Notnotamathblog - The Only Logical Conclusion - Tumblr Blog

dumbest firefox feature you can just set whatever the fuck you want to be your default search engine

not the dumbest actually this rocks

(go on a page with a search bar and right click the address bar at the top of the page, an option gets added to the bottom and you can even set custom shortcuts for it if it's not your main one)

You probably have seen already all the caps about google AI recommending to put a bit of glue in your pizza sauce. You may have seen also how someone dag up that it comes from a reddit shitpost from ten years ago.

This case illustrate perfectly something I’ve been saying for a while: chatbots are basically a cosmetic upgrade over the good old “I’m feeling lucky” Google button.

Or more exactly: a new version of the button that needs 600 million $ in Nvidia gear every month and wastes half a little of water every time you click it

Source

Reblog if you hate reblog bait

Me and my homies hate reblogs bait

Me when I want to learn all my life without grades

xkcd fans are the only fandom I've had direct experience with where people do the stereotypical nerdy fan thing of referring to installments of the thing they like by their release order numbers instead of their titles

My latest New Scientist cartoon

Dear professor this assignment did not nourish my fundamentally curious soul so i did not do it No penalty full 100 points please Goodbye!

I love when a textbook has a theorem that is just the most obviously true shit, like girl I sure hope so, if that weren't true I think math would fall apart!

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

I have an official rolling release, if you even care

tech illiterate people are the funniest thing

Okay I'm not gonna reblog the actual post because I don't wanna give this clown blog publicity but I do wanna laugh at it. These are not AI-based tools lmao. Probably some of them are, but a lot of them are not. Unless you think every algorithm is AI. Or you think every platform where you can do enough coding to build a simple AI is itself AI. Or you're just slapping AI buzzwords on stuff so you can make a stupid list post. This shit is so annoying the maple calculator is not fucking AI lol

hello friends I want to share with you a cult classic and a long time fav of mine

"turning a sphere inside out"