Codex

Good definition! I’ll often say it is a “primary unit of cultural exchange.” I consider a lot of things memes: internet memes of course, songs, scenes from movies, plot tropes, characters, basically any bit of culture that can be encapsulated and identified as a distinct entity.

Great book, one of my favorites! Can’t comment on the movie it (apparently) inspired.

Thanks! I hate it!

I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?

Knives are also made of atoms

/\/\/\/\/\/\/=O-OH!

…

I don’t get it.

(I do tho)

((or do i?))

Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.

Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.

“P.J Féret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, offers you the boof across 200 years of time, wyd?"

Wow, I didn’t realize someone was making a game based on @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org 's work! !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org will be so proud!

I hadn’t read there were so many angles on the word. I had heard it came from Joyce and never dug deeper. I’m surprised that you quoted a passage from Oxford but didn’t check the OED. Joyce being Irish, the OED would better document the English he’d have been using. Merriam-Webster and derivatives are American English dictionaries.

From the OED:

Honestly, I’m just surprised physicists don’t have a gif/jif thing going on with quork/quark pronunciation.

Oh oh iyo

He lives in me!

Awww, JEJ 😭 Well, as long as there’s baseball, he’ll live on in the cornfields of our cells.

Centrioles is my favorite pasta shape, the little ridges hold sauce so well.

Sometimes you need a stranger to really get that Rough Endoplasmic treatment.

All these jokes about naming variables and yet no serious suggestions that if you have a turtle2, what you really need is a turtle array. I like to block out all the memory I’ll need for the whole program up front, put it all in one big array, and then I can use clean, easy to remember numbers for all my variables!

What is this, a barn for aphids!?

Got’em! Saddam!

Same. I hate presidential trivia!

Hey how did you copy the score and emojis? When I got to share my score it just copies a link to the page?

I believe the Fahrenheit scale was originally set up for 100° to be human body temperature. We’re just built colder now I guess? I had to look up what zero was and apparently he originally set it at the coldest the air had ever been around his village, but later had to standardize it and so cooked up some brine that froze at 0°.

I would propose that 100 should be calibrated around the wet bulb temperature, which I think is around 105°F but varies with humidity. That’s the temperature where sweating doesn’t cool you off any more, so any temperature 100 or more is deadly to most people. I like 0 being freezing for water, seems sensible and is also a good “prolonged exposure to this or lower will kill you” cutoff point.

Start with a list of numbers, like [1 2 3]. That’s it, a list of numbers. If you treat those numbers like they represent something though, and apply some rules to them, you can do math.

One way to consider them is as coordinates. If we had a 3-D coordinate grid, then [1 2 3] could be the point at x = 1, y = 2, and z = 3. You could also consider the list of numbers to be a line with an arrow at one end, starting from the point at [0 0 0] and stopping at the other point. This is a geometric vector: a thing with a direction and a magnitude. Still just a list of numbers though.

Now, what if you wanted to take that list and add another one, say [4 5 6], how might you do it? You could concatenate the lists, like [1 2 3 4 5 6] and that has meaning and utility in some cases. But most of the time, you’d like “adding vectors” to give you a result that maps to something geometric such as putting the lines with arrows end-to-end and seeing what new vector that is. You can do that by adding each element of the 2 vectors. And, almost magically, the point at [5 7 9] is where you’d end up if you first went to [1 2 3] and then traveled [4 5 6] further. We made no drawings, but the math modeled the situation well enough to give us an answer anyway.

Going further, maybe you want to multiply vectors, raise them to exponents, and more? There are several ways to do these, and each has different meanings when you think about them with shapes and geometry.

But vectors are just lists of numbers, they don’t have to be geometric things. [1 2 3] could also represent the coefficients of a function, say 0 = 1x^2 + 2x + 3(x^0). You can still do the same math to the vector, but now it means something else. It models a function, and combining it with other vectors let’s you combine and transform functions just like if they were lines and shapes.

When you get into vectors beyond 3 elements, there’s no longer a clean geometric metaphor to help you visualize. A vector with 100 elements can be used just as well as one with 2, but we can’t visualize a space with 100-dimensions. These are “vector spaces” and a vector is a single point (or rather, points to a point) within them.

Matrices are similar but allow for deeper models of more complex objects.