AnimalMuppet

I have a pair of running shoes. I don't run very much, so they haven't worn out. But they're 26 years old. Twenty six years. Will good quality running shoes last that long? Or will, say, the padding at the bottom lose…

Let's say I have a jigsaw puzzle with n pieces? If you get no help from the picture (maybe it's completely white or something), then is the complexity O(n!), because I have to see if I can join every piece to every…

I'm wondering if the problem with LLM-generated text is that there's too little information. Yeah, there's plenty of words, but they don't seem to say all that much. And if that is the problem, how would you tell? If I…

Long, long ago, in my college days, I worked the problem of a drop falling through a mist (in a vacuum). As it falls, it sweeps out a volume of the mist, and so the mass of the drop keeps increasing. So you have mg = ma…

Let's say you create an AGI. (Yeah, I know, we don't know how to define it or test for it. That's not the point.) And let's say that you worry about containing it so that it doesn't take over the world. (Perhaps…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40169178 It is on the front page, it has 30 upvotes, it's not flagged, but it seems impossible to comment on it. Is it just me?

My voicemail app on my android phone just refused to let me listen to any existing voicemails until I gave it permission to see the location of nearby devices. Can anyone give a steelman version of why a voicemail app…

OK, that's a bit of an overstatement. When confronted with a meandering, vague, or poorly worded post, "what's your point?" is a perfectly reasonable reply. (Although just ignoring it is also a perfectly reasonable…

Everybody knows the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2). And everybody knows of integer solutions like 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2. And most people know of Fermat's Last Theorem, which says that there no integer solutions for…

Can anyone comment on these two papers? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37738335/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9294036/ They're both published by NIH. I never heard anything about this. Is this known by…

Pythagorean triples are integers a, b, and c, such that a^2 + b^2 = c^2. If you look for triples such that b = a + 1, they are scarce. But when you look at the few examples, you start to see a pattern. The value of a…

Last week there was a discussion about 2^4 == 4^2 (my search-fu is letting me down - I can't find it again, or I'd link it). It proved that that is the only pair of integers with that relationship. But what about…

If you had a screaming fast SAT solver, how would you monetize it? Sell it to the highest bidder? SAT-as-a-service? Something else?

I think this is interesting from a marketing perspective. It's probably not high volume, but it might have decent margins. Could this be done in tech? Is there a market for new, made-in-2022 Amigas? Apple IIs? TRS-80s?…

No, I'm not looking for a plush toy that I can chase around. (We'll see how many people reply without reading.) Cats are apex predators within their weight class. They kill anything and everything, by day and night.…