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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Bigger/faster the bullet the easier it was for water to stop.

    For bullets that’s probably true because of their light weight, but heavy shells from the big naval guns of battleships (12" to 18" caliber) actually carried a long way through water and sometimes hit and damaged target ships below the waterline. The Japanese in particular actually designed some of their shells to maximize their underwater performance.


  • It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.

    I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.

    What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.





  • My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.


  • The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.

    And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.




  • Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.

    As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It’s like the whole field is based on one person’s poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective in some ways as it is, but you’d think there’d be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.


  • Years ago I got a copy of MSDN which had apparently been put together by developers who all had giant monitors. On a normal laptop screen none of the text wrapped properly so every article had a horizontal scrollbar which you had to work left and right to read every fucking line. I eventually had to start copying the contents into a Notepad instance just to be able to read the damn things normally.

    This is why I think developers should always have to work on 10-year-old laptops with 800x600 screens.