Wouldn’t surprise me if even Unicode advices against using Roman numerals depending on meaning.

It was mostly a joke (though frankly if you try any implementation more complicated than that joke you’re going to have a bad time).

It’s simple ⅯⅯⅩⅩⅣis a number, MMXXIV is not.

I mean Fibonacci did more or less the same thing to his work a few centuries later, so fair play I guess.

I’m not too sure being non-religious from the start would lead to better education. Seems to me that religion was quite a big driver behind early education. You’ll also have some trouble separating history religion and science at that point, people told each other stories about things that happened or how they thought things worked. Some of those stories are rather more fantastical than they needed to be, but how would you tell if there’s nothing to kickstart intellectual discourse in the first place?

And the whole religion stops crime through fear idea seems overly simplistic. It’s the same reasoning that bigger sentences would lower crime, and so far that hasn’t worked terribly well.

You can stick your tongue in it. Wouldn’t recommend actually trying to get anything in your mouth.

You’re protected by the thin layer of nitrogen that immediately sublimates, this lasts until the nitrogen heats up so the liquid can touch you directly, which you want to avoid.

For mostly the same reason you can stick a finger into molten lead (without losing said finger), provided you do it fast enough and your finger is wet enough.

If someone’s licking any of the transuranic elements I’m not sticking around to watch.

Some stuff should simply not exist in a lickable quantity.

Americans assuming ‘America’ means ‘U.S.’

O(1)

Wait so the production release would consist of uploading the files with Filezilla?

If you can SSH into the server, why on earth use Filezilla?

I must have missed that one, what’s going on with Filezilla?

They definitely didn’t just stop tracking you because this option exists.

Cookies are a non-issue. They store data only locally and can be edited and removed at will. With third party isolation on by default there’s really no reason to worry about them much anymore. And if you do just install cookie auto-delete to clean things up.

This variant is definitely worse because the data is no longer just local.

It’s kind of neat you can launch a version of Visual Studio code by pressing ‘.’ though.

Still not sure why, especially given that it’s pretty much impossible to find out that you can even do that.

Movies. You used to be able to just buy them and own the data.

Now you have to pray the other party doesn’t ‘alter the deal’ and if you are proactive about safekeeping the stuff you own you’re a ‘thief’.

One of the better uses I’ve seen involved using this perspective to turn what was effectively a maximum likelihood fit into a full Gaussian model to make the predicted probabilities more meaningful.

Not that it really matters much how the perspective is used, what’s important is that it’s there.

Just because you don’t know what the uncertainties are doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Most optimization problems can trivially be turned into a statistics problem.

So what you’re saying is that if you put a burrito inside a burrito it’s still a burrito?

Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.

Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)

They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.

I think /r/science is misunderstood. The moderators had quite a clear vision on the kind of discussion they wanted and the kind they did not. This caused some friction every time a post reached /r/all but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

If anything that’s an ideal situation. People encounter a new community they’re interested in, break some rules in ignorance, the mods interfere and the violations are rolled back, the new users then either follow the rules or leave.

Not sure how they’re doing with the API changes, pretty sure they had some automation going. Don’t think they’re compatible with reddit’s new view on making communities as interchangeable as possible to stop friction from interfering with ad revenue.

You might want to mark that NSFW. Don’t want to be caught reading some discussion with the word union in it.