I don’t think the world applauds that at all. The US used to be the good guys. Very flawed but still “good” as things go. Now they’re just dangerous and thrashing wildly…

In Soviet America, a wrong turn takes your life.

Disagree. Just because luck saved your ass doesn’t mean what you did wasn’t stupid.

Winning a round of Russian Roulette doesn’t make you a genius.

Feeding money to Russia was madness and had to be stopped as a priority. Nothing ridiculous about it.

a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.

They demonstrated that 40 milligrams of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.

Vaccines turned me into a newt!

gestures at butterfly

Is this Neon Genesis Evangelion?

You are being liberated. Please do not resist.

Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.

“could help solve” was the quote.

Physics is like that joke about halving the distance to a woman at a bar*. I don’t expect it will ever be entirely solved, but whatever stands as the “for all practical purposes” of the era might. I’m taking “help solve” as just another halving of the distance in this analogy.

* A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”

The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

TL;DR

If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:

• McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.

• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.

• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.

• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.

• McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.

• Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.

• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.

offended beeping

I will be messaging you in 7 days on 2025-04-07 10:06:96 UTC to remind you that there is no RemindMe! bot on lemmy.

I have to wave my hand, too.

👋

After a lifetime of dealing with dandruff, I’ve recently discovered the best anti-dandruff shampoo in the world, hands down: hot water.

No shampoo at all. Just scrubbing with hot water every two-three days. After about a month or two the scalp stops overcompensating for the degreasing effect of shampoos and calms down. The first month will be pretty itchy and dandruffy though. Tapering out shampoo use gradually and some spray-on/drip-on anti-seboreic dermatitis lotion can keep things under control until the scalp normalizes.

I think this was the video that I first got the idea from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmDBYsRJN7A

Ok, that could be true. I assumed they meant the “building” phase that some frameworks go through.

Except… the compilation step doesn’t add type safety to JS.

As an aside, type safety hasn’t been something I truly miss in JS, despite how often it’s mentioned.

Honk honk.

Bees are pretty much the angels of the insect world… Harming no-one and nothing, and almost single-handedly holding up the ecosystem of a quarter of the planet’s life forms.

He’s got a long way to go to reach level bee.

I just funged it. You’ll never get me, coppers.