kmm

6 ms·

1.
by kmm 2mo ago
That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they
2.
by kmm 4mo ago
I like the temperate graph halfway down the page. It looks like two decaying exponentials alternating every ~40 minutes, with the downward one steeper than the upward one. It's a neat visualization of hysteresis, where the thermostat p
3.
by kmm 5mo ago
Russian used to have dual pronouns too, but they all were lost somewhere in the 13th century, as in all other Slavic languages other than Slovenian. The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension of an earlier dual number f
4.
by kmm 5mo ago
Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound change[1] where the -n- sound disappeared before fricatives (
5.
by kmm 7mo ago
Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after i
6.
by kmm 7mo ago
That's correct, but it's pretty well-hidden because at first sight there is no term that's just the year modulo 7. That's because a Gregorian calendar cycle of 400 years is coincidentally an integer amount of weeks long,
7.
by kmm 7mo ago
That's only if you delay renewal until the last day of the lifetime of the certificate. If you renew at day 30 you'd only get in trouble if there's more than two weeks of downtime.
8.
by kmm 7mo ago
Hah, the capitalization of the title of this post only just now made me realize why the GPU farm at my job is called "barracuda". That's pretty funny.
9.
Ulster County "I Voted" sticker(en.wikipedia.org)
15 points by kmm 7mo ago|0 comments
10.
by kmm 8mo ago
And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about
11.
PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok(martypc.blogspot.com)
91 points by kmm 8mo ago|16 comments
12.
by kmm 8mo ago
I think I have some sort of intuition why all the probabilities are the same. Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the starting position. At some point, the ladybug will be guarante
13.
by kmm 8mo ago
In that case following Alice's input is still the best strategy, but you'll be worse off: you'd only be right if both tell the truth, at 80% 80%=64%, or both lie, at 20% 20%=4%, for a total of 68%. In the general case of n in
14.
by kmm 9mo ago
That's actually a message from the (Arch) initramfs[1], in case it can't mount the root filesystem or find an init to hand off to. The kernel has a different error message: "No working init found. Try passing init= option to
15.
by kmm 10mo ago
That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment i
16.
by kmm 10mo ago
There are many more kinds of masters than just owners of slaves. The word "master bedroom" only appeared in 1920, it has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
17.
by kmm 11mo ago
Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I&#
18.
by kmm 11mo ago
In Newtonian gravity, the relation between the orbital period T and the semimajor axis a of the orbital ellipse is a^3 / T^2 = GM / 4π^2, where M is the reduced mass of the system (in this case, with 99% of the mass being in one o
19.
by kmm 11mo ago
I sort of understand the reasoning on why Arxiv prefers tex to pdf[1], even though I feel it's a bit much to make it mandatory to submit the original tex file if they detect a submitted pdf was produced from one. But I've never un
20.
by kmm 1y ago
I understand there are API limitations, but isn't 15 minutes a lot for an object that orbits around the entire Earth in 90 minutes? On average you're going to be off by about a twelfth of the circumference of the Earth, or roughly
21.
by kmm 1y ago
I don't see how the size of Wikipedia has any bearing on the 50MB figure given for pre-20th century literature by the parent.
22.
by kmm 1y ago
Perhaps that's meant to be 50GB (and that still seems like a serious underestimation)? Just the Bible is already 5MB.
23.
X explains Z% of the variance in Y(lesswrong.com)
5 points by kmm 1y ago|0 comments
24.
by kmm 1y ago
Without taking into account dark energy or a cosmological constant (so on scales smaller than a few hundreds of millions of lightyears), in the usual cosmological model you can see the expansion of the universe simply as a remnant of the in
25.
by kmm 1y ago
Is it really that siloed? The condition mentioned in the article (there being a global timelike Killing field) is discussed in all introductory texts on quantum field theory in curved spaces, it's even present in the first few paragrap
26.
by kmm 1y ago
I thought coffee for people who don't like coffee was instant coffee? The linked Clever Dripper seems like it's comparatively a bit more effort and waste. Apart from the advantage of instant preparation, to my undiscerning palate
27.
by kmm 1y ago
Out of curiosity, what do the backticks and ellipsis do here?
28.
by kmm 2y ago
The body of the question makes it abundantly clear what the OP is asking, which has nothing to do with the plural form of the noun "zero". You could suggest an improvement to the title, but answering "zeroes" and pretend
29.
by kmm 2y ago
"will" used to mean "to want", like its cognates in Dutch or German still do. However, it's not really unusual, it's quite common for desiderative forms of verbs to evolve into expressing a future tense, someth
30.
by kmm 2y ago
According to the etymology section on the Palau Wikipedia article, there is no relation. Palauans calling themselves Belau makes the similarity less remarkable as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palau#Etymology

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