silent_water [she/her]

yeah, I was lucky to have already taken Classical Mechanics prior to Quantum Mechanics (it wasn’t a prereq so most of my classmates jumped straight into QM), so the math was all perfectly sensible. but the second any prof started trying to use English to interpret the math, I started having these moments where I’d have to sit back and think about the words coming out of their mouths, and sitting with how it was all actually gibberish. Feynman’s “shut up and calculate” started to feel incredibly valid really fast, whereas prior to QM, I was under the impression that physics was natural philosophy. it’s not and QM was the breaking point, at least for me, personally.

they don’t actually spin but they’re little bar magnets as if they do. if you charge a sphere and spin it, you’ll generate exactly the same kind of bar magnet, but they don’t actually spin. and just like bar magnets, like repels like. but they’re neither bar magnets nor spinning. why don’t they spin? because they’re point masses, which don’t have any extent. but actually, you can’t really observe them as point masses because they’re waves.

^^ this was the exact point at which I said quantum mechanics wasn’t for me and I’m done with physics, after completing most of a degree. it sort of all makes sense but at the same time it completely doesn’t. it all makes sense as pure math but the second you try to make sense of the math, sense goes out the window.

there are exactly 4 division algebras (over the field of real numbers): the real numbers, the complex numbers, the quaternions, and the octonians. you can’t add any more complex parts because you lost associativity with the octonians. I’m not entirely sure how the first domino leads to the last, though.

no, we don’t have downvotes on hexbear and this is what they looked like when we did. it means bad post.

nah, it was a politically conscious choice to set up something like reddit, outside the control of capital and the state. the devs have written about it.

nah, they’re just good at posting. up your game.

lol the US security apparatus is bad but it’s not that bad. you might get put on a watchlist though.

FOSS hacks the copyright system to build a software commons independent of corporation, guaranteeing the freedoms of users and developers - what part of that statement isn’t political?

how can privacy ever be stripped of political content? it’s inherently about social forces - ie politics.

what’s the remainder of pi after division by 3 and 3^2? notice how the remainder is the same – i.e. there’s no 3s digit needed. and the same will be true for all higher powers of 3. this is because pi is <3^n for all n > 1. but we failed to express the fractional part of pi. if we extend to the p-adic rationals, we can express it as an infinite expansion but that’s not allowed for p-adics – they can only have a finite number of digits in the part to the right of the radix.

yeah, the remainder of pi after p^2 for p>2 will always be the same as the remainder after division by p (p^2 if p=2), so it truncates to the left of the radix, and p-adic rationals can’t go off infinitely to the right of the radix. also, more trivially, pi isn’t algebraic so it’s not the solution to any polynomial with rational coefficients, so it’s also not the solution to any polynomial mod p^n.

it’s definitely 5-adicly rational

a gift economy is also an exchange of goods but it’s decidedly not capitalism - no one earns any profit and there’s no flow converting money into capital and capital back into money.

learn Haskell, write better code

it’s probably not code golfed and the type signatures probably weren’t elided. because otherwise I’d expect it to be above javascript.

that just says mod. whoever did it, purge them.

lying when we have screenshots of the modlog is some real cajones

they were speculating that hexbear’s userbase was using pronoun tags to pretend like we’re queer friendly – we’re 1/3 trans and that was deeply offensive to all of us. it literally erases our existence.

Removed by mod

ehhh, it was institutionalized for a long time and that creates an unspeakable amount of trauma. I prefer knowing who’s a bigot and who isn’t straight up.