The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built
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@mott555 As a general rule of thumb, the answer to "can you drive real quick between two cities?" is "no" for any two actual cities big enough to be worthy of the name. How did they not know this, East Coast or not?
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@Mason_Wheeler These guys are used to states that are physically smaller than our counties. In their territory, they think nothing of driving two states over to a neighboring office in the span of two hours, but the Midwest is so forgotten/ignored by the coasts that they simply don't realize our states are as large as countries.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
our states are as large as countries
dude. y'all have COUNTIES! that are as large as countries!
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@Zerosquare said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
AmigaOS, really? Does your perversion knows no bounds?
I've done some Amiga programming in the past year, but I'm already out of the closet.
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@Gąska said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@topspin said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
the ideal shape of a MacBook would just be a thin, solid plate of aluminum
Edit: , of course...
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@djls45 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Gurth said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
an electric motor and a dynamo
Aren't those structurally identical, with the only difference being which direction the energy flows and is converted?
Indeed, the whole reason we had that conversation was because I had just explained to him that an electric motor will produce electricity if you turn the shaft. This, as I recall, was shortly after I had amazed everyone nearby with magic produced by means of an AA battery, a piece of electrical cord wrapped around a medium-sized carpentry nail, and assorted small screws made of steel.
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@Gurth said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
an electric motor will produce electricity if you turn the shaft
Depends on the motor. DC motors with permanent magnets can easily act like generators. Most AC motors or any motor with field coils instead of magnets will not produce any electricity unless you already have electricity to charge the field coils first.
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@Jaloopa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@LaoC said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@remi said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@djls45 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
a day-trading program written in C# that submitted the trades using a REST API for a day-trading website and implemented an algorithm that supposedly would make trades that would always come out even or ahead. The algorithm doesn't really work, but it was a fun project to put together nonetheless.
I'm no trading expert, but I suspect that this algorithm is something akin to a perpetual movement machine...
That was my first thought as well. And the proof isn't even hard, just suppose everybody on an exchange uses it.
It works if there's a third option: never sell
Buy some stocks at random, only sell when the price has gone up
In the long run, we're all
deadbankrupt.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Most AC motors or any motor with field coils instead of magnets will not produce any electricity unless you already have electricity to charge the field coils first.
but you could certainly use a tiny permanent magnet motor as a generator to charge the field windings of a bigger universal motor to use for power generation.
or you could carefully align the motor so that you would generate small electric current thanks to earths magnetic field and use that to bootstrap up to stronger and stronger self generated magnetic fields for power generation.
alternatively you can strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat and drop it, and use the opposing natural laws that cats always land feet first and toast always lands buttered side up to generate power.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
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@Jaloopa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Gurth said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Bulb said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Gurth said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
don’t seem to have figured out that having a fullscreen window with almost nothing in it is not only a waste of space and efficiency, but a good reason to buy sunglasses.
Most application main windows have enough content to fill the screen. Or will quickly change to a state where they do; e.g. finder may be showing just a few entries, but I don't want it to change size when I select another folder with more entries. And dialogs generally start sized to content already.
That is completely not what I was talking about. I meant the kind of behaviour where people habitually maximise windows when there is absolutely no need to — say, having an Explorer window with four files in it, but maximising it anyway before doing anything with them, then minimising or closing the maximised window to get at another maximised window behind it. Which tends to leave me thinking: if you didn’t have both windows maximised, you could have them both visible at the same time and just move your mouse cursor from one to the other.
i.e. the people Windows 8 was designed[citation needed] for
CNTFY
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
our states are as large as countries
dude. y'all have COUNTIES! that are as large as countries!
How does the saying go? "In America, 100 years is a long time. In Europe, 100 miles is a long way"
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@Jaloopa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Windows 8 was designed
Was it?
edit:
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@hungrier It's worse than that in places. In the mountainous bits it can take 100 miles of driving to travel 20 bird miles.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
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@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
Status imagining a physics control panel filled with toggled, some of which toggle other toggles and others which light up lights all labeled "law" on them.
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@djls45 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
If you start by buying, and the stock just goes up, it would sell when the price passed a certain threshold. If a setting was configured to continue trading, it would then re-buy at the new price and wait for it to keep going up, that way you would continue to make money as the stock continued climbing. If the direction turned and went down far enough, then it would sell enough to get back the original purchase price and then wait for the price to fall far enough to make the same desired profit. If it then goes up, at a new threshold, it will buy enough to cover the sell and then wait for the price to go high enough to make the desired profit.
I just read this in detail and it's stupid. I buy stock at price X, and then when it hits X+10 it sells all the stock and rebuys it? Just don't and say you did.
