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Those LED people marketed themselves out of a job, then. I repaced one (1) broken light bulb over the past 10 years, as opposed to 5 a year before switching to LEDs.

Apparently, all of the audio cassette players being produced now use the same mechanism (perhaps from multiple factories). Some upscale brands like Fiio use basically the same mechanism but use some more premium parts in places, swapping out plastic bits for metal ones. If you need low wow and flutter, it makes sense to seek out vintage players that were built like a tank.

A great youtube channel on both modern cassette players and legacy audio formats is Techmoan. I never knew I was interested in this topic before watching those videos.


What a terrible headline and introduction. Designed to pique your interest by being mysterious? The ACM's announcement comes straight to the point: https://www.acm.org/media-center/2026/march/turing-award-202...

They know. They're hoping you don't notice the line doesn't intersect.

The article doesn't share the actual math, but also not the relatively easy intuition. When you roll a pair of dice, there are more combinations that add up to 7 than any other number. Change the numbers on the dice (change the 1 to a 6, e.g.), there's again more combinations that add up to some numbers than to others. The histogram of the number of combinations that add up to different results is a bell curve. That's why it pops up everywhere you have addition of independent events. It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.

The distribution of the sum of two dice is actually triangular, not a bell curve https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1204492

The distribution of the sum of a finite number of dice only approximates a bell curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin%E2%80%93Hall_distributio...


> It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.

I was probably lucky.

We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.

Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.

Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.


And if you take the log of the number of ways you get the entropy corresponding to the 'ways' macrostate.

Yeah that is definitely not the relatively easy intuition for this. The relatively easy intuition comes from learning about the Bernoulli trials, binomial distribution and Pascal triangle. Once you understand those you understand why normal distribution is so prevalent. Or just watch this https://youtu.be/AwEaHCjgeXk?si=tV72uauquCHvzkNE

They explained the intuition in like two sentences that an 8th grader can understand and test themselves.

Sounds simpler than whatever you’re talking about here


Anybody who has ever played Craps will know this.

Or, as featured in 99 percent invisible, https://www.theamdash.com/


Thought that was going to be a reference to AM, the malevolent AI from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".


Punctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.


Aargh, aggressively blinking visual horror website.


Telcos and insurers (especially life, pensions) too. Not rocket science.


Roman empire is obsolete. Men can't stop thinking about it.


The IRS can issue Private Letter Rulings (which are anoymized but public so you could check if they treat a company preferentially - although not which company) and Advance Pricing Agreements.

Rulings from different countries are typically used to ensure no taxes are paid. E.g. get a ruling from the US that some activity is taxable in Luxembourg, and then get a ruling from Luxembourg that it's taxable in the US. Like McDonald's did. Either country will then say "well, it's up to the other country to tax that, I'm not policing that". Mostly after a while, multiple companies get clued in and it all gets exposed and the "loophole" is closed. E.g. a uble Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

This can be an honest error by one or both tax services, a strategic move (to be a "tax paradise" and prevent other taxable activities from leaving the country), or - one would speculate, allegedly - for political or personal gain.


There's a list of the supported opcodes on the page if you scroll down.


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