[luntfontanne]

damn he really is an all-time poster

[onrtrp]

the set of ships is nonempty and finite

(any reasonable notion of) size induces a total order on the set of equivalence classes of ships of the same size

every nonempty finite total order has a maximum

there exists a ship that is no smaller than any other ship

QED

[redescription]

an addition to my usual complaints about the godawful state of contemporary athletic wear: why is it so hard to find a serious distance running shoe that doesn't have like 6 inches of cushioning

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

my inner qualities will carry the day in the third act. but here in the first act they're worth fuck all

[thebreakfastgenie]

Quand il faut expliquer la pâtisserie à un Américain: imaginez un hamburger

[redescription]

this post by @sleepnoises where the staples employee responds to "have a good day" with "they don't pay me enough to have a bad one!" has actually rewired my brain. i repeat it to myself every time i feel myself being insidiously infected by someone else's stress. the rental company forgetting to deliver a drum stool or the livestream dropping for thirty seconds or a technician messing up a cue are not world-shattering crises that i need to be emotionally invested in

[gaytanic-panic]

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

a lot of jazz musicians ended up that way because they couldn't figure out how to rock

[redescription]

"The uproar of his advent had not yet died away when Professor Ronald Murray, the chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the proceedings began. Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the common fault of most Englishmen of being inaudible. Why on earth people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take the slightest trouble to learn how to make it heard is one of the strange mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a nonconducting pipe, which could by the least effort be opened. Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the candlestick upon his right."

-- arthur conan doyle, "the lost world"

plus ça fucking change! over the years i have become much more sanguine about the reality that a large portion of academics are too absorbed in their subject and simply cannot and will not be persuaded to give a damn about production value despite my best efforts, but it still spikes my blood pressure whenever a keynote speaker (who ran over to the tech table five minutes before their talk to make a last-minute slide edit) decides to fully turn their back to the podium mics and our carefully-positioned confidence monitor and deliver a lecture directly to the projection screen instead

[redescription]

tonight's concert was so beautiful that it temporarily suppressed my dread of the upcoming wedding season

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[ryebreadgf]

[redescription]

tonight marked my first nap on the office couch this year, which isn't bad considering it's halfway through may

[philcollinsenjoyer]

jesus was in the bible?

[redescription]

i realize my LLM era is annoying, but it feels like nearly every few days lately i find a solution to a long-standing personal problem and i know this is going to sound silly but sometimes it legitimately makes me really emotional.

i'm working on my DIY e-reader project right now, and one small piece of the puzzle is conversion. i've struggled with PDF to EPUB conversion for well over a decade now, and for complex PDFs, the standard tool (calibre) still doesn't perform much better than it did in 2014. today after a series of typical calibre failures, i let opus chew on a PDF of tore janson's speak: a short history of languages for about 10 minutes, and it managed to produce a near-flawless EPUB: no spacing issues, accents rendered accurately, no header or footer text accidentally embedded in-line, all tables rendered as images to preserve formatting, removal of the hyphens in words that are no longer broken up across a line now that the text is reflowable, etc. literally 15 years of struggling with imperfect solutions to this problem! i found myself just sitting and staring at the screen for a little while processing what this means to me. all the journal articles i've ever downloaded from jstor can be added to my e-reader now. pdfs of short stories, bespoke poetry collections, old textbooks...

[redescription]

finding inner peace in 2026 looks like finally coming to terms with the fact that people will continue to regularly use both "learnings" and "compute" as nouns

[redescription]

my initial attempts at doing chess analysis with LLMs failed so incredibly miserably that i really hadn't bothered to check to see if there were any improvements. thought i'd give claude a go tonight, and was pretty pleased to discover tonight that while a language model basically still can't track through a position or maintain a board state on its own without tool assistance (it's hallucination nation if you just use the chat function), telling it to load stockfish and the python-chess library, tweaking the analysis depth, and giving it some custom instructions resulted in really strong performance:

this is exactly the kind of natural language analysis i've been hoping for! it's trivially easy to see the engine eval and i always try to do self-analysis before using an engine or an outside tool, but i'm not a strong enough player to consistently work out why the engine prefers a specific move or to understand why a particular blunder is so bad, especially when i'm playing against openings that i am historically bad at (ruy lopez 😔).