dfyx

The point is that you need to figure out which advice and criticism is useful. You shouldn’t dismiss everything but you shouldn’t accept everything either.

In my interpretation, this is not about “I know better than everyone else” but about “That person has hurt me so much in the past. Maybe I should not take their criticism to heart anymore.”

Absolutely. I haven’t been told the final costs of the renovations yet but from what I’ve heard, they had to completely rip out everything from the room you can see in the background to get rid of the (lead-contaminated) soot.

Also, it was pure luck that everyone got out unharmed. I rent that place twice every year to spend a couple of days with friends who live all over Germany. One of them had all his stuff in the room behind the fire. The only reason he hadn’t been in there when the battery exploded was that the night before he hadn’t slept well on his air mattress and had moved to a couch upstairs. The room has a fire exit but depending on how fast he would have woken up, he might not have found it through the dense smoke.

Tell that to the person who wanted to be cheap and used a car battery.

Put it on a wooden shelf and let it sit. You certainly won’t regret it.

This is the aftermath of a spicy car battery that was used as backup power for some emergency lights in a community center. Blew up in the early morning, burned the plastering from the wall and covered the whole basement in smoke and soot. Fortunately someone was there and heard the fire alarm, otherwise the whole building would have burned down.

Because the original SE is the smallest somewhat modern phone you can get.

The Post title is literally „nutty putty“

Yeah, no, knowing what that comic references, that’s not a price I‘m willing to pay for therapy.

Avalonia offers an unoffical Linux backend for MAUI and there are some other less-maintained backends. I have tried neither of them (I really should) but they might work.

The nice thing about WPF, MAUI, Avalonia and Uno is that they are all extremely similar in concept to the point where you can sometimes just take an existing UI, change some namespaces and class names and get mostly what you want. (WinForms on the other hand is very different from all of them)

I would say the main downside of C++ is that it carries around a lot of baggage from the last 40 years. Even if you decide to use a modern standard in your own code, you’ll have to deal with libraries that can’t use many of the new features because they need to stay backwards compatible with old code bases. Also, a lot of tutorials and examples still look like they are from pre-C++11 times.

I recently started a project that would have been a great fit for C++ (simple 2D game engine + editor) but the way Qt has to reinvent half the standard library, GTK basically asks you to write plain C and gtkmm had some other issues that I can’t even remember, all the fun of working on the project was gone. I decided to switch to C# (which I use for work anyway) and Avalonia and so far it’s going well. Not being able to use C++ still nags at me anyway. I would have loved to get more comfortable with modern C++ but I just couldn’t keep up the motivation.

I’ll try again for the next project.

NP doesn’t mean “non-polynomial time”, it means “nondeterministic polynomial time”, i.e. for a turing machine that is allowed to make random decisions, at least one of the random paths solves the problem in polynomial time. We have known for a long time that we can simulate such a machine in exponential time (essentially by trying all possible paths sequentially) and that there is a class of problems (NP-complete) where if we find a faster solution for one of them, we can derive an equally fast (in terms of O) solution for all of them. 3SAT is one of those NP-complete problems.

While reducing the complexity from O(c^n) to O(c^(n/log n)) is still far from O(n^c), it shows that what we assumed might be a hard limit if P!=NP isn’t true. There might still be a limit that has some term of n as its exponent or it might not. What this finding suggests is that at least the term is better than just n, meaning we are at least getting closer to a polynomial solution, even if it’s baby steps. So far, there is no practical consequence of this but it gives us a direction for possible further attempts.

For these kinds of problems, finding a solution is often about slowly finding tighter and tighter upper and lower bounds, not about hitting the truth right away and we hadn’t found a new upper bound for NP-complete problems basically since they have been defined.

Edit/Disclaimer: this is based on what I remember from University over a decade ago and a quick Wikipedia search. I might have gotten a few details wrong.

That’s so zero of you to say that

Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.

Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.

Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.

I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.

explainXKCD runs on MediaWiki which is PHP, so yeah…

AGAIN?! That’s the third one in two months.

1. Because people still misread a single CloudFlare graph that shows a huge drop in bot traffic. The thing is, that graph only shows traffic between one specific subnet and CloudFlare. If you bomb a data center, of course that data center’s traffic drops. But for the internet overall, that’s less than 0.1% of the total bot traffic and social media bots don’t target CloudFlare. They target Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There is no reason they would ever even show up in CloudFlare’s statistics.
2. Barely anyone seems to actually measure the amount of bot activity on social networks. They see less traffic so that must mean fewer bot-written posts.
3. Even the one linked here is misleading. Seems like they did analyze message contents but a very small amount (less than 5000 per day) and their “84% drop” happened for 1.5 days then immediately recovered.
4. For those who profit from the bots, it’s a great narrative. Now they can claim that everything positive about them that you see on social media must be true because after all, the evil bots are dead and only true Americans write stuff about Trump, a couple of weeks before the midterms. Or about the German AfD fighting against being banned.
5. Cognitive biases. Many of us (including me) desperately want this to be true so we are less likely to critically examine the details. I don’t think Jowi Morales who wrote the Tom’s Hardware article that many other articles quote wanted to mislead anyone. He saw something that fit his worldview and went with it. It’s the same reason why we’ve seen “the AI bubble is about to collapse any minute now” articles basically every week for over a year and yet it’s still going.

I’ve helped my Kurdish neighbors that I’ve barely ever talked to move out of the apartment next to mine. Ten hours of carrying stuff down the stairs, into someone’s cousin’s GLS delivery van. They asked me over and over, why a German would do that for foreigners that he barely knows. I shrugged. I said nothing. It was all for a warm meal and the privilege of now knowing someone who delivers parcels for GLS and can borrow the van over the weekend.

Compression stockings. Do young people even remember that Gentoo exists?

Okay, good. Now show me the statistics that show that there are actually fewer bots than last week.

Don’t get me wrong, I desperately want these news to be true. But so far every single article I’ve seen links back (directly or indirectly) to that one CloudFlare chart that doesn’t say what people think it says. Some point to a few individual posts that didn’t get many interactions. But as far as I’m aware nobody has made the effort to check if there is an actual widespread difference and which topics it affects. Right now this all seems like confirmation bias and wishful thinking. And again, I get it. We need good news now more than ever. But the only thing worse than no good news is good news that just isn’t true and leads to us letting our guard down.

Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.

If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from “AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC”, not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.

I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.

Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be “real people” when it’s very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.