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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • My personal tale on this is that given that the brain contains chaotic circuits (i.e. circuits in which tiny perturbations lead to cascading effects), and these circuits are complex and sensitive enough, the brain may be inherently unpredictable due to quantum fluctuations causing non-negligible macroscopic effects.

    I don’t know if the above is the case, but if there’s anything like free will out there, I’m inclined to believe that its origins lie in something like that.



  • In 2020 there were 448 events at the Olympics, let’s round up to 450. Each event gives 3 medals, for a total of 1350 medals. The Olympics are held every four years, so that 337.5 medals are awarded in an average year.

    There are about 8.1 billion people in the world. On average, 0.000004 % of the worlds population receives an Olympic medal each year.

    If this were a completely random yearly lottery, and you lived for 100 years, you would have about a 0.0004 % chance of winning an Olympic medal in your lifetime.

    I would count myself lucky if I won that by the time I was 50.





  • I am very fond of the idea of “stateless” code, which may seem strange coming from a person that likes OOP. When I say “stateless”, I am really referring to the fact that no class method should ever have any side-effect. Either it is an explicit set method, or it shouldn’t affect the output from other methods of the object. Objects should be used as convenient ways of storing/manipulating data in predictable/readable ways.

    I’ve seen way too much code where a class has methods which will only work"as expected" if certain other methods have been called first.


  • Sounds reasonable to me: With what I’ve written I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like the one you describe, with an algorithm split over several classes. I feel like a major point of OOP is that I can package the data and the methods that operate on it, in a single encapsulated package.

    Whenever I’ve written in C, I’ve just ended up passing a bunch of structs and function pointers around, basically ending up doing “C with classes” all over again…



  • This makes sense to me, thanks! I primarily use Python, C++ and some Fortran, so my typical programs / libraries aren’t really “pure” OOP in that sense.

    What I write is mostly various mathematical models, so as a rule of thumb, I’ll write a class to represent some model, which holds the model parameters and methods to operate on them. If I write generic functions (root solver, integration algorithm, etc.) those won’t be classes, because why would they be?

    It sounds to me like the issue here arises more from an “everything is a nail” type of problem than anything else.








  • Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.

    Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.


  • Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?

    Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.

    It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.