CodexArcanum

It's posts that are a step up from piss-posting, but below regular unmodified posting.

Did I hear a "Fels und Stein"?!

I have a pair of wired earbuds that are over ten years old and I've sent them through the washing machine by accident and they still work. I don't know what you lunatics are doing to have so many issues, have you tried not swinging your phone around over your head using the cord?

Also if the sound quality isn't great, you can try a headphone amp. I have a portable one smaller than an old ipod, and a cool vacuum tube one that both really improve the sound. Good luck adding an amp (or any other audio accessories) to your bluetooth headphones.

"Day" and "year" have local equivalents for any orbiting, revolving body. We'd probably retain the second as the basic unit of time and maybe go to something like decimal time as a generic standard for communicating between places and for trade and business. That covers spans of time. For absolute time, we may be out of luck. Even assuming we could pick a standard object and point in time as anchors, relativity means that each frame of reference has clocks moving at their own speeds. So far as we know, there is no universal frame of reference.

So even if we said "every revolution of the pulsar at coordinates blahblahblah is one galactic standard day and we define Year 0 as starting exactly 3237.95 standard days ago" we still wouldn't have a universal time standard because people close to black holes will have seen fewer rotations of the pulsar, so they'd be living in the pasts of any planets in a faster frame of reference.

Start with a list of numbers, like [1 2 3]. That's it, a list of numbers. If you treat those numbers like they represent something though, and apply some rules to them, you can do math.

One way to consider them is as coordinates. If we had a 3-D coordinate grid, then [1 2 3] could be the point at x = 1, y = 2, and z = 3. You could also consider the list of numbers to be a line with an arrow at one end, starting from the point at [0 0 0] and stopping at the other point. This is a geometric vector: a thing with a direction and a magnitude. Still just a list of numbers though.

Now, what if you wanted to take that list and add another one, say [4 5 6], how might you do it? You could concatenate the lists, like [1 2 3 4 5 6] and that has meaning and utility in some cases. But most of the time, you'd like "adding vectors" to give you a result that maps to something geometric such as putting the lines with arrows end-to-end and seeing what new vector that is. You can do that by adding each element of the 2 vectors. And, almost magically, the point at [5 7 9] is where you'd end up if you first went to [1 2 3] and then traveled [4 5 6] further. We made no drawings, but the math modeled the situation well enough to give us an answer anyway.

Going further, maybe you want to multiply vectors, raise them to exponents, and more? There are several ways to do these, and each has different meanings when you think about them with shapes and geometry.

But vectors are just lists of numbers, they don't have to be geometric things. [1 2 3] could also represent the coefficients of a function, say 0 = 1x^2 + 2x + 3(x^0). You can still do the same math to the vector, but now it means something else. It models a function, and combining it with other vectors let's you combine and transform functions just like if they were lines and shapes.

When you get into vectors beyond 3 elements, there's no longer a clean geometric metaphor to help you visualize. A vector with 100 elements can be used just as well as one with 2, but we can't visualize a space with 100-dimensions. These are "vector spaces" and a vector is a single point (or rather, points to a point) within them.

Matrices are similar but allow for deeper models of more complex objects.

A vector is a variable-length collection of homogeneous elements. For fixed-length, use an array if homogeneous or a tuple if not. For heterogeneous, untyped collections, please consider one of the many "list" variants.

Jane! Smoke this crazy thing!

If they called them "hot boxes" instead of "gas chambers," i think the public support might be stronger.

"Hey Chad, we're going light up this joint and gas chamber Alex's car, want in?"

just doesn't work as well.

I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

You're right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don't really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I'm sure something like XLT exists, but there's no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there's no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.

I've written Go code; they were right to fear.

I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it's automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with // comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.

I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.

Web names, called URLs, have a peculiar syntax: