. The Japanese in particular actually designed some of their shells to maximize their underwater performance.
It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.
I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.
What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.
Based on fossil records we’ve estimated that homo sapiens sapiens emerged about 200k-300k years ago.
All of the estimates of when modern humans “emerged” (originally called the “Out of Africa” or “Mitochondrial Eve” hypothesis) are/were based on population analyses of samples of modern DNA (mitochondrial or otherwise) and are/were presented as being in opposition to conclusions based on the fossil record. The original such estimate was 100,000 years ago subsequently revised to 200,000 years ago (both in the mid-1980s) and since then these estimates have been all over the place, ranging from 50,000 years ago to 500,000 years ago. The fossil record shows no significant changes even within this wide time range: bipedality appears in the fossil record for our lineage around 5 million years ago, while our brains enlarged from chimpanzee size to modern human size between 2 million and 1 million years ago.
I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.
c-suite
CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.
giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases
Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.
Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.
How is a database a trick?
The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).
Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.
As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.
Is BeOS still floating around?
They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.
/s just in case.
They get taken over by sales & marketing types
Like Steve Jobs lol.
The year they both came out (1995) I was coding in Visual Basic 3. Ack.
My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.
The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.
And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.
Wait, chatgpt was convicted of multiple felonies?
there’s nothing left to do research.
There’s still military robots, unfortunately.
Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.
As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It’s like the whole field is based on one person’s poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective in some ways as it is, but you’d think there’d be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.
Many places I worked the recent college grads were paid as much as (or more than) the senior developers, so this strategy didn’t work. They still did it, though.
Years ago I got a copy of MSDN which had apparently been put together by developers who all had giant monitors. On a normal laptop screen none of the text wrapped properly so every article had a horizontal scrollbar which you had to work left and right to read every fucking line. I eventually had to start copying the contents into a Notepad instance just to be able to read the damn things normally.
This is why I think developers should always have to work on 10-year-old laptops with 800x600 screens.
I don’t understand why they don’t just put “My” on it: MyMail, MyOutlook etc.
Well, typical muzzle velocities for these shells were in the neighborhood of 2500 feet per second, and although they slowed down some out to typical combat ranges they were still going pretty damn fast when they hit. I don’t think the Mythbusters ever had the kind of budget you’d need to test this one out.