the name seems to be an unfortunate choice that stems from their historical usage as “a means to an end”. i.e, they were first used as part of a method to find some solutions to cubic equations. this method would require algebraic manipulations of complex numbers, but the ultimate goal was to discover a real root. the complex roots would be discarded once a real root was found (if it existed).

the wikipedia article attributes the name to Descartes:

… sometimes only imaginary, that is one can imagine as many as I said in each equation, but sometimes there exists no quantity that matches that which we imagine.

which i think helps to highlight how skeptical the people at that time were about the existence of the “imaginary” numbers.

source: memories of my first complex analysis class, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History

i’d strongly recommend reading the history section of that wikipedia page to anyone interested in the topic, it has some pretty fun history

you also can’t drive it on the roads too much or else the tires will go bad

you could put “AI is making things worse.” after just about any sentence and it would probably be true.

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code

could not be me in the second frame

ask and ye shall receive.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240912024402/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/kamala-harris-broke-donald-trump/679780/

the children yearn for the mines

im not sure if the average republican voter is capable of understanding advanced concepts like “negative numbers”

that’s not a very helpful suggestion considering that a good number of people are there specifically because there is a war going on.

i’ve been trying for a whole lot longer than 6 years

i do too. i always have to turn on reader mode for that website

“the dmv is going to have to be a bit more hardcore until they can turn a profit”

everything you said is true. i just wanted to add something to the suicide point: owning a gun has been tied with an increased risk of suicide. source

here’s a quote from the link that i think gives a good summary of the problem:

“Suicide attempts are often impulsive acts, driven by transient life crises,” the authors write. “Most attempts are not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide. Whether a suicide attempt is fatal depends heavily on the lethality of the method used — and firearms are extremely lethal. These facts focus attention on firearm access as a risk factor for suicide especially in the United States, which has a higher prevalence of civilian-owned firearms than any other country and one of the highest rates of suicide by firearm.”

you’d likely need to go somewhere a bit more extreme to wait for silksong

it also bothers me when people say “my algorithm” to refer to the thing that recommends posts to them. people shouldn’t ever say “my algorithm” unless they personally own a copy of the kick-ass prog-metal band

i wonder what this will mean for the upcoming Truth streaming service

well, according to the congressional budget office,

In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion

and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.

it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.

that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

and

A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.

“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?

that sounds like a better choice to be honest. i haven’t used signal much and i didn’t know they supported that sort of thing