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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • My “page” is my monitor’s screen, a window into many virtual worlds that extend past the plane of my screen.

    Actually, my screen is a curved surface. So the 3d virtual world is projected onto a 2d plane which is then projected back onto a 3d curved screen. The math to make it look correct in the final projection is different from what makes it look correct on a flat screen, though I don’t know if any renderers actually do this correction. Not that I think the difference is huge.


  • Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist. If I want to search the web, I can use a web browser to do it. I feel like it was added to try to make up for how bad the search used to be (and still is? I just never really had a habit of using it because it was so unreliable and depended on other ways to figure out where things were), so that it would give something, plus MS really wanted bing to be a thing.

    I recently switched to KDE and their main search bar also includes web search. I haven’t looked at the settings for it and expect there’s probably a way to disable that, but I didn’t feel great about seeing that there.









  • As I understand, chess AIs are more like brute force models that take the current board and generate a tree with all possible moves from that position, then iterating on those new positions up to a certain depth (which is what the depth of the engine refers to). And while I think some might use other algorithms to “score” each position and try to keep the search to the interesting branches, that could introduce bias that would make it miss some moves that look bad but actually set up a better position, though ultimately, they do need some way to compare between different ending positions if the depth doesn’t bring them to checkmate in all paths.

    So it chooses the most intelligent move it can find, but does it by essentially playing out every possible game, kinda like Dr Strange in Infinity War, except chess has a more finite set of states to search through.





  • I used to do “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc”

    But then found it was better to so l switch it to “one-thousand one, one-thousand two, etc” because then the count matches the time closer. In the first, when you say the count, you are actually one second earlier. Eg, “two” marks the end of the first second and the start of the second one. But saying the number after (one-thousand, steamboat, mississippi, or whatever) means you can just say the number you last said for an accurate second count.



  • Plumbing issues? When I had one of those at my last place, it just had an attachment for the tap to get the water and another hose that drained into the sink. My current under the counter dishwasher is the exact same setup, it just taps into the inlet and drain under the sink instead of over it. The only physical change to the pluming was replacing the tap nozzle, which I put back without issue when I moved out (might have even given them a new screen when I did so).


  • I bet early adopters will just end up with a robot that mostly just lives downstairs, occasionally making it to the top, but usually failing on at least one stair before it gets to the top and loudly clattering to the bottom before going to sleep for an exponentially increasing time (so that people can use the stairs between attempts).