Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.

“could help solve” was the quote.

Physics is like that joke about halving the distance to a woman at a bar*. I don’t expect it will ever be entirely solved, but whatever stands as the “for all practical purposes” of the era might. I’m taking “help solve” as just another halving of the distance in this analogy.

* A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”

The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram:

TL;DR

If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:

• McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.

• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.

• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.

• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.

• McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.

• Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.

• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.

There was something wrong here, but the… right kind of wrong.

Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.

No, never did find it… But I’m pretty sure now that pen really was his. It was just a mildly unlikely coincidence that he had one just like mine.

I felt at the time that I’d been conned out of some things in the past, and that had me set a bit too hard on “not being fooled again”, so I overdid it.

One particular case I remember is exchanging toy cars with someone, and them claiming later that day that they lost the car i just gave them. So I spent a good few minutes looking for it with them. I even insisted “no, let’s look again” when they suggested we give up. I felt bad that they’d lost out on our exchange, so I gave them back the car they’d given me, just to ease their misfortune. Only to hear the next day how they’d been bragging about fooling me. Gah.

I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think… I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate’s desk, so i grabbed it and said “hey, that’s mine”. He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.

The teacher suggested “just let him have it” to the classmate, who conceded.

I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out “you scratched those in just now” and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher’s mortification with the whole situation.

It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right… That wasn’t my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn’t know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.

offended beeping

I will be messaging you in 7 days on 2025-04-07 10:06:96 UTC to remind you that there is no RemindMe! bot on lemmy.

Nobody who can still talk afterwards.

I just funged it. You’ll never get me, coppers.

You meant to type 32, but by putting a full stop after it makes it look like “1.” on a lot of clients because of markup interpretation.

Have you considered that you may be a hallucinating AI yourself?.. Quick, try drawing a full glass of wine!

You should try tea that isn’t shocked… Green tea is especially bitter and unpleasant if the water’s too hot. The recommended temperature is 80°C, if I remember right.

But even black tea tastes less bitter if you use slightly rested water after boiling (and if you remove the teabag without squeezing it out). You’re probably used to teas being astringent, but they don’t have to be. They can be smooth and “rounded” and rich.

That’s a great way to make the air inside the teabag expand but not be able to escape through the wet paper, making the teabag float on top of the water like a confused little fish that just escaped a dentist’s aquarium.

Well, no, China is bad because freedom is very restricted there and because they have ambitions to dominate the world.

Yes, every other world power in the world is more or less the same. People cannot, in general, be trusted to be “good” when given the opportunity to abuse. A world power can be held in check by the presence and efforts of other world powers, though.

Let us enjoy our schadenfreude!!

Oh, right, you did say “just got mine”… Never mind me. It does seem like it could be a mismatch between what the adb was compiled for and what it’s being asked to install on.

I think it needs special hardware to run on:

It is developed to run on an Orbic mobile hotspot (Amazon, Ebay) which is available for $20 or less at the time of this writing.

Ok, fair enough then. Could have been a simple misunderstanding.

Ok, you keep saying that but never explain why/how. Like, why refuse such a small change so aggressively?