NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I hear what you’re saying, and you’re 100% correct, but I think most people will realize it’s a figure of speech, and easier to say than “Via the process of gene mutation trial and error over many, many generations of tigers, spots have developed on their ears that look like eyes, resulting in predation from behind being discourged.”


  • Fair enough, I suppose it is interesting!

    In terms of the question, “Are there more infinite sequences that contain Hamlet or more that don’t?”- in the context of true randomness and truly infinite sequence, this feels like almost a trick question. Almost every truly random infinite sequence will contain Hamlet an infinite number of times, along with every other possible finite sequence (e.g., Moby Dick, War and Peace, you name it). In fact, the probability of a random infinite sequence not containing Hamlet is effectively zero.

    Where it becomes truly interesting is if you have an infinite number of infinite sequences. Now you’d certainly get instances of those “effectively zero” cases, but only in ratios within infinity itself, haha. I guess that’s probably what you were getting at?


  • I could have worded that better. Any probability with a non-zero chance of occurring will occur an infinite number of times given an infinite sequence.

    To address the comment you linked, I understand what you’re saying, but you’re putting a lot of emphasis on something that might as well be impossible. In an infinite sequence of coin flips, the probability of any specific outcome - like all heads - is exactly zero. This doesn’t mean it’s strictly impossible in a logical sense; rather, in the language of probability, it’s so improbable that it effectively “never happens” within the probability space we’re working with. Theoretically, sure, you’re correct, but realistically speaking, it’s statistically irrelevant.




  • Just went down the rabbit-hole of the acquisition of MySQL as I was bored. What a fascinating story.

    Dude who originally made it in 1995, Michael Widenius, named it after his