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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

    But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.



  • the other is still made of people who deserve to live their own lives.

    But those “people” (i.e., the clones of Tuvok and Neelix) never existed in the first place.

    The main issue in this episode is that two sentient beings were effectively destroyed against their will to create a new sentient being. To rectify the issue of two sentient beings being destroyed to create one new sentient being, the one was destroyed against his will.

    But a clone of Tuvix would not come into existence at the expense of any sentient beings besides the original Neelix and Tuvok. It doesn’t solve the original “we’re killing a sentient being to bring back our friends” problem the original Tuvix caused, but it doesn’t create new problems either.

    We could just transporter-clone and combine Tuvok and Neelix into Tuvix in one shot. The net effect is one new being, Tuvix, at the expense of nobody. Doing it by cloning Tuvix is just an added intermediate step.


  • It wouldn’t. THC has to be decarboxylated via heating before it has any psychoactive effects.

    If you eat an ounce of weed, you’d just get a tummy ache. If you heat up an ounce of weed in the oven just hot enough to decarboxylate the THC before you eat it, you’ll be experiencing your tummy ache on an entirely different plane of existence.


  • But that’s not what TypeScript does. The joke in the meme doesn’t really even make sense.

    A better analogy would be you have a basket that’s explicitly labeled “Fruit” and TypeScript complains if you try to put laundry detergent in it because you said it’s supposed to be a basket of fruit.

    This meme was clearly made by someone who doesn’t use or understand TypeScript.




  • That’s not really a solid argument. Blocking is likely implemented as a very tiny piece of what is already very likely a massive table join operation. Computationally, it’s likely to have as much an impact on their compute costs as the floor mats in your car have on fuel efficiency.

    Everyone already sees different content. It’s an inherent part of Twitter. It’s not a static site where everyone sees the same thing. You see the tweets of who you’re following, and don’t see tweets of those you’ve muted. All that filtering is happening at the server level. Any new tweets or edited tweets or deleted tweets change that content too, which is happening potentially hundreds of times a second for some users.

    Anyway, caching would be implemented after a query for what tweets the user sees is performed to reduce network traffic between a browser and the Twitter servers. There’s some memoization that can be done at the server level, but the blocking feature is likely to have almost no impact on that given the fundamental functionality of Twitter.



  • Voyager was especially notorious for this. TNG had its share of technobabble, but it felt like every character in Voyager apparently had intricate knowledge of advanced engineering concepts that magically solved every problem in almost every episode.

    Chief Engineer B’Elanna: “There’s this new problem no one has ever faced before and we don’t know how to fix it!”

    Commander Chakotay: “Have you tried realigning the dilithium matrix?”

    B’Elanna: “It wouldn’t work because it would cause an interference pattern in the warp attenuation field.”

    Chakotay: “What if we harmonize the polaron emitter to reverse the polarity of the chroniton field so we can convert the matter/antimatter reaction into a photonic gamma burst and triple the power of the warp core?”

    B’Elanna: “That could work!”

    Not real, but this feels like almost every episode in Voyager.