being a prompt engineer is so much more than typing words. you also have to sometimes delete the words and then type new ones

what’s the appeal of haskell? (this is a genuine question.) i’ve been a bit curious about it for a while but haven’t really found the motivation to take a closer look at it.

i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.

here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:

Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.

you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)

even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”

playing russian roulette is not going to give you permanent damage every 5/6 times

back in my day we only had one language. it was called ASSEMBLY. wanted to make the computer do something? you had to ask it yourself. and that worked JUST FINE

if you’re trying to be malicious, wouldn’t it be better to multiply by Rand() instead of divide by Rand()?

assuming there are a decent number of recorded sales, you’d end up seeing many of the calls to Rand() returning values very close to 0. so, if you’re dividing by those values, you’d end see lots of sales records reporting values in the thousands, millions, or even billions of dollars. i feel like that screams “software bug” more than anything. on the other hand, seeing lots of values multiplied by values close to 0 would certainly look weird, but it wouldn’t be as immediately suspicious.

(of course a better thing would just be to use Rand() on a range other than [0,1])

you could also bring a regular keyboard and try to plug it in when the cashier isn’t looking. i’m sure that will go over well

i feel like javascript could also be

Problem -> solution -> 3 days pass -> all dependencies had breaking changes made -> problem

what a wonderful and beautiful language. i’m so glad i asked

what does the +x do.

this is just like in regular math too. not being a number is just so fun that nobody wants to go back to being a number once they get a taste of it

what i’m gathering from this thread is that i should learn cobol

quite a few of them are “natural monopolies”. for those unaware (source):

A natural monopoly is a type of monopoly in an industry or sector with high barriers to entry and start-up costs that prevent any rivals from competing. As such, a natural monopoly has only one efficient player. This company may be the only provider of a product or service in an industry or geographic location.

ie, cable companies, electricity suppliers, amazon. it’s really complicated and really expensive to build the infrastructure needed to meaningfully compete in those industries.

another relevant concept is the “network effect”, defined as (source):

a business principle that illustrates the idea that when more people use a product or service, its value increases.

this kind of thing is more applicable to things like social media companies (they’re more appealing the more users they have). this makes it hard to compete with social media companies because convincing people to use your new app is really hard if the usefulness of it depends on everyone’s friends already being on it. (this is also part of the reason twitter is taking so painfully long to die)

both concepts illustrate the different barriers to entry that exist when trying to compete with these giant companies. these barriers are also what allow these huge companies to get so complacent.

(i’m not happy about quoting investopedia or wharton, but they do give simple definitions of both concepts so i did it just this once.)

In 2023, a full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $28.58 on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. This Housing Wage for a two-bedroom home is nearly four times higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

source: https://nlihc.org/oor/about

this isn’t even taking into account groceries, transportation, medical expenses, etc. the problem is not buying too many carbonated drinks.

never chew before swallowing either. the food can still get stale in your mouth

this is easily fixed by copy pasting the files into a new directory and never opening git again out of fear

they made a very influential isEven algorithm

fortran is a bow and arrow. it was quite powerful and widely used in the past, but i have not met anyone in recent years who uses it other than as a hobby.

i’ve only ever used nano in the early stages of a gentoo install, when it’s too early to install vim and import my dot files 😈

here’s another mathematical approach (that has the added benefit of only working when x and y are both positive).

let f denote the linear functional on ℝ² defined by f(1,0) = x and f(0,1) = y (and extend by linearity). then the operator norm || f || is equal to max(x,y).