Out of context that would be a truly bleak statement.

You say the first point is 15, but you must remember that both players start on an egg, called love.

Alternatively, you can count to 6 on each digit be counting joints and segments, sostart with the joint with the palm (knuckle), then the first segment, next joint, and so on. The thumb is a little odd because the knuckle joint is near the wrist, but you can still count it.

Using binary (finger up vs. finger down) lets you count from 0 to 1023 though.

A thermostatic mixer is the usual solution. Set your desired temperature and the valve dynamically adjusts the hot and cold flows to produce that output regardless of input temperatures and presures.

Works great until it jams at the “instantly vaporize target” setting. Which reminds me, I must call a plumber…

Pool noodle, rolled up towel, folded up cardboard, pretty much anything will do. It’s the same technique when kids keep losing their toy cars under there.

You can have your drugs, or you can have Koffing blowing smoke. Make your choice, but choose wisely.

That’s not helping…

Like a sea turtle trying to get up on a raft.

What a mental image. Brain bleach, stat, please.

I’m guessing that was their last post.

Threads like that explain a lot about the state of the world.

My god, is systemd ever a piece of crap. Coupled with ‘consistent[ha!] naming’ it’s the single most likely thing to cause a field engineer to scream into the partially-lit datacenter in abject rage and hate. Even more if they remember how fucking sysVinit actually delivered on the promise. Even more if they still remember how well inittab Just Worked.

I agree with everything you’ve said, but this paragraph in particular resonated. We used to have a clean, simple, and predictable, system. Now we have exciting race conditions, a massively over complicated monolith (“but it’s not”, I hear the Lennart’s fans scream, “you can just install the bits you want”. To them I say “Try it. You’ll soon wish for the sweet release of death. Install a good init system instead”), and once simple tasks being swamped by poorly designed tooling.

I’d say the entire design of it is badly thought out, but that implies there was much though given to it’s design at all. It seems more like it simply coagulated. As another commenter said, it’s become popular because it makes the disto builders’ lives easier, not because it’s better, and that leaves everyone actually using the thing in the lurch.

I won’t say a bad word about Gentoo, I enjoyed running it, but if you want to use sysvinit, Debian works fine with it. There’s a page on the wiki (linked form the install guide) on how to do it here. I’ve not run into any issues over the time I’ve been running like this, and having a clean init system makes my day a lot better.

Well obviously. I mean, have you ever tried eating those things without sauce? They’re bland, dry, and uninteresting. Clearly that crow has a more refined palette than that.

It probably also helps lubricate it to make it easier to swallow, crows really are smart.

This changes everything…

s/goat/potato/

Delightful though goats undoubtedly are, potatoes don’t typically try to escape or eat the scenery.

Sure, they blew a hole in the building, but the pizza was perfectly cooked, so mission accomplished.

Goats are actually malevolent vegetables.

As I said, it’s an interesting question! I think I’ve found a paper describing something like the scenario you mentioned (Dhar, A. (1993). Nonuniqueness in the solutions of Newton’s equation of motion. American Journal of Physics, 61(1), 58–61. doi:10.1119/1.17411). It’s a apparently shows that for certain conditions (such as the balanced knife you mentioned, or a particle in a field that would accelerate it away from the origin proportionally to it’s distance) Newton’s equations of motion have non-unique solutions, although I confess that the author rather lost me during some of his leaps in mathematics. The discussion section is interesting, a couple of key conclusions stood out to me: ‘In this sense we may say that Newton’s equation has a unique solution even for singular forces like x^1/3 but x(0)=0 and derivative(x(0))=0 in such cases do not uniquely specify the initial state.’ and ‘Infinitesimal disturbance in position or velocity will change the state and one of the other solutions will become effective.’

From what I have understood from the paper, the author seems to be mostly pointing out that there are certain conditions under which Newton’s equations do not have a unique solution, but that in reality a deterministic, but chaotic, outcome will occur due to infinitesimal disturbances. Ultimately, no matter how carefully you balance the knife, it’s going to fall over, and the direction it falls will be determined by a multitude of forces rather than pure chance.

@bunchberry@lemmy.world has also made a thoughtful reply regarding quantum field theory and it’s implications on determinism, and I need to respond to that too as it’s a fascinating, if baffling, topic.

Your question about predicting your own future is interesting; you’re making the assumption that a prediction must continue to be true after the point at which it is made, but I would suggest that you can resolve the apparent contradiction by considering that any prediction of the future is only true at the instant it is made. After all, if someone else predicted your future, wrote it down, but did not tell you, you would eat the avocado, however seen as you changed the conditions of your future by gaining additional information the result changed. If you predicted your future a second time, directly after having resolved to not eat the avocado, the prediction would have you not eating it.

If we assume the universe is deterministic, and that we have the ability to perfectly replicate it and run that replica forward in time without time passing in our universe it would seem that we could accurately predict the future of our universe just be seeing what happened in the replica. However, that would involve the replica creating it’s own replica as it would evolve in exactly the same way as our universe. That replica would create it’s own replica, and so on. I’m not quite sure of what the implications of that are, and it’s late here, so I’m going to have to call it a night, but if if could be done it would be a clear way to distinguish between a random or non-deterministic universe and a chaotic one. If the predictions sometimes proved incorrect it would suggest true randomness rather than just a chaotic system.

It’s a really interesting question actually. In my previous answer I was alluding to the fact that computers typically use pseudorandom number generators, whose output appears random but is actually entirely deterministic.

In real life I think a similar situation holds. First we have to make a distinction between a system having randomness; a completely unpredictable outcome and being chaotic; where the outcome is theoretically predictable but varies significantly with even tiny changes in input.

For instance, most people would say a dice roll is random, but physics would suggest it is chaotic instead. If you could role the dice twice in exactly the same way, you’d get the same result both times as there is nothing that could change the outcome.

For there to be true randomness, something would have to change the energy level of the dice, and we’ve controlled for that by requiring both throws to be exactly the same.

However, you cannot role the dice exactly the same way twice as exactly means having the entire universe the same, which is obviously impossible.

Applying this reasoning to everything leads to the conclusions that a) there is no randomness, just chaotic results, and b) that this is indistinguishable from true randomness as we cannot determine the starting condition of any chaotic system accurately enough to predict its outcome.

I know that quantum physics has something to say about this, but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to fully grasp what it is saying.

So, ultimately I don’t believe in ‘true randomness’, but in a chaotic universe instead.

You’ve probably just got a really long period pseudorandom number generator. No need to flaunt it, not all of us are so blessed! ;)