quchen

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
1,486
Submissions
436
Member since
Apr 30
Freenode: quchen https://github.com/quchen

Encryption: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/quchen; my proof: https://keybase.io/quchen/sigs/wFLn8V9VLr7GdojgPvbUt_UhfePTJoOYC2MQPmuAEMI ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 22 days ago
The weak force is weak in two ways. One is as you mention the massive-ness of the W/Z resulting in exponential decrease of force over distance, but there's also the fact that at our usual energy scales, creating a (virtual/off-shell) W/Z is close to impossible - so it's not only weak over distance, but also very rare.
Comment · 1 month ago
Part of the name was a joke about people often mishearing Haskell as Pascal, Ed told me a couple of years ago. I think it might have been at ZuriHac back when it was at Google Zurich, so 2016-ish?
Comment · 1 month ago
Or take DMT as a crystalline, naturally produced substance. As far as I know, there's no Methamphetamine in nature, although I've become very careful with the terms none/all in biology.
Comment · 1 month ago
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.

That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.

Comment · 2 months ago
On the other hand, lots of people have the liberating experience of discovering that "no tip" is a sensible default to press, and from then on we're out of the tipping game. Bots don't guilt trip me anymore, hooray!
Comment · 3 months ago
I'd say it's quite the opposite, Google is the only thing that made Go become somewhat popular.
Comment · 5 months ago
"Check it out, a licence plate" still rings in my head. It's a random sentence at the very end of the demo. 10-ish me must have played that first short level dozens of times. But as you said, the framerate was ok, and the final game being much more open and effectful it lagged my computer to death. Good times.
Comment · 6 months ago
Algebraic too.

There's also the opposite in physics though, "modern" means from the 60s with square roots drawn in manually.

Comment · 7 months ago
There are a couple of communities that have almost no phone presence. Certain kinds of music festivals are an example, and it's really quite nice not having to worry about being filmed.
Comment · 7 months ago
The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn!

I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age yet though, and trying out NixOS in a VM is not only easy, it is practical – in the sense that when you’re happy, you can simply boot that same config/OS anywhere else by just installing that config. And I’ll never forget that one time where I completely borked my everything in the VM, did a kernel rollback with like 3 command line args and a reboot, and the OS was, well, rolled back. As I said, almost platonic.

What I can recommend is using nix-the-package-manager. Whenever I need the newest version of something, `nix-env -i <whatever>` and it’s there and works. If it doesn’t, roll back. If I need a different version, that’s on nixpkgs as well, with the same negligible amount of friction.

Comment · 7 months ago
Do you have a link? There are plenty of snippets that are easy to find, is there one canonical full video?
Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
Bezier curve are just nested lerps! A bezier curve of degree 1 is lerp, what we usually call "bezier curve" is of degree 3.

It's a mathematical property that bezier curves (degree n) can be split exactly into two bezier curves (degree n), which is known as deCasteljau's algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Casteljau%27s_algorithm

That page also features some pretty animations on the "lerpy" part - Bezier curves are really simple, it's just that for some reason they are often presented with lots of math jargon that's completely over the top.

This is also used to efficiently draw bezier curves: subdivide them until they're visually straight lines, then plot those.

Comment · 8 months ago
(Note the post you’ve replied to mentioned electrons and _protons_, not positrons.)
Comment · 9 months ago
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.

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