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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Unfortunately the horrible death would come long before you even reach the event horizon. The tidal forces would tear you apart and eventually, tear apart the molecules that used to make up you. Every depiction of crossing a black hole event horizon just pretends that doesn’t happen for the sake of demonstration.


  • My favorite use is actually just to help me name stuff. Give it a short description of what the thing does and get a list of decent names. Refine if they’re all missing something.

    Also useful for finding things quickly in generated documentation, by attaching the documentation as context. And I use it when trying to remember some of the more obscure syntax stuff.

    As for coding assistants, they can help quickly fill in boilerplate or maybe autocomplete a line or two. I don’t use it for generating whole functions or anything larger.

    So I get some nice marginal benefits out of it. I definitely like it. It’s got a ways to go before it replaces the programming part of my job, though.




  • VoterFrog@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzOKBuddyGalaxyBrain
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    16 days ago

    I don’t think it’s working. LLMs don’t have any trouble parsing it.

    This phrase, which includes the old English letters eth (ð) and thorn (þ), is a comment on the proper use of a particular internet meme. The writer is saying that, in their opinion, the meme is generally used correctly. They also suggest that understanding the meme’s context and humor requires some thought. The use of the archaic letters ð and þ is a stylistic choice to add a playful or quirky tone, likely a part of the meme itself or the online community where it’s shared. Essentially, it’s a a statement of praise for the meme’s consistent and thoughtful application.



  • VoterFrog@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlack Holes
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    21 days ago

    I heard it more like, the fact that our universe is expanding faster than light, means there are parts of the universe we can never reach, even at light speed, which is mathematically identical to the event horizon of a black hole, which not even light can escape from. There’s not a singularity at the center of our observable universe, though.

    Just to add to this… It’s not like there’s an event horizon like with a black hole. It’s just that in the amount of time it would take the light to reach us, there will have been more space “created” than the distance the light was able to travel. For someone living near the edge of our observable universe, there’s nothing strange happening. In fact, we’d be at the edge of their observable universe, the edge of their “event horizon.”




  • Sure you can move some parts of the conversation to a review session, though I think the answers will be heavily influenced by hindsight at that point. For example, hearing about dead end paths they considered can be very informative in a way that I think candidates assume is negative. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time and telling the interviewer about your binary tree solution (that actually doesn’t work) can be a good thing.

    But the biggest problem I think with not being in the room as an interviewer is that you lose the opportunity to hint and direct the candidate away from unproductive solutions or use of time. There are people who won’t ask questions about things that are ambiguous or they’ll misinterpret the program and that shouldn’t be a deal breaker.

    Usually it only takes a very subtle nudge to get things back on track, otherwise you wind up getting a solution that’s not at all what you’re looking for (and more importantly, doesn’t demonstrate the knowledge you’re looking for). Or maybe you wind up with barely a solution because the candidate spent most of their time spinning their wheels. A good portion of the questions I ask during an interview serve this purpose of keeping the focus of the candidate on the right things.


  • I’m not sure that offline or alone coding tests are any better. A good coding interview should be about a lot more than just seeing if they produce well structured and optimal code. It’s about seeing what kinds of questions they’ll ask, what kind of alternatives and trade offs they’ll consider, probing some of the decisions they make. All the stuff that goes into being a good SWE, which you can demonstrate even if you’re having trouble coming up with the optimal solution to this particular problem.


  • Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.

    The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).


  • But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.


  • We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.

    The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.



  • Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.


  • A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.

    Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.



  • The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it’s less “we don’t know what’s outside” and more like (to a certain extent) “we have to wait and see.” And there’s nothing we’ve seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.


  • The important thing in the balloon analogy isn’t what the balloon is expanding into, it’s just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.

    One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it’s less that “space is expanding” and just that “the location property of everything is constantly diverging.” There’s no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.