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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Well, first off he wasn’t actually doing it after Celsius existed as a temperature scale. He made it a solid 18 years beforehand.
    Second, there are some issues. Specifically, ice freezes at 0, but it doesn’t stop getting colder. So if you have a bit of ice, that doesn’t tell you the temperature, just that it’s below a threshold. Boiling is more convenient because liquid water can’t get above 100, but you do have to consider side pressure.
    Fahrenheit used brine because as it freezes it forces salt out of the ice, making it more resistant to freezing. It self stabilizes its temperature, which is immensely handy.

    None of the people designing their scales envisioned that using the basic reference points for common calibration would be a thing. Just like how we don’t calibrate them with brine, ice, steam or butts today, instead relying on how we marked down how electrical resistance changes as a function of temperature and then calibrated reference numbers to get the scale right.

    It’s important to remember that the people in the past were largely not stupid, they simply hadn’t found out something we take for granted or they had priorities that we don’t.




  • I’m one of those people who knows we should standardize, bit also finds Fahrenheit just very convenient.

    Like, when people say it’s 50 out, I immediately know that it’s going to feel about halfway between what I know 0 and 100 feel like. No one can even put up the pretext of doing that with Celsius, because not even the most pedantic person ever bothers to tell you when it’s 100 c out.

    In seriousness though, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t non-sense, it’s just addressing things we don’t much need help with anymore. The zero point was chosen as a temperature you can create reliably without particularly sophisticated tools, and the range is so freezing and boiling are 180 degrees apart, putting them on the opposite sides of a dial.


  • Ugh, I’m one of those people who will defend imperial as not being irrational, just built ad-hoc for purposes that aren’t in alignment with modern ones and … No, that’s not what Fahrenheit is.

    Fahrenheit was trying to make a temperature scale that was easy to recreate to ease the calibration of thermometers. Zero is a temperature that can be created in your garage with some ice, salt and water. 100 was his best, ultimately inaccurate, attempt to measure human body temperature, since it’s another easy calibration point, and from there water was defined as 32 and 212 so that they were 180 degrees apart, which would fit will on a temperature dial.
    Not irrational, not a comfort scale, and not in alignment with current needs.

    It’s pure coincidence that it kinda lines up with comfortable outdoor temperatures in the opinion of a good chunk of a population living in the northern part of the western hemisphere.



  • I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
    The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.


  • That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”

    I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.

    Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…

    Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.



  • City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.

    It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.




  • Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

    One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

    I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

    Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

    Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.


  • It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.

    PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
    If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
    Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.

    The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.



  • It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

    You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
    They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
    These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

    Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

    The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.



  • Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
    Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
    A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

    It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

    All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.