Gustephan
@Gustephan@lemmy.world
- Comment on bad board games 5 days ago:
My first speeding ticket happened during college. I had to take a few weeks driving course, cut luxuries out of my life for a month, and pick up extra shifts at my job for a month to handle it. It was an overall miserable experience.
My next speeding ticket happened while I was an engineer. I literally paid it off on my phone while the officer was doing paperwork on the side of the road AND gave them an extra $100 because I could do that instead of any kind of driving course. I stopped caring about it at all 10 minutes later. It was fucking wild to see “laws are only for the poors” in action like that
- Comment on cookie combs 1 week ago:
Does it haunt your dreams the same way it haunts mine?
- Comment on cookie combs 1 week ago:
I’ve legit been thinking about this since i posted the comment lol. I think the target area should probably be a minimal regular hexagon, but I honestly dont have the mathematical chops to figure it out myself or to know which would be more interesting.
Intuition tells me to either try to reduce the problem to like convex hull or figure out a reasonable way to generate random packings and just monte carlo it a few million times for a close to optimal solution. A reasonable way to generate random packings feels like it would be way harder to implement than it sounds
- Comment on cookie combs 1 week ago:
I wonder what the optimal packing of 17 hexagons looks like
- Comment on Thoughts?? 1 week ago:
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
- Comment on Thoughts?? 1 week ago:
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
- Comment on Thoughts?? 1 week ago:
That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
- Comment on Thoughts?? 1 week ago:
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
- Comment on It's just loss. 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
- Comment on Our dancers have infinite curves 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on [Video] BBC cuts away during pro-Palestine musicians Kneecap. The followup act Bob Vylan invents a new chant on live TV 3 weeks ago:
Those abs need a marble statue, not a shirt
- Comment on Amazing Grace 4 weeks ago:
TIL that Dolly Parton entered in and lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest at some drag bar in LA in 2012
- Comment on I'm down 4 weeks ago:
This is how you get the thoroughbred of sin riding across the nation
- Comment on And you can thank me for it 5 weeks ago:
Glad you like it :)
And hey, you never know. You’re a person on the internet I don’t know; I wouldn’t want to look like a fool in front of you and your deer furry lover if that happens to be your situation
- Comment on And you can thank me for it 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on And you can thank me for it 5 weeks ago:
With a reflective pool of water on the forest floor. Like the rest of us
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
“Everything I don’t like is ai”
Grow up. The imgflip watermark is clearly visible in the meme, and it’s an ancient meme format.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
Euclidean geometry enjoyers in shambles
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
I guess n would be infinite in the limit I’m looking for. I’m looking at this in like a “musing about theoretical complexity” angle rather than actually needing to use or know how to use pi on modern systems.
For the record, I realize how incredibly pedantic I’m being about the difference between the irrational pi and rational approximations of pi that end up being actually useful. That being said, computational complexity has enough math formalism stink on it that pedantry seems encouraged
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
You sound like an involved and caring father. Rock on, dude
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
Do said atomic instructions produce pi though, or some functional approximation of pi? I absolutely buy that approximate pi is O(1), but it still seems like a problem involving a true irrational number should be undecidable on any real turing machine
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
Is it actually? I’ll admit im pretty rusty on time complexity, but naively I’d think that pi being irrational would technically make even reading or writing it from memory an undecidable problem
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
“is not like you do calculations by hand anyway”
… get off my lawn, whippersnapper.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
That’s because your engineering ass needs things to be physical and sane. Physics is a field for the mentally unwell to sink further into insanity while incoherently scribbling greek letters on every available flat surface.
On a more serious note, yeah you absolutely have to be careful about where you apply really ambitious simplifications like that. There are plenty of mathematical regimes where you can use natural units (this is the term to look up if your interest extends further) and simplify your reference frame by a hell of a lot though. Setting the speed of light to 1 is also a hell of a drug, and brother I’ve got an addiction
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
You’re a monster. I love it
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
The real comment mvp. You deserve every positive vote my post got
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 weeks ago:
Somebody else already said it, but that’s what the title is.
Longform: for a lot of calculations that happen in astro deal with distances so large so large that only order of magnitude changes actually meaningfully affect the end result. To connect to a more common topic, here’s a joke. “Whats the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?” “About a billion dollars” This joke works for the same reason; 1 billion is so many orders of magnitude larger than 1 million that (1,000,000,000 - 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000) is only incorrect by ~0.1%, even though substituting 0 for 1 million in that equation seems ridiculous on the face of it
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 98 comments
- Comment on It's not supposed to make sense... 1 month ago:
The most important thing I’ve ever been told about quantum is “shut up and calculate.” Results don’t seem physical? That’s quantum. Results don’t make sense? That’s quantum. Shut up and calculate
- Comment on How To Swap Couplings? 1 month ago:
The perspective of this pic makes it look like you have the cutest little crescent wrench and screwdriver
