Notices by Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

@astrid @lily the *amount of people* that think A4 paper is in the golden ratio is maddening. there is more than one interesting number! A4 is in √2, not ϕ! Although whatever you do don't tell the designers that or they'll be calling it "tritone paper" and insisting it's cursed

huh, my money was on starmer

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/15/earthworm-crowned-uk-invertebrate-of-the-year-by-guardian-readers

Playing around with a basic "2.5d" version of the #picotron map system

Definitely needs optimising, though, this is currently using ~80% of the CPU

Nasa are currently working to fix a computer error aboard Voyager 1. The probe's computer system runs at around 8000 instructions per second and has about 68kB of memory. Due to the interplanetary distances involved, even at light speed it takes 45 hours to send a signal and get a response. When asked about the unique challenges this poses, an engineer said "that's actually about average for a modern CI system".

@girlonthenet @thisismissem I reckon it's kind of to be expected for stuff that's properly original and ambitious — anything ambitious in 1999 is probably easy to do better 25 years later. And anything original in 1999 even more so — The Matrix was humanity's first real attempt at bullet time, whereas now even BBC Sherlock has it in for absolutely no fucking reason. Makes sense we've got better at it faster than we've got better at doing big explosions or whatever that we've been doing since cinema was invented. All the videogames people remember for their graphics look awful now too.

IEEE floating point numbers are named after the noise mathematicians make when you explain how they work

Whenever someone tells me their name, I enter my Memory Palace, stand around for a bit, and then say "what did I come in here for?"

@BethanyBlack I enjoy that if you take it too seriously it cycles round to being true again.

Good idea, let's turn off all the AI data centres and solve both problems at once.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/24/ai-risk-climate-crisis-google-deepmind-chief-demis-hassabis-regulation

Every YouTube video is either "all of science and the entire history of the world explained (5:41)" or "how player two's controller inputs are processed on level six of this japan-only game boy advance game that was only available free with a particular brand of cereal for two weeks in one store (2:37:21)"

@monorail a thing I've found after studying physics is it's often really hard, maybe impossible, to say which thing is "why" — if you start from Newtonian mechanics then yeah, conservation of angular momentum is just a neat by-product you can use as a shortcut in these situations, but if you start from quantum mechanics, then angular momentum is fundamental and Newtonian mechanics is a convenient shortcut that falls out of the maths. To properly understand what's happening, sometimes the important thing is that you find the answer that clicks best for you, whether or not it's the "standard" one — I never intuitively understood the angular momentum explanation of precession (why a spinning top stays up) but the linear explanation works fine for me.

(I don't think this invalidates the point at all, just thought it was interesting 🙂)

@PatriciaLewis the tool they are training us to use accidentally got rolled out too early so the first I heard if it was when my computer popped up a screen for no apparent reason saying "do you want to grant PhishHook access to your Google account" so now I haven't got the chrome extension installed and I don't think this is a me problem

@laser @panegyr apparently the system has flagged it as a concern that I didn't report the fake email

i also didn't check the dog shit in the street wasn't poisoned before deciding not to eat it, I don't think this should count against me

@ellenor2000 I mean, if I'd opened it it'd have been perfectly clear it was fake, I just trashed it based on the subject line, I never even asked myself if it was real.

it's like if someone tried to sneak into my house by pretending to be a vacuum salesperson, I don't care if you're real, you're not coming in

apparently i passed a phishing awareness test last week by correctly ignoring a fake linkedin email

nobody tell my boss that i ignored it entirely on the assumption that it was a real linkedin email

@neave haha, yes, like I've seen brilliant sketches on the BBC making fun of BBC News, and we know the BBC knows that's a ridiculous way to run a corporation because they made a whole sitcom about how ridiculous it is but absolutely didn't fix any of it. It's *such* a strange organisation.

Hey, look, the BBC are on fedi now — they have an instance at social.bbc

Please do not yell at them about transphobia or whatever.

By all means block or defederate — I don't trust the BBC one fucking inch not to fill their instance with transphobic articles propping up various abhorrent Tory policies — but I promise, nobody at BBC News has the slightest clue that BBC R&D even exists. The departments are organisationally separate and well over 100 miles apart. The person running the R&D account is far, far more likely to be trans themselves than to have any way at all to affect News policy, and there's less than no use harassing them about it.

Not that it matters a damn, this is a BBC R&D project, it'll probably be a roaring success and then get quietly discontinued because nobody outside R&D is willing to take it on.

@EeveeEuphoria @Rairii @ShadowJonathan imagine if some random ex employee discovers they have a copy of that key and now they're the only person in the world who can make custom ROMs for those phones, not even Microsoft can stop them