I’m all for the “SLEEP 8 HOURS” bit though. I need more of that in my life.

Bottle caps are stored in big bags of some sort before being placed on bottles.

They have sharp edges and they scratch each other’s paint as they shift around in the bags.

The scratching produces a fine dust of plastic/paint particles. The dust covers all sides of the bottle caps in the bags.

The caps are placed on the bottles. The dust goes into the liquid inside the bottle. People drink it.

Yes. So many people are misunderstanding this article… The microplastics are on the inside, in the drink, and they are bits of the paint from the exterior of bottle caps that stuck to the inside of other caps when the caps were all jumbled together in big bags before they were placed on the bottles.

It’s a pretty awesome superpower, either way you look at things.

Two passing nurses postponed her death.

Since I didn’t know:

“Parasocial” refers to a relationship or connection felt by a person towards someone they do not know personally, typically a celebrity, character in a media, or public figure. This relationship is one-sided, meaning the other person is unaware of the connection.

I get the impression this is a video-only thing because you need multiple vantage points of the scene. You can still extract a single frame in the end of course (like the article itself does), but you’ll need to shift around meaningful distances, like attack submarines do with Target Motion Analysis.

That’s 25 attoseconds, no?.. If so, that’s impressive.

The power record holder right now is the Măgurele laser in Romania, at 10 PW, but it lasts a thousand times longer, at 25 femtoseconds I believe. I can’t find clear info on pulse duration anywhere. They do intend to decrease pulse durations it seems.

I think “blitzkrieg” matches somewhat: don’t stop to engage every stronghold, just drive around them, isolate them, and cut off their support networks.

That’s the longest time I’ve ever heard someone take to build up a comeback. Be on your guard!

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.

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

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.

There was something wrong here, but the… right kind of wrong.

Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.

No, never did find it… But I’m pretty sure now that pen really was his. It was just a mildly unlikely coincidence that he had one just like mine.

I felt at the time that I’d been conned out of some things in the past, and that had me set a bit too hard on “not being fooled again”, so I overdid it.

One particular case I remember is exchanging toy cars with someone, and them claiming later that day that they lost the car i just gave them. So I spent a good few minutes looking for it with them. I even insisted “no, let’s look again” when they suggested we give up. I felt bad that they’d lost out on our exchange, so I gave them back the car they’d given me, just to ease their misfortune. Only to hear the next day how they’d been bragging about fooling me. Gah.

I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think… I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate’s desk, so i grabbed it and said “hey, that’s mine”. He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.

The teacher suggested “just let him have it” to the classmate, who conceded.

I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out “you scratched those in just now” and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher’s mortification with the whole situation.

It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right… That wasn’t my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn’t know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.

You meant to type 32, but by putting a full stop after it makes it look like “1.” on a lot of clients because of markup interpretation.

Have you considered that you may be a hallucinating AI yourself?.. Quick, try drawing a full glass of wine!

You should try tea that isn’t shocked… Green tea is especially bitter and unpleasant if the water’s too hot. The recommended temperature is 80°C, if I remember right.

But even black tea tastes less bitter if you use slightly rested water after boiling (and if you remove the teabag without squeezing it out). You’re probably used to teas being astringent, but they don’t have to be. They can be smooth and “rounded” and rich.

That’s a great way to make the air inside the teabag expand but not be able to escape through the wet paper, making the teabag float on top of the water like a confused little fish that just escaped a dentist’s aquarium.