Notices by nex (nex@chaos.social)

@marmarta @cstross Sure; you can totally get suggestions for how to approach a task from the internet, including chat bots. But looking up what each command will do before actually running it is so easy, there's really no good reason not to do that. Et voilà, you're no longer running a command you don't understand.

Similarly, reading an AI's explanation can be helpful, but it would be a good idea to cross-check with actual documentation instead of blindly taking the bot-BS as fact.

@Gargron What? “Band”? I find it weird other people here are also saying that. Are they just following your lead or is there any sense to that? I would have assumed it's a simple typo from getting confused between record decks and radio receivers for just a second.

@mcc I don't see how this analogy could be helpful here; I also didn't get the impression that O'Dowd was trying to imply anything like that.

To me this is a completely ordinary rotation, it's just that some objects (spin n + .5 where n is integer) behave like that under rotation — this seems familiar when you've used quaternions for 3D graphics or similar.

Watching this could help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKKy2mmsziI

@mcc Btw., I just rewatched the SpaceTime video (first saw it years ago) and found it quite well made — which was definitely in part due to having seen it and similar lectures about the topic before. So I've already developed a certain tolerance to this weirdness, but still I still had to occasionally pause the video at a few points to mentally catch up. That's how I discovered that other video: YT suggested it as related and I watched it in those breaks.

@mcc Suppose you're helping someone learn square roots and they're currently learning for their first test for which they need them.

If you told them to take the square root of -1 as a practice example, you'd *want* them to say “this is BULLSHIT!”, right? I think this is a normal an necessary step towards understanding 😄

@thomasfuchs Whoa! If you used approximately what I assume you did (i.e. a somewhat portable/affordable telescope), that is _stunning_ and indeed on the edge of believability. (Would be impossible from my light-polluted neighbourhood, I guess.)

125h exposure time? I.e. this is composited from pictures taken over 2 weeks or so?