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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I feel like the quality of her videos is way down but I am ND and found that video pretty neutral.

    I skimmed a transcript just now because I wanted to understand why people are so disproportionately mad about it. She mentions Autism Speaks and does not immediately condemn it. Is that it? I wouldn’t say that counts as being wrong on everything.

    I’m tired of (especially internet) discourse where shouting which camp you belong to is most important. One good example is when people accused Amnesty of siding with Russia because they reported on Ukrainian warcrimes. Nothing is truly neutral but I much prefer information or thought experiments over the virtue signaling that has taken over the internet.

    You will not convince people to change their mind by shouting in their faces that your point of view is correct. Granted, you usually wont change people’s mind online anyway, except entrenching them deeper into their existing beliefs. I don’t think that is a good thing regardless of the side they take. It leads to seeing fellow humans as monsters just because they are wrong about something.









  • It represents each circle as an equation that is only true when x and y are on the circle. By requiring that all three equations are true, you can find all points that are on all three circles.

    You can either convince yourself that three circles can only intersect at one point or you can use the fact that two variables and three independent equations means that there are zero or one solutions that satisfy all equations.

    You could actually even make a system that only needs two distances (and the depth)! Two circles can only intersect at two points, so you just need to figure out which one of the two you are. That can be done by looking at which of the landmarks is on the left when looking towards them.

    Now the really difficult thing here is to figure out why this works even with inaccurate inputs, as the math presented on the site assumes that everything is perfectly accurate.

    You can actually formulate different ways of computing the position that differ in how they react to measurement error. One way to investigate that is to take the derivative wrt. to one of the radii.

    This resonated with me because I once did the same thing but in 3d and with magnetic field strength instead of distance. I never found a satisfying solution because magnetic fields are capsule-shaped rather that spherical. The shape is described by a 4th degree equation, so its exact solution is too large to be useful and the whole system of equations cannot be solved symbolically.

    I hope that didn’t get too intimidating.


  • Plastic packaging has issues but climate change is not one of them. Shipping also isn’t impactful at all. Most shipping emissions happen when the product moves to the store, not when it sails in a container ship.

    Based on your post, the main evil of the corporations is manipulating the media, confusing people with things like abolishing plastic straws (which are very efficient at what they do).

    Eating beef, owning a car and buying unnecessary stuff (for example those bottled drinks) are huge. They easily make up half of a persons emissions. An accurate measure is hard because of secondary effects like needing less road with fewer cars.






  • Prismata is the best 1v1 turn-based competitive game. It even looks and feels somewhat like Starcraft.

    It isn’t very pooular, which I blame on bad tutorial and monetization decisions. It used to have just a series of missions for learning the game but in an attempt to make it palatable for a wider audience, the developers replaced it with a story and way too easy tutorial missions. The monetization is random loot boxes which doesn’t fit well, as the game itself has no rng.

    Unlike Starcraft, Prismata can be mastered simply by playing. (I went from bronze to gold in SC2 by not playing the game for years. It helped me focus on actually important things instead of getting my build order timings just right.)