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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I worked at Bell Labs in the 90s, on wireless stuff, but we were still using the “in house” cfront compiler at the time, and would e-mail the compiler group, which included Bjarne Stroustrup, with issues sometimes. I learned C++ from his book before I joined Bell Labs, so that was a bit of a holy shit moment for sure for me then.

    Kernighan, Ritchie and Thompson all still worked at Bell Labs as well at the time, but the company was huge then, and they were all in a different location from my team, so I never had any opportunities to meet them.



  • You can keep a short position for a long time, as long as you can maintain margin, which gets bigger if the stock price continues increasing, and pay margin interest - there is no set date when the short has to he closed, it’s indefinite. Sometimes the lender who loaned you the stock can ask for it back, and if you can’t locate any more shares to borrow to replace the returned shares, you might be forced to buy the shares back and close the short, but this is not common, at least during normal market conditions.



  • ylph@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldremoved a homeplug
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    3 months ago

    +1 for MoCA

    I switched from powerline to MoCA about 10 years ago, and it was a huge step up. Even though it’s half duplex, since MoCA version 2.5, there is enough total bandwidth available to sustain 1 Gbps in 2 directions simultaneously, so it is functionally almost equivalent to full duplex 1 gig Ethernet (except for few ms of extra latency)




  • It was the 90s… rules were different then ! I still have my white pants deep in the closet somewhere… they haven’t seen the light of day in a while though :)

    I worked at Bell Labs back when this photo was taken - my office pretty much looked exactly like this, chair, furniture, Sun SPARCStation on the floor…

    Bjarne still rocks white pants sometimes to this day though ! And the same haircut - he really committed to the look :)



  • Didn’t the original full body scanners used at airports use backscatter X-rays, which are ionizing radiation ?

    I believe these were mostly replaced by millimeter-wave scanners, and are not used anymore (even banned in some countries) but a lot of the initial pushback and debate surrounding the scanners when they were first introduced was about potential health risks of repeated X-ray exposure from those scanners, and so the idea of ionizing radiation exposure persists to this day in many people’s minds.


  • ylph@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldTrue love
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    11 months ago

    For most citrus the pith has no flavor at all, definitely not bitter. Most people object to the texture and blandness/lack of flavor, which I can understand. I have a bunch of citrus trees in my yard, and learned to not mind the pith, mainly due to laziness (I eat a lot of oranges) - and it’s a good source of fiber.


  • ylph@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldTrue love
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    11 months ago

    Western diet is actually notoriously low on fiber and high in sugar, and the citrus pith is also high in vitamin C.

    So for many people eating the pith would actually be a healthier choice - in the context of their low fiber/high sugar diet.





  • photography might be an area where digital hasn’t caught up, since film’s resolution is down to the molecular level

    Film resolution is limited by the size of the silver halide crystals that make up the light sensitive layer of the film. Crystals can come in different sizes, but their sensitivity to light depends on their size - generally you need pretty large crystals for usable photographic film, somewhere between 0.1 and 10 microns (depending on the film ISO rating) - about 3-5 orders of magnitude larger than what you would consider molecular scale.

    When the film is developed the crystals are visible as film grain limiting the resolution in some ways similar to pixel size of a digital camera (although there are differences, since the crystal size is not completely uniform but rather has a specific distribution, creating a more random effect than the regular pixel grid of digital cameras)

    The pixel sizes on modern high resolution digital camera sensors are actually similar, down to 0.5 micron. It’s hard to make an exact comparison, but I have seen estimates that you need a full frame digital sensor of somewhere between 10 to 50 megapixels to equal the resolution of 35mm ISO 100 film.

    And modern sensors are much more light sensitive than film, which allows you to shoot more optimally and give you more flexibility (less exposure time, potentially higher f-stop with better lens resolution, lower ISO, less light, etc.) and therefore achieve potentially better results in more conditions. Add to that the hassle and costs of working with film, and most professional photo work is now done in digital as well. Film is generally only used for stylistic purposes, by purists who are not satisfied with digital simulation.





  • But your citation gives both statements:

    “In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times.”

    and

    “The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.”

    So when you say the number of times is “unknowable” the actual answer is “almost surely an infinite number of times” no ? Since the probability of that can be calculated as 100%. The mindfuck part is that it is still possible that no monkey at all will type a particular text, even though the probability of that is 0.

    The probability that only 2 monkeys will type the text is also still 0, same as 3 monkeys, 4 monkeys, etc. - in fact the probability of any specific finite number of monkeys only typing out the text is still 0 - only the probability of an infinite number of monkeys typing it out is 100% (the probabilities of all possible outcomes, even when infinite, have to sum up to 1 after all)

    We just know that it will almost surely happen, but that doesn’t mean it will happen an infinite amount of occurrences.

    Basically, if we know “it will almost surely happen” then we also know just as surely (p=1) that it will also happen an infinite number of times (but it might also never happen, although with p=0)