People running systems like this are who pays for market makers. If you sell all your stock at X+10, a market maker will buy it from you and sell it back to you at X+9.
@djls45 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Denver or Salt Lake City and Seattle or San Francisco then drilling holes through mountains would make more sense
Philadelphia somewhere? They pay a team of guys to drive up and down the whole fiber every day. Money is nothing.
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@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
oooooooh.
CURSE YOU MURPHY AND YOUR LAW! CURSE YOU TO HECK!
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@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
Actually, I think I once read an article on it. Might even have been a legitimate scientific paper. Interesting blend of math and newtonian mechanics. Turns out toast lands buttered side down because the table is between 60cm and 1m high, or a range like that.
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
Actually, I think I once read an article on it. Might even have been a legitimate scientific paper. Interesting blend of math and newtonian mechanics. Turns out toast lands buttered side down because the table is between 60cm and 1m high, or a range like that.
well does the size of the toast have an effect on the range? could we have a loaf of a sufficient size that it remains conveniently edible and yet is not prone to falling buttered side down when tipped from tables of the usual height for humans?
what about gravity? do the physics rely on gravity? is toast more or less prone to buttered side down on Mars? or Jupiter?
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@Vixen I don't recall. It was based on the assumption that the toast had been pushed exactly enough past the edge of the table to start tumbling off.
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen I don't recall. It was based on the assumption that the toast had been pushed exactly enough past the edge of the table to start tumbling off.
THIS SOUNDS LIKE A JOB..... FOR SCIENCE!
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
toast always lands buttered side up
Wasn't it buttered side down?
uhh....... i don't think so...
I think i will have to science this.
It lands buttered-side-down as a corollary of Murphy's Law.
Actually, I think I once read an article on it. Might even have been a legitimate scientific paper. Interesting blend of math and newtonian mechanics. Turns out toast lands buttered side down because the table is between 60cm and 1m high, or a range like that.
It even won someone an IgNobel prize!
Aston University's Robert Matthews got a thousand children to conduct 21,000 toast drops. He proved not only that it is possible to use child labor in such a way that it seems whimsical and sweet, but that the toast, spiraling through space as it drops off the edge of a table or a plate, will land butter-side-down sixty-two percent of the time. Some experiments show an even higher rate of buttered floor than that.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
alternatively you can strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat and drop it, and use the opposing natural laws that cats always land feet first and toast always lands buttered side up to generate power.
Anyone who's done their homework will know the cat will eat the toast while in the air, before landing on its feet.
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@hungrier said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
loaf
A loaf of toast?
well bread comes in aloaf and you make toast from parts of a loaf, yes?
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@Jaloopa except even that let you have two side by side.
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@brie said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
f you could guarantee that the zip file wouldn't contain any holes, your original problem (which was having to seek to the index just to open the file) isn't a problem, because you can just open the file at the beginning and start reading. Each file has its own header block, and you're guaranteeing that the next file's header will come immediately after the previous file's data with no unused data in between.
A bit late to the game (blame work), but you're right. Assuming a non-malicious .zip file, you could start at the beginning and then just iterate over the files by their local header blocks. TIL - and I guess I should have taken a closer look at the .zip files earlier.
That's actually quite useful.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Most AC motors or any motor with field coils instead of magnets will not produce any electricity unless you already have electricity to charge the field coils first.
but you could certainly use a tiny permanent magnet motor as a generator to charge the field windings of a bigger universal motor to use for power generation.
Self excitation is a thing. You don't even have to align anything; there's always a bit of residual magnetism in steel that can get the party started.
Reminds me of a rather absurd hardware thing I built. When I read about the railgun concept in highschool I decided that spinning up a ton of copper surrounded by supraconducting electromagnets was a tad out of my league but an electric version of a BB gun would be fun to try as well, so I got a good 10 kg of electrolytic capacitors from scrap, something like 700 mF total, and soldered them together with speaker wire and two fat salvaged copper bars. Obviously nothing railgun-like ever came of it but the thing was good for some other fun high-current experiments like shooting thumbtacks with a coil.
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@Vixen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yW5cyXXRcBut wouldn't it be easier just to have a toasted sandwich? Wait, you butter the outside of those. So an inside-out toasted sandwich.
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@Zecc said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Anyone who's done their homework will know the cat will eat the toast while in the air, before landing on its feet.
No, it won't. As an obligate carnivore it won't be interested in the toast unless it is a toast with ham, but then it's surface will be ham and not butter, so the law about buttered side down won't be active.
It might, however, just cut it from it's back with one swift swipe of a claw and land on its feet while letting the toast land on whatever it wants as long as it's not the cat.
