jacobolus

4 ms·

1.
by jacobolus 6d ago
I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word. Some of the statements (by other people) in this c
2.
by jacobolus 6d ago
It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind. A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I
3.
by jacobolus 6d ago
Both of these are common in the US. It doesn't seem like there's any strong regional connection. Judging from a search, "play the piano" is about 5 times as common as "play piano", but there are also many sourc
4.
Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump(wired.com)
5 points by jacobolus 9d ago|0 comments
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by jacobolus 10d ago
Some people have the primary goal of making things work for everyone. Other people have the primary goal of personally benefitting. These are often in conflict. The better a company or team can align these goals, the more effective it is, a
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by jacobolus 13d ago
The authors of this piece are Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. It is hosted at Terence Tao's blog, but he did not write it.
7.
by jacobolus 14d ago
> Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition&quot
8.
by jacobolus 15d ago
Why would outsiders take this at face value considering Altman's reputation as a pathological liar? Cf. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may... > The memos, which we revi
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by jacobolus 15d ago
What was the "truth" in the Johansson case? Many, many people who heard the voice immediately thought it was Johansson's voice, or some kind of sound-alike, presumably picked because she voiced the computer in a popular film.
10.
by jacobolus 16d ago
It's really fun to play with black and white photography using various kinds of color filters and see how different you can get the same scene to appear. (Also fun to play with a polarizing filter.)
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by jacobolus 16d ago
Maybe to be more precise, conformal projections like the transverse Mercator projection and the conformal conic projection were adopted by militaries after WWI, and the UTM system per se was created during WWII.
12.
by jacobolus 16d ago
The transverse Mercator projection is completely different than what people are complaining about. The UTM system is roughly what you get if you only take a narrow band of the ordinary Mercator projection near the equator, but turn the glob
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by jacobolus 17d ago
If my property bordered an alley where literally every surface had been covered in murals for decades, and I discovered that the organized non-profit coordinating murals in that alley, who had a long-standing relationship with all of the pr
14.
by jacobolus 17d ago
Some people have the legal authority to destroy public art. That doesn't make it a morally or socially acceptable behavior.
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by jacobolus 17d ago
From Mission Local, https://missionlocal.org/2026/09/four-murals-in-clarion-alle... > “CAMP has had both written and verbal agreements/understandings with property owners and landlords regarding murals on
16.
by jacobolus 17d ago
This alley has consisted of mostly murals for several decades. Anyone owning property there is well aware of it. If someone ordered murals painted over there, it was because they were deliberately trying to destroy celebrated public art.
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by jacobolus 17d ago
Grandmasters absolutely make mistakes, and you could learn to notice them with a few months of guided practice.
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by jacobolus 24d ago
For a low-discrepancy sequence you are usually trying to generate one point at a time, up to some arbitrary number. Here the goal is to generate (roughly) a specific number of points that fill a whole region. So you probably could figure ou
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by jacobolus 24d ago
Also fun: https://observablehq.com/@jrus/spheredisksample
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by jacobolus 24d ago
Folks may find https://observablehq.com/@fil/poisson-distribution-generator... useful
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by jacobolus 26d ago
That's not at all about fine detail, but is about relative amounts of absorption/reflection of the light between skin vs. vein. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)
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by jacobolus 28d ago
People always feel like that to a certain extent, but both quantitatively and qualitatively there have been very dramatic shifts in the past few decades in the USA.
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by jacobolus 28d ago
I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers. A large number of them are more or less explicit warnings that Trump-style actions and attitudes should not be tolerated, and explanations about how they should be prevented and countered. T
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by jacobolus 28d ago
Politics doesn't work if a significant part of the leadership is constantly acting in bad faith, and behaving essentially sociopathically. Voters' and citizens' (and some judges') willingness to support sociopathic behav
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by jacobolus 29d ago
The so-called "Tea Party" was not a "populist movement". It was a billionaire-funded (notably by the Koch brothers, but also by fossil fuel and tobacco companies) astroturf operation.
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by jacobolus 29d ago
This is one variant of the 3-d analog of the "shoelace formula" for area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula#Generalizatio... The 2-d version is from the 18th century. I'd expect the 3-d vers
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by jacobolus 29d ago
Some authors use a ton of dashes, while others never use dashes.
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by jacobolus 1mo ago
Spaced en dashes – like this – are a correct and accepted typographical choice. Whether to use spaced en dashes or (spaced or unspaced) em dashes is a matter of taste or local convention, and varies from one publication to another. Other th
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by jacobolus 1mo ago
It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.
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by jacobolus 1mo ago
That's why they didn't design an entirely new font. Instead they made semi-automated modifications to a free font, and then tweaked a few specific characters afterwards. The result is not as good as what they had before, and not a

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