• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search “results” page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can’t find actual links anymore.

    Personally, and In principle at least, this makes sense. About half of my web searches are looking for a quick answer to a question (what’s the per pound cook time for a frozen turkey?), so having that answer highlighted and summarized alongside the source is very useful. It’s actually the minority of the time that what I really want is a link to an external resource.

    The effectiveness of that implementation and the accuracy of the summarized info is a whole other topic…







  • One of my old coworkers who was Vietnamese once brought in some iced Vietnamese coffee to share with the office. I have never had jitters that strong from a small cup of something so smooth and sweet! And I drink a fair amount of coffee so my caffeine tolerance is decent.

    Truly nectar of the gods…





  • I’m not going to inflict a JP video on myself, so maybe someone else can help me with the math. Moore’s law says the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 2 years. Earth is roughly 5 billion years old, so there have been roughly 5 billion doublings since his proposed time that life emerged. 2^5,000,000,000 is an absolutely unfathomable number compared to… anything really! So what am I missing here?

    And looking at it the other way, if a “law” that has existed for only a matter of decades is being extrapolated back for billions of years, and is only off by a factor of 3-ish… that’s pretty fucking solid endorsement of said law!





  • Human brains are literal pattern-recognition and classifying machines. It’s what they have evolved for millions of years to do. We’re hard wired to observe nature, detect patterns, and classify things based on those patterns to help focus on new info and not be overwhelmed by the world.

    Gender is just a shorthand that we’ve developed for classifying people into groups, based on key commonalities about how most of us tend to look and behave.

    It’s like the names we give to colors. We can all name a handful of main colors off the top of our head, and we’ve even named a few as “primary” colors because of how they interact together. But someone would have to be an absolute fucking moron to insist that primary colors are the only “real” colors, just because the idea of primary colors has some basis in color theory.