Reminds me of this quote which I recently found and like:
> look, I'm sorry, but the rule is simple:
if you made something 2x faster, you might have done something smart
if you made something 100x faster, you definitely just stopped doing something stupid
Edit: cool article, I have myself speculated that we will get a new language made for/by llms that will be torture writing by hand/ide but easy to read/follow/navigate/check for a human and super easy for Llms to develop and maintain.
This is interesting to think about: For gold I'd say the demand is coming from both industries and from people who want it as a store of value. If it was only used as an industrial chemical, then surely the price would drop because there would be less demand.
Some bitcoin advocates will talk about how useful it is as a currency, and I wonder how much bitcoin is actually used for purposes other then to hope you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid.
If the price dropped, it would be even more in demand and reach equilibrium. Gold has several unique mechanical properties, being the most corrosion resistant metal and one of the most electrically conductive, as well as being able to be flattened into extremely thin sheets and drawn into extremely fine wire.
Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price things 9.99999? Ridiculous.
It's because technically the dollar is divided into Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.
So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able to get away with it.
> (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.
No, it's purely stylistic. We tend to spell out denominations on coinage and "dime" is just the American spelling of disme, meaning a tenth.
The capped bust dime from 1809-1839 had "10 C." rather than "One Dime". Similarly, the capped bust quarter said "25 C." instead of the modern "Quarter Dollar", the half dollar said "50 C." rather than the later "Half Dollar" and the half dime said "5 C." rather than the later "Half Dime."
Most of the 18th century and early 19th century coinage, besides half pennies and pennies didn't have their denomination written on them at all.
There is no such decipence division in the UK, but fuel is still sold with a vestigial .9 pence on the end. In fact, since the denomination is per litre, not gallon, the .9 is about 4 times more significant.
When the final calculation of XX.YYY litres * AAA.9 pence/litre is done, it's then rounded off to 1 pence.
They're allowed to get away with it because of a dysfunctional lobbying driven government. Mils don't exist in the common knowledge and if any reasonable person looked at this they'd call it out. It is useful in accounting but a Mill has never been minted and the last half penny was minted in 1857. It has never been possible using issued physical legal tender in the US to pay a debt of $3.129
The Mill doesn't exist because of some archaic need - it's pure dysfunction and the utilization of it in gas prices is a practice that should and very easily could be made illegal.
Yes, the "Mill" discussion looks to be totally irrelevant. [1] and [2] seem to back up my claim that, at least in modern times, it's purely a "just-below pricing" psychological trick and has nothing to do with the Mill unit.
$4.999 looks a lot smaller than $5.00 to everyday people and it makes the gas company more money than $4.99. That's all there is to it.
So do whatever they do with mils but for the penny too. They don’t nor have they ever minted a mil coin, so the procedure for this is already well established if this is correct.
Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are, IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax, which varies from state to state but seems to always be x.4 cents per gallon.
So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".
Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?
I think I might be missing something basic, but if you actually wanted to do a Fourier transform on the sound hitting your ear, wouldn't you need to wait your entire lifetime to compute it? It seems pretty clear that's not what is happening, since you can actually hear things as they happen.
Yes, for the vanilla Fourier transform you have to integrate from negative to positive infinity. But more practically you can put put a temporally finite-support window function on it, so you only analyze a part of it. Whenever you see a 2d spectrogram image in audio editing software, where the audio engineer can suppress a certain range of frequencies in a certain time period they use something like this.
It's called the short-time Fourier transform (STFT).
Yeah. But a really annoying thing about the STFT is that its temporal resolution is independent of frequency, so you either have to have shitty temporal resolution at high frequencies or shitty frequency resolution at low ones, compared to the human ear. So in Audacity I keep having to switch back and forth between window sizes.
Yes exactly. This is a classic "no cats and dogs don't actually rain from the sky" article.
Nobody who knows literally anything about signal processing thought the ear was doing a Fourier transform. Is it doing something like a STFT? Obviously yes and this article doesn't go against that.
Not really, just as we can create spectrograms [1] for a real time audio feed without having to wait for the end of the recording by binning the signal into timewise chunks.
Yes, but the article specifically says that it isn't like a short-time fourier transform either, but more like a wavelet transform, which is different yet again.
I'd say the title is like that (and I agree with someone else's assessment of it being clickbait-y). I think the actual article does a pretty good job in distinguishing a lot of these transforms, and honing into which one matches most.
But the title instead makes it sound (pun unintended) that what the ear does is not about frequency decomposition at all.
The fourth sentence in the article is "Vibrations travel through the fluid to the basilar membrane, which remarkably performs frequency separation", with the footnote
"We call this tonotopic organization, which is a mapping from frequency to space. This type of organization also exists in the cortex for other senses in addition to audition, such as retinotopy for vision and somatotopy for touch."
So the cochlea does frequency decomposition but not by performing a FT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform), but rather by a biomechanical process involving numerous sensors that are sensitive to different frequency ranges ... similar to how we have different kinds (only 3, or in birds and rare humans 4) of cones in the retina that are sensitive to different frequency ranges.
The claim that the title makes it sound like what the ear does is not about frequency decomposition at all is simply false ... that's not what it says, at all.
It's very unlike both of those, as the nice diagrams in the article explain; not only is what it is saying not obvious to you, it is apparently something you actively disbelieve.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
Just a thought: Make the velocity of the path constant. There should be some way to take a derivative an set it to a constant and solve for z. ( or really reparameterize the curve t' = f(t)) so the velocity is constant.
Actually, now that I think about it, choosing z = c * t is kind of both influencing how the path is parameterized as well as the path carved out on the sphere.
> look, I'm sorry, but the rule is simple: if you made something 2x faster, you might have done something smart if you made something 100x faster, you definitely just stopped doing something stupid
https://x.com/rygorous/status/1271296834439282690
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