@meoralis Pretty sure I've seen pottery glazes that look like that?

@b0rk @mjd I think hashing is by far the most useful for the working programmer (in some sense -- like, it would be hard to imagine life without https, but I mean, direct use). In addition to integrity checking, deduplication/content-addressed storage, there's password hashing, and, if you are a fan of carbon dioxide, proof-of-work. But admittedly my own experience biases me.

@mjd @b0rk I actually think I at least skimmed that paper, a while ago. But I mean, it's known in the sense that we know that nobody has published a way to do it, and people spend billions of dollars online on the assumption that these operations are difficult. And we further are now deploying PQC on the belief that certain operations will not be difficult for very long given newer technology. It's not a mathematical fact, but an engineering value, like the compressive strength of concrete. But it's subject to change because we live in an adversarial world. So maybe it's more like, I dunno, how deadly a bullet is given current armor. You're taking a math mindset, but that is exactly not the mindset that @b0rk is asking about.

@b0rk I don't understand the math well enough to trust in my understanding of it. Why should reversing certain functions be hard?

The only answer I can give is the same as the answer I give on global warming: scientists say this is the fact of the matter, and I trust their general epistemology.

I can plug in a toaster that I couldn't build, and I can toast with it. So I guess I can understand an interface to something I couldn't build. And I know that there are some toasters that are not worth taking a chance on (I guess the public key equivalent would be designing a novel cryptographic protocol).

re: Catfishing.net trivia game #792

@ranjit @futzle @fsvo I just checked and my hardest correct answer is Susan Kare. I don't know why that's so hard -- she's an absolute icon!

@b0rk The reason to choose example.com is that you're setting a good example for others, who might instead use a real domain in a dangerous situation.

@lahosken @bethwinegarner Is her avatar a snake? Say, a boa?

@waltman @mjd It cites a NYT article, but that article says "nobody seems to be sure" (its other cited sources are silent). Claude couldn't find a primary source either.

@mjd Funny enough, a bitcoin is divided into 100,000,000 "satoshis". Kind of a driving on parkways situation.

@mjd I was also making the same joke (hence the link), but yes, that does make some sense as an actual origin.

@mjd I was also making the same joke (hence the link), but yes, that does make some sense as an actual origin.

@mjd Presumably because they used an early form of bitcoin.

@mjd No, with that explanation I agree.

@mjd @universe_of_discourse I think your lexicographic list of binary numbers is wrong -- it starts 0; 1, but should start 0; 01; 001; ...

@mjd @chris__martin I find that doctors at One Medical are dramatically more willing to give you Y or Z if you ask. Like, it's a ten minute appointment; you had better go in with plans Y and Z in hand. But if you do, they are well aware that you've chosen One Medical for a reason. It's not 100%; I got the shingles vaccine early but Danielle didn't (until a week later when coincidentally the One Medical doctor I had used moved to be the in-house One Medical person at her company, at which point, problem solved). Similarly, for psychiatric meds, someone whose job description is "medication management" will be more willing to let you bring your own suggestions.

But yes, it's crazy that you have to know tricks like this to get the bare minimum level of care.

@ranjit @vapaad More cat is more love.

@mjd Empirically, it's 51

@igb I think the Enterprise version is called the universal translator.

@igb I think the Enterprise version is called the universal translator.

@johns Attn @bkuhn In re my email, this is one example of something that one could whack together with a LLM in a few days. (In re John's actual question, it looks like there are a bunch of web-based ones like Odoo or OSPOS, which, well, I guess? But a desktop one would be so much nicer).

@bkuhn @jalefkowit @wwahammy

Coming from a not bad family, I think there are things we can teach our kids about adulting. Like, how to budget. Or how to think about debt. Or when it's worth asking for an exception to a rule (or just ignoring the rule). What a good relationship looks like. Or how to manage being neurospicy.

@chrissie_c Supposedly NordVPN.

