mohn
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
384
Submissions
105
Member since
Oct 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 months ago
Whoops, my comment was supposed to say "instead of reframing", but the crucial "of" got lost when I reworded things. Too late to edit now.
Comment · 6 months ago
Interesting question, a lot of search engine results claim that John Von Neumann was presented with the problem and quickly solved it by summing the infinite series instead reframing it as a constant speed for an easily calculated duration. Plausible, but sounds apocryphal. Here's the oldest reference I've found and verified by reading scans[0] of the source book:
Initiation Mathématique (1906) by Charles-Ange Laisant (1841--1920), number 53. Le chien et les deux voyageurs.
The setup here has two pedestrians walking in the same direction with a dog running back and forth between them. One of them starts out some distance ahead of the other but, because the one behind walks faster, they eventually intersect. It briefly mentions a variation where they are walking toward one another, as in the typical trains & fly version of the problem. Best of luck finding older, I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there!
Comment · 8 months ago
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.
[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Comment · 8 months ago
Nice, love a good grenade glitch! I owned and played a bit of GTA II, but never knew about this. I like the grenade glitches in the Command & Conquer series where, if you click again to retarget during the grenadier's windup animation, they will ignore the range check and can throw arbitrarily far.
Comment · 9 months ago
I agree with the sentiment, and the specific wording of your comment made me want to link to the classic bash.org quote[0] which has consistently been in the top 5 for a long time, but I just learned that we lost bash.org... :(
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?...
Comment · 1 year ago
I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
Comment · 1 year ago
>1-bit audio output
Hey, with the appropriate overclock, that could be audiophile-grade [0]! I want to see an appliance that takes DSD input and uses it to drive a 2.8224 MHz musical Tesla coil.
Comment · 1 year ago
This reminded me of a Kurzgesagt video from a few months ago on the same topic [0]. I see that the author, Karen Lloyd, was one of the experts they consulted when making that video.
Comment · 2 years ago
I enjoyed playing with that webapp [0], bummer that it's down now.
Comment · 2 years ago
>I don't think Google can fix it
Can they eventually throw away Android and replace it with Fuchsia? In the reporting about Fuchsia that I read ages ago, it sounded like it was intended to be an Android replacement but, looking into it again just now, it seems more like an embedded OS for other non-smartphone hardware -- maybe with some (aspirational?) claims of utility on smartphones and tablets.
Comment · 2 years ago
It sounds like GP would benefit from satellite internet bypassing the firewall, but I don't know how hard the Chinese government works to crack down on that loophole.
Comment · 2 years ago
In the US, HIPAA grants you the right to access your own health information [0]. I recommend asking providers to burn the DICOMs to a DVD (or send your images to you via an online portal, if they and you prefer) whenever you have medical imaging done.
[0] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/right-to-access/in...
Comment · 2 years ago
For anyone wanting a better image of the "Modern model of the Lehmer Bicycle Chain Sieve" than what is embedded in TFA, it can be seen on page #4 of the Spring 1983 Computer Museum report (which is also a PDF):
https://tcm.computerhistory.org/reports/TCMReportSpring1983....
Comment · 2 years ago
> there is a pretty famous former M$ performance engineer who worked on Xbox and bunch of other large projects, he has webpage about how he tracks down bugs and performance issues, don't it have it handy unfortunately.
Bruce Dawson's blog, Random ASCII?
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)