robryk @robryk@qoto.org

In what languages, apart from Polish, one "burns" a cigarette (as opposed to "smoking" it)?

@eniko

On one hand, very often the notation is annoyingly imprecise, making it hard to understand for anyone who is not familiar with the concrete area (e.g. anything about PDEs).

On the other, when the notation is precise, it reduces the amount of reliance on comprehension of whatever language the text is written in (and in particular reduces the requirements around understanding how one expresses e.g. quantifier order and other things that are rarely relevant in everyday use of that language).

@whitequark
if you don't mind, what do you mean by black-and-white states of mind? (ISTM that you are pointing at increased contrast/variance/things being always pegged but in different directions, whereas I'd expect less contrast and things just being pegged in mostly the same direction.)

@Red_Shirt_Dude

I think that specifying the threshold of faithfulness that you desire (e.g. Expanse -- ignoring its declared departures from our physics -- has the "Roci running silent" sequence that is unrealistic at least in timescales) might net you very different answers.

There are various semi-historical or semi-documentary series that might fit your bill. From The Earth To The Moon is one such (the faithfulness complaints I had about it were minor and not about realism, but about faithful reproduction of actual space hardware[1]). I haven't watched more than excerpts of Masters of the Air, but ones I've seen suggest that it's realistic.

[1] of the sort "this is not how you switch the LM descent engine off, doing that would have no effect"

@BathysphereHat Amusingly enough, Catholic lithurgy requires that consecrated wine is sufficiently diluted (I never tried to dig up what's the story of that requirement).

@freemo

People use (I don't know how successfully) gravimetric anomalies to supplement inertial navigation underwater (in a similar mode to those early car navigation systems that could never locate you, but would use their knowledge of how the roads look like to correct dead reckoning). I wonder if this could be used in a similar way.

@freemo

Mechanical compasses of that sort are more complicated, at least because you need a vertical reference and a gimbal with 2 degrees of freedom.

Also, that's not very accurate if you don't know your longitude: the isolines of vertical strength are amusingly curvy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/World_Magnetic_Inclination_2020.pdf

BTW I wonder how many sports trackers use the magnetic field to simplify their motion tracking, and then work very differently sufficiently far north or sufficiently close to the equator. (E.g. for breaststroke in swimming pools oriented east-west in Switzerland keeping a running average of the magnetic field direction at wrist is a more reliable way of counting lengths than what Garmin was doing up until something like 1-2 years ago)

@lauren

The comparison to children feels somewhat offensive to me (as a former child).

@foone Doesn't your phone have a commutated DC motor (for vibration)? :)

@lauren @dalias @mark

Another option would be to make country of some responsible entity legible via caller ID (or at least make it legible whether that entity is local or foreign), no?

@b0rk

BTW re contents of worktree, I've once tried to cobble together something that would "backup" the worktree into a commit without affecting the checked-out branch (so that I can e.g. run it in a build script so that every built binary could point at its exact sources, at least until the repo gets gced). I failed to find a solution that would be racefree and would produce a commit (instead of a naked tree object) -- anything that I could find involved using `commit` and "manually" reverting everything it has done, incl. changes to index, or making a naked tree and trying to make the commit object by hand.

@b0rk

Using the latter didn't cross my mind previously. I think that I'd usually anyway check out the branch to be moved first (for no good reason) and then `git reset` is more natural, given that it explicitly handles the index and worktree.

I continue to find it weird that git has the reflog, which is a nice universal undo mechanism for lost commits, but none for lost contents of the index or worktree.

Yearly reminder: today's the day when the Swiss authorities break the noon quiet period.

@ZachWeinersmith

Them being perfect squares is a bummer: that teaches that correct solutions are neat and round, which isn't really a good heuristic (and is somewhat subtly distinct from the "simple conceptually" heuristic, which IMO is good).

I'd also consider showing the 9-year-old a slide rule and explaining how one can use it. I'm not too sure about it though (on one side: neat device, gives intuitions like "square root will have half as many digits", requires manual sanity checking; on the other might seem magical for someone who doesn't have the concept of a logarithm).

@lcamtuf I'm curious how that varie[sd] with tenure. Do you have some intuition?

@Neblib @whitequark

It might be. My native tongue (Polish) has verbs that declinate by gender of subject. I think that makes me prefer picking different genders in setups where there's more than one participant (because it's more effective than in English at disambiguating them).

@freemo Does this cause you to also automatically trust new company keys signed by that key (but not keys signed by them in turn)?

@timClicks An often overlooked point is whether a sandboxed thingy is a trustworthy source. IMO not universally: if you sandbox something that parses unsafe input and is written in an unsafe language, output of that sandbox should still be considered untrusted (because an attacker who can get code execution in the sandbox can inject arbitrary output).