@mjd I think this is another example of my theory that there are two types of people: those who embrace things of the class Cooper Coupe, and those who don't. The rank "General of the Army" was invented because otherwise George C. Marshall would have been Field Marshall Marshall. I would have jumped at that chance. Marshall didn't. (Of course, now I can't think of any other instances of this, but I'm sure I have some somewhere).

@mjd The New Yorker's Shuffalo isn't quite that, but it's similar.

@mjd @mcahalane The dissents' whole argument about not being subject to a foreign power was incomprehensible to me. There were Black people alive in 1868 who had been born outside the US. Why wouldn't those people have been considered to be subjects of whatever polity they were born in? And thus, wouldn't their children be in the same situation as children of immigrants today?

@bmd Thanks for the feedback.

I think it gives you a pop-up when you've got it solved; if you're not seeing that, please let me know what browser/OS and send me a screenshot. I'm not sure about typing -- there's a little thing where sometimes you've got to use the correct "O", but I don't know that it's a good thing, so maybe I should just forget that and allow typing. Kind of tricky to figure out how typing interacts with the drag/drop, but probably possible.

Anyway, too-much-dragging aside, how do you like it?

@lahosken You can use each letter at most once, but they are in order. So, if the words are MORX and FLEET, you might be given MFOLREETX. You know that M is the first letter of one of the words.

(If you have red-green colorblindness, the UI will be harder to understand; I intend to fix this somehow but haven't quite gotten to it)

@mjd From episode 193 of the Lateral podcast, wet vs electronic.

@mjd I know what Peano numbers are, and could roughly do arithmetic with them. So I would not need an explanation, I think.

@bkuhn @seabass I am a beneficiary of this -- I was a total rando, 20 years old or so with no accomplishments, who approached Bradley at a conference. We ended up going to dinner, and somehow this led to him hiring me at FSF.

@bkuhn Fun fact: in the original novel, soylent wasn't people.

@jmac I have said it for years. Possibly my dad says it? (he does wear suspenders)

re: unspecified horror

@mjd @simontatham @robinhouston @gjm @pozorvlak I have seen that confusion in the wild -- they don't mean trash bags that are 1.9mm thick (which would be thicker than lightweight wetsuits). They mean .019 inches.

re: unspecified horror

@mjd Smart, mathematically people like you and @danluu often overestimate how much math other people can do.

Here's a bit that I recall finding tough:

This means that you can think of the powers of x as being vectors in a 4-dimensional vector space whose canonical basis is {1, √2, √3, √6}. Any four vectors in this space, such as {1, x, x2, x3}, are either linearly independent, and so can be combined to total up to any other vector, such as x4, or else they are linearly dependent and three of them can be combined to make the fourth. In the former case, we have found a fourth-degree polynomial of which x is a root, and proved that there is no simpler such polynomial; in the latter case, we've found a simpler polynomial of which x is a root.
To complete the example above, it is evident that {1, x, x2, x3} are linearly independent, but if you don't believe it you can use any of the usual mechanical tests.

I can't remember anything about vector spaces, and I don't know any of the usual mechanical tests. That one, I could probably get through by refreshing from Wikipedia, but a while back there was one about intuitionistic logic, which I had never even heard of (even though I read and enjoyed The Intuitionist).

@checkervest That's the moment the arrow went in.

(Note that the Kennis & Kennis reproduction above is missing his numerous tattoos)

@mjd Epoxy clay (I usually buy Apoxie Sculpt) for a permanent solution. It can be very permanent; I used to install a spindle in a homemade door handle and it hasn't had any problems despite 8 years of daily use.

@crystalvisits @crschmidt @somershade.bsky.social The double-stair thing long pre-dates ebike batteries. I mean, yes, this is one of FDNY's current reasons to oppose single-stair buildings, but firefighters also often opposed bike lanes for insane reasons. You also can't have large home batteries like FranklinWH. Well, I think you can, but only if you have them 25 feet away from your house, which in practice means you can't in the parts of the city where most people live.