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cyborgx7

Re:New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes on Monday July 21, 2025 @07:23AM (#44633908)
I'm pretty sure that line of the article didn't mean to imply that we don't know, or aren't sure, only that it goes beyond the scope of the article and isn't directly relevant to the topic at hand.
It's really the last thing that keeps any trustworthy source from recommending switching to linux for gaming without reservation. As soon as you want to play any competitive online multiplayer games, which to my understanding is the vast majority of people, you're going to have problems with some anti-cheat not working on Linux sooner or later.

I'm not saying it's the only thing that stops mass adoption of Linux for gaming, but I think we'd see a massive uptick very quickly, if this problem went away.

Re:Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order? on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @11:54AM (#44378702)
According to Wikipedia, there are countably many algebraic numbers, and that makes intuitive sense to me as well. Do you have a source that the set of algebraic numbers is uncountable?
Re:Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order? on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @06:48AM (#44364743)
An interesting thing about the quote you highlighted is that it's already true about the set of real numbers itself. The set of real numbers that can be precisely, individually identified is a countable subset of all real numbers. That means the vast majority of real numbers, an uncountable amount of them, can not be individually defined and thought about.
Re:Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order? on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @04:36AM (#44364041)
> Maybe it's the idea of a completed infinity that's my problem; maybe it's the fact I don't understand how to define (or forgot cauchy sequences in detail) an arbitrary real.

As someone who also has never fully made his peace with the diagonality argument, but just chosen to accept it as true, as a given, this kind of bumps up against an interesting implication of different cardinalities of infinity.

To precisely define an arbitrary real you'd need some kind of finite string that uniquely identifies that real number. Finite strings can be mapped, 1 to 1, to natural numbers. Therefore there can't be a finite string for any real number that uniquely identifies it. Otherwise we'd have a mapping between natural numbers and real numbers.

In fact, the set of uniquely identifiable real numbers is a countable subset of real numbers. [1]

Somehow, this realization has helped me make peace with the uncountability of real numbers.

[1] Sorry if use words like "unique", "identify", "define" in not quite the right way. I hope the meaning I'm going for comes across.

Re:LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @02:56AM (#43829417)
The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.
Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? on Monday April 07, 2025 @03:51AM (#43608955)
If they provide something of value to their audience, they can take money from their audience, in exchange for that value. If they do not provide value for their audience, them ceasing to exist is not a loss for society.
Re:Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof on Friday March 07, 2025 @02:40AM (#43288005)
When the AVGN started out, the SNES was roughly as old as the PS3 is now.
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @07:32AM (#42182723)
Why is efficiency the guiding metric of our decision making?
Re:CSS Gets a New Logo: and It Uses the Color `Rebeccapurple` on Sunday November 17, 2024 @04:43AM (#42163106)
They're so much nicer.
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..

At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.

It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.

> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.

"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.

Re:Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake on Saturday September 28, 2024 @02:23AM (#41678301)
I don't have a strong opinion in the matter, but the argument is that banning things don't automatically make them go away. Banning things that people want to do will make organized crime spring up around it, which is often worse. The idea is, by allowing it in some limited legal way, you make it unprofitable for the organized criminals.
Re:Fair Chess and Simultaneous Games on Friday July 26, 2024 @08:15AM (#41077966)
If the point of this exercise is to create a game that removes first move advantage, while keeping the game as unchanged as possible, this is an utter failure.

Turning a game of perfect information into a bluffing and anticipation game is not a minor change. It's a fundamental change of the essence of what the game is.

From your FAQ: "While this is a beta product, our tests show it to be about 82% accurate."

What does this mean? Is it the true positive rate? The true negative rate? An average of the two? An average weighted by frequency?

Re:Static Chess on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @05:21AM (#40353187)
Ah, that's the possibility I wasn't thinking of. Thank you.
Re:Static Chess on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @03:22AM (#40352500)
I admit that while I do regularly play chess, I'm not super well versed in either FEN nor Chess960. That said, I've been trying to figure out why you would need a different notation for Chess960 for half an hour now, and I just can't figure it out. All explanations I'm seeing just make some vague mention about ambiguity in the regular notation for Chess960, but I, personally, can't think of a situation in which the regular notation is insufficient.

