gdavisson

6 ms·

1.
by gdavisson 5mo ago
Classical brute force is embarrassingly parallel, but Grover's algorithm (the quantum version) isn't. To the extent you parallelize it, you lose the quantum advantage, which means that to speed it up by a factor of N, you need N^2
2.
by gdavisson 9mo ago
"Grue" has a surprising variety of meanings: Obsolete/dialiectical English: to shudder with fear, or a shudder (related to "gruesome") Computer games: in Zork, a monster that eats adventurers in the dark [0] Linguis
3.
by gdavisson 2y ago
Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities. That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations
4.
by gdavisson 2y ago
You're refuting a strawman. The junk DNA claim is not, and as far as I can see never had been, that all non-coding DNA is junk. It's that most of our genome -- around 90% -- is junk[1][2]. But since the genome is over 98% non-
5.
by gdavisson 2y ago
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2024.108404
6.
by gdavisson 2y ago
That's not correct; you cannot use a double-slit test to check for entanglement. Running a photon through a double-slit setup always just produces a single dot, not a any sort of pattern. To get a pattern, you need to run a bunch of ph
7.
by gdavisson 2y ago
Brackets are used in shell wildcard ("glob") expressions. For example, if you try to use "[bar]" as a command, the shell will first look for files named "b", "a", and "r" in the current dire
8.
by gdavisson 2y ago
True, but since everyone in the study -- both those with and without diagnosed COVID-19 infections -- had been subject to this, it shouldn't affect the results. Essentially, they're comparing people who were just trapped indoors
9.
by gdavisson 3y ago
Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.
10.
by gdavisson 3y ago
echo -n is not safe, because some versions of echo will just print "-n" as part of their output (and add a newline at the end, as usual). In fact, XSI-compliant implementations are required to do this (and the same for anythin
11.
by gdavisson 3y ago
I (vaguely) remember playing games with terminal echoback on physical terminals back in the early-mid 1980s when I was in college. This was on a VAX/VMS system. Someone (I don't remember who did what here) discovered that they cou
12.
by gdavisson 3y ago
That's what I do. I have one account ("Apple ID") for iCloud, and a separate one for music and App Store purchases. A couple of caveats, though: Apple encourages using the same account for everything, and their interfaces try
13.
by gdavisson 3y ago
I find that the `pbpaste | something | pbcopy` idiom is common enough that it's worth having a shell function for it: pbfilter() { if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then pbpaste | "$@" | pbcopy else pbpaste
14.
by gdavisson 3y ago
It usually doesn't matter much, but there are some situations where it can matter a lot. For one thing, you can't use seek() on a pipe, so e.g. `cat bigfile | tail` has to read through the entire file to find the end, but `tail bi
15.
by gdavisson 3y ago
Actually, the article ends with "The ampersand isn’t the only former member of the alphabet. Learn what led to the extinction of the thorn and the wynn." (which links to https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-al
16.
by gdavisson 3y ago
I don't know about that particular analysis, but there've been a number of such claims that don't stand up (mostly because, as you ask, the districts themselves don't follow Benford's law). See, for example, "I
17.
by gdavisson 3y ago
I recently watched a YouTube video from someone who'd tracked a nasty intermittent parasitic draw [0]. The problem only happened after turning the ignition on & back off (so the standard test of disconnecting the battery & reco
18.
by gdavisson 4y ago
"They filter AT LEAST 95% of the particles above a certain size." That's a common misunderstanding; they filter at least 95% of particles of all sizes . It's actually intermediate-sized particles (around 0.1 - 1 micron)
19.
by gdavisson 4y ago
That study didn't compare suicide rates with and without surgery, it compared post-op trans people with the general population (i.e. mostly cisgender people). It explicitly says "This study design sheds new light on transsexual pe
20.
by gdavisson 4y ago
That's just plain wrong. Mental properties in general (e.g. personality) are not easily measurable, but that doesn't mean they don't exist (or can't exist without a non-material soul), and I see no reason to think that a
21.
by gdavisson 4y ago
First, why do you consider it to be a problem in the mind, rather than the body? It seems to me that, fundamentally, gender dysphoria is a mismatch between the mind and the body. Declaring the body to be correct and the mind wrong seems arb
22.
by gdavisson 4y ago
They weren't in the medical literature. The 10k prediction was in STAT news ( https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... ) (note: it wasn't a hard prediction, but he seems to trea
23.
by gdavisson 4y ago
I have an example of the opposite: When I was quite young, I got into model rocketry as a hobby. Buying engines required a pyrotechnician's license, and I was too young to get one, so I talked both of my parents into applying for licen
24.
by gdavisson 4y ago
bash is the default interactive shell for users, but dash is the default shell for scripts with a #!/bin/sh shebang (or no shebang, unless they're run from bash), system() calls, etc. This means bashisms will work sometimes
25.
by gdavisson 4y ago
The Democrats' Senate Majority PAC is planning to return $1M contributed by SBF and $2M from Nishad Singh; the House Majority PAC got $6M from SBF and "will send funds in question wherever authorities instruct us". Source (an
26.
by gdavisson 4y ago
That's not true. Death rates are now much lower, but that seems to be mostly due to people having (partial) immunity due to vaccination and/or previous infection, and better treatment. Omicron variants are less intrinsically sever
27.
by gdavisson 4y ago
Archived version: https://archive.vn/cw8Ma SBF claims if there was such a thing, he didn't know about it: https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1602419187296641024
28.
by gdavisson 4y ago
VINs are generally visible from outside the car (on the dashboard). That means until this was fixed you could walk up to a car, read its VIN, and remotely unlock & start it.
29.
by gdavisson 4y ago
Interesting. If you use curl -v, you can see that the difference is that the newer version of curl canonicalizes(?) the Host: header to "1.0.0.1", which the server recognizes and responds to with a redirect. The older version send
30.
by gdavisson 4y ago
The recommendations look clear to me: you should use CRYSTALS-Dilithium (unless you need smaller signatures, in which case use FALCON), but you should also be prepared to switch to SPHINCS+ on short notice if someone breaks CRYSTALS-Dilithi

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