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@Gurth said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Some years ago I had a hard time explaining to someone that if you connected the shafts of an electric motor and a dynamo, then connected them electrically, they wouldn’t keep running. Unfortunately we never did get round to building it.
I remember we had a demonstration of that in physics class: A motor whose shaft is connected to a dynamo, a power source, and a lamp. When you connect the lamp to the dynamo, it slows down the motor, showing the energy is consumed and motor/dynamo couples are not infinite energy generators/multipliers like dwarven pump/waterwheel combos.
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@error When I saw the facebox I thought "This has to be the Onion, right? please?" Hovering the link restored some of my faith in humanity.
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@Bulb said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Zecc said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Anyone who's done their homework will know the cat will eat the toast while in the air, before landing on its feet.
No, it won't. As an obligate carnivore it won't be interested in the toast unless it is a toast with ham, but then it's surface will be ham and not butter, so the law about buttered side down won't be active.
It might, however, just cut it from it's back with one swift swipe of a claw and land on its feet while letting the toast land on whatever it wants as long as it's not the cat.
My parents had a cat that was crazy for cucumber. He'd growl like mad while eating it, and swipe at anything that came close while hissing. Anything else, he was the second nicest cat I've ever met, and took anything in good nature. He also ate bread and other stuff.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
our states are as large as countries
dude. y'all have COUNTIES! that are as large as countries!
Being as big as Luxembourg is not a major challenge, to be fair.
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@dkf said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
our states are as large as countries
dude. y'all have COUNTIES! that are as large as countries!
Being as big as Luxembourg is not a major challenge, to be fair.
Even so, 27 countries fail to reach even that low bar.
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@Bulb said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
As an obligate carnivore it won't be interested in the toast unless it is a toast with ham, but then it's surface will be ham and not butter, so the law about buttered side down won't be active.
Cats can digest carbohydrates (such as in toast) and derive some nutritional value, even though they still definitely need meat in their diet as well.
The cat will quite like the butter, especially if it is not a housecat.
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Most domestic animals seem to like some foods they should have no interest in according to biologists, and sometimes they even dislike some parts of their supposedly typical diet. (Doesn't mean it's healthy for them, though).
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@Zerosquare I've heard that dogs really love chocolate, which is moderately-to-severely toxic to them. (Source: a friend who is both a dog owner and a chocolate lover. This combination causes her and her family (and their dogs!) no end of pain and frustration.)
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@dkf said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Bulb said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
As an obligate carnivore it won't be interested in the toast unless it is a toast with ham, but then it's surface will be ham and not butter, so the law about buttered side down won't be active.
Cats can digest carbohydrates (such as in toast) and derive some nutritional value, even though they still definitely need meat in their diet as well.
The cat will quite like the butter, especially if it is not a housecat.
Mine always comes into the kitchen to beg when I start cooking. Usually before I even open the meat.
In most cases she'll be happy with the first thing I'll toss down to her (always a piece of vegetable), though it's a toss-up whether she'll eat it or only play with it. She's understandably not fond of onion but she'll bugger off regardless.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
what about gravity? do the physics rely on gravity? is toast more or less prone to buttered side down on Mars? or Jupiter?
These are the kinds of questions we need to answer before we start thinking about human colonization of other planets.
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@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
what about gravity? do the physics rely on gravity? is toast more or less prone to buttered side down on Mars? or Jupiter?
These are the kinds of questions we need to answer before we start thinking about human colonization of other planets.
exactly! and I WANT humans to colonize other planets. The more humans that leave for colonization the fewer remain on earth and the better the planet will be for that.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
exactly! and I WANT humans to colonize other planets. The more humans that leave for colonization the fewer remain on earth and the better the planet will be for that.
There used to be someone here whose signature was something like, "Goal: To go to Mars with a hammer."
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
The more humans that leave for colonization the fewer remain on earth and the better the planet will be for that.
Hm, so you like having lots of rocket exhaust in the atmosphere?
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
The more humans that leave for colonization the fewer remain on earth and the better the planet will be for that.
Hm, so you like having lots of rocket exhaust in the atmosphere?
Assuming they use hydrogen/oxygen rockets whose only waste product is steam I see no issue with this. if they go grand mal stupid and try to fling themselves off planet with nukes..... well that's double plus ungood.....
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@Vixen I suspect however many leave won't leave a dent in the number staying behind.
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@PleegWat go ahead! shatter my dream some more!
/me runs off crying and falls in a lake, almost impaling herself on the sword some mysterious woman was lifting out of the lake to give to her
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@Vixen That's no basis for a system of government!
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@Mason_Wheeler We found a witch! May we burn her?