• AstronautOlympian@lemdro.id
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    1 month ago

    Here’s the source:

    https://xkcd.com/2501/

    And the alt text:

    How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    There’s an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They’re arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.

    The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, “one third x cubed.'”

    “One ther desque,” she repeats.

    “One third x cubed,” the mathematician tries again.

    “One thir dek scubed.”

    “That’ll do,” he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. “I’ll prove it. I’ll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer.” The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.

    “My friend and I have a question,” the first mathematician asks the waitress. “Do you know what is the integral of x squared?”

    “One thir dek scubed,” she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.

    And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,

    “Plus a constant.”

    • nikaaa@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Just yesterday I ran into some chucklehead here on Lemmy that had convinced themselves that the average person would interpret “crypto” to mean SSL rather than cryptocurrency.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      You know, I think I agree with the spirit of that assertion but not the letter of that assertion.

      There are people who are kind of at their limit knowing that on your phone there’s a Facebook app, but you have to use your browser and go to the website on a computer. These folks will hear dial tones and TV static in their heads if you say “secure socket layer” to them. These folks have probably also sat through NordVPN ads and heard words like “secure” and “encrypted” used together, and will probably make understandable mistakes like “how’d someone steal bitcoins? I thought it was encrypted?”

    • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I had one last week here on claiming the average person could feed themselves for years by growing cherry tomatoes from 6 tiny plants. Bro is supposed to be a big-time agricultural bigwig

      • Treemaster099@pawb.social
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        2 months ago

        Cherry tomatoes are the things you put in a salad at a restaurant to feel healthy, then pick them out once you get back to the table.

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          Wut? Are we talking about one of those “salads” with mayo, eggs, bacon strips, croutons, sugary dressing and whatnot?

          Because if not, then cherry tomatoes are going to be pretty much the sweetest thing you’ll find for your salad. I’d definitely still call them healthy, but not more so than the other ingredients of a salad…

        • Hobo@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Look I’m not saying you’re wrong or anything just that I really don’t appreciate you stalking me.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        As a small time backyard gardener I can say from experience that 4 plants made more cherry tomatoes than I could reasonably eat. I was giving ziplock bags of cherry tomatoes away to people at work for a couple months. They probably did produce a year’s worth of cherry tomatoes, but they don’t refrigerate or freeze particularly well and they’re not a great choice for making tomato sauce because of their liquid/pulp/skin ratio.

        Similarly I’ve found that I can grow a year’s supply of red pepper flakes with a whopping two cayenne plants. The rate at which I consume red pepper flakes, I’m about out by the time this year’s peppers start ripening.

        I’m able, in my tiny little garden, to grow more of single kinds of foods than I can reasonably eat. I cannot grow enough to sustain my entire diet; I’d need more land than I own to grow grain.

  • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    They are talking about computer things, that’s about how familiar I am with whatever they are talking about.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, it’s intentionally obscure. Basically, x86 assembly code is a way of telling a processor what to calculate, at a very low level.
      So, it’s similar to programming languages, but those actually get translated into x86 assembly code, before it’s told to the processor. (“x86” is a certain processor architecture. Others exist, too, most prominently “ARM”.)

      But yeah, even with me knowing that much, I’d need to guess what ret and int3 might do.

      Everyone knows jmp and nop, though, of course. 🙃

      • cows_are_underrated@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        That’s the exact same thing. x86 Assembly Code isn’t that hard(to know what it is, understanding it is something different),but I havent heard of the other stuff.

        • mormegil@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          Int3 is a special single-byte (CC, if I recall correctly) form of the INT instruction (which is CD imm8, I think) to raise an interrupt. Interrupt #3 is the debugging interrupt, so by overwriting any instruction with CC, you place a breakpoint there.

  • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Is there any situation where you’d want to remember the opcodes? Disassemblers should give you user-friendly assembly code, without any need to look at the raw numbers. Maybe it’s useful to remember which instructions are pseudo instructions (so you know stuff like jz (jump if zero) being the same as je (jump if equal) making it easier to understand the disassembly), but I don’t think you need to remember the opcode numbers for that.

    • Beetschnapps@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The important thing is to be important. Engineering has to deal with teammates that don’t have these problems, so they equalize.

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    I recently took a class on ARM assembly, and yet I don’t even know half of these x86 instructions.

  • moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    It’s insane how close that handwriting is to randall’s, did he make multiple versions of this comic or was this written by a professional forger?

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        2 months ago

        Holy shit. I remembered the original comic, but didn’t remember what the subject matter of it was. So if you hadn’t left this comment, I would have just gone on believing that the OP’s version was Randall’s version.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Yeah, I’ve seen people riff on xkcd comics before but they usually do a bad job of matching the handwriting/font (I don’t know if Randall hand-letters these or if he types in a handwritey font). It’s often a deliberately bad job, because indicating that they are changing the original is a part of the message/artistic expression. Like when a word is covered with a black bar with white letters in it in a different font, an obvious revision, it’s like hearing a different voice interrupt.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

    …sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

    [looking up]

    …it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      My daughter told me the other day, “I bet I could figure out a Commodore 64 if I had one.”

      Good luck figuring out LOAD “*”,8,1 by yourself, kid.

      • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Literally every game manual comes with instructions to do LOAD "*",8,1. (oh, did I say “manual”? Instruction card. Yeaaaah, the minimal instuction stuff isn’t new, kids.) Everyone and their dog figured it out. If there was any command anyone knew, it was that. …only to be topped by SHIFT+RUN/STOP for initiating tape load (which you could just do by typing in, you know, LOAD).

        Know what else we did when we were kids? WE ASKED AROUND. If you don’t tell your kid how this thing works, you’re making things worse, to be frank. I mean, if some random kid came up to me and asked how to load a C64 game, I’d give them a goddamn lecture free of charge.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          She meant she could figure it out just playing around with it, not reading a manual or asking around. I told her she’d have to read a manual.

          • cmfhsu@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Erm I might be showing my inexperience here.

            Is there no equivalent to man LOAD in the commodore world? Or even just help?

    • palordrolap@kbin.social
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      2 months ago

      Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

      Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

      Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

      Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

      The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

      But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.