abstractbill
Joined 19 years ago
Karma
11,182
Submissions
1,763
Member since
Feb 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 months ago
Theoretical physics, sure, ok. Not experimental physics though.
Comment · 3 months ago
Math is full of such steps, moreso than most other endeavors, probably because the main limit is the abstract reasoning itself.
That, as well as how long we've been doing it (thousands of years!) and so how much of the more accessible parts we've explored very thoroughly.
Comment · 3 months ago
I've been admining our family minecraft servers for about 5 years, and just handed off that job to my 12 year old daughter who now knows more than enough of the linux command-line to do it. I thoroughly recommend it, it's been great!
There are many ways to get it done. What worked best for us was choosing java over bedrock, renting a cheap linux vps, and writing some very simple shell scripts for starting, stopping, changing worlds, etc. Happy to talk you through anything you get stuck on!
Comment · 3 months ago
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.
Comment · 5 months ago
A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!
Comment · 5 months ago
It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got better. I have unpredictable good stretches and bad stretches. During my bad stretches I can't get out of bed. I've mostly given up on the idea of a diagnosis myself, after seeing dozens of doctors over the years, with the most positive interactions being Stanford researchers telling me I'm a really "interesting" case.
Comment · 5 months ago
My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.
Comment · 5 months ago
"... though when it tried to animate it the bicycle bounced off into the top and the bicycle got warped."
Should be the pelican bounced off.
Comment · 6 months ago
I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.
Comment · 6 months ago
A complaint asking what this has to do with hackers or hacking.
Comment · 8 months ago
A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?"
For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
Comment · 1 year ago
Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else.
Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.
Comment · 1 year ago
It’s your brain working as intended.
As intended by whom?
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