The KQkq still unambiguously mark which player can castle to which side, and once either a rook or King move for the first time, you just remove the corresponding letter(s). What am I missing?

Re:Tangoing with a Martin Gardner Word Game on Monday April 29, 2024 @08:52AM (#40197650)
You're correct. In fact I'm not seeing any two probe words that will give you a definite piece of positive information, without taking into account a third word.

I made my own mistake when trying to figure out this puzzle, that I didn't notice until your comment prompted me to go back and check through it again. I thought after the three even words, the solution had to BAY or all three even words had to be zeroes. But without using any of the odd probe words, words starting with BU- are also still a possibility.

Re:Passkeys: A Shattered Dream on Friday April 26, 2024 @09:28AM (#40169122)
I understand this, but the person who responded said Passkeys are exactly the same as SSH and used the same, when asked what they are. If that was true, then we would just teach non-technical users to use SSH Keys.
Re:Passkeys: A Shattered Dream on Friday April 26, 2024 @04:59AM (#40167251)
If they are exactly like SSH keys, then why not just keep using SSH keys. Clearly, there is something else to them.
Re:Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums on Saturday December 30, 2023 @07:08AM (#38814642)
This is exactly it. The purpose of web forums is communication that you want to reach people right now (if you don't already have a well established platform). Most of it is information that, if it has any value at all (I think it does, but wanted to preempt snarky comments) it has the most value right now, and it diminishes rapidly as time passes. So having it be read by people right now is much higher priority than preservation for the future.
I'm pretty sure if you reproduce a work from memory by accident, because you didn't notice your subconscious had just stored the entire article and is now reproducing it word for word, you'd still be guilty of copyright infringement.
It's fine for a human to remember it. It's not fine for a human redistribute it for money (legally speaking). That's copyright infringement.
Re:How Gödel's Proof Works (2020) on Friday November 24, 2023 @03:26AM (#38401721)
Here is the thing with that. Technically every individual instance of a problem is decidable. It's only in the universal case that they become undecidable.

Take the halting problem for example. Imagine two algorithms for determining if a program halts. One always returns true, the other always returns false. For every single program, one of them will be the correct solver, but clearly neither of them is the correct solver for every single program.

Therefore the counter-example necessarily has to depend on the specific details of the algorithm that claims to be the universal halting decider.

Strictly speaking, there isn't an universal counter-example, since it changes depending on what the algorithm is. There are just instructions on how you can always make one, no matter what the algorithm is.

Beat me to it.
Re:Ask Wirecutter: Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me? on Thursday April 13, 2023 @05:05AM (#35552830)
Long TOS that nobody expects to ever be read should be illegal in general.
Re:Ask Wirecutter: Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me? on Saturday April 08, 2023 @03:02AM (#35491205)
Because your neighbor "agreed" to to the possibility in the process of setting up their device as part of that device's TOS.
This is just a simple classification problem, the prime application for basic neural networks. Using a general text generation system for this seems like complete overkill. Just a bunch of wasted resources.
Re:The water technology behind Avatar: The Way of Water on Monday March 13, 2023 @05:26AM (#35133179)
I think the person you replied to was being sarcastic. They were pointing out that the ideas presented in the movie are anything but generic for major blockbuster movies.
Re:The water technology behind Avatar: The Way of Water on Sunday March 12, 2023 @06:23PM (#35127068)
Is the idea that someone would genuinely appreciate the artistry of an earnest movie without clever self-aware memable moments really that unthinkable to you?
Re:The water technology behind Avatar: The Way of Water on Sunday March 12, 2023 @02:23PM (#35124038)
What? You were the one that equated cultural impact with quotable lines. The fact that memability doesn't equal cultural impact is exactly the point I was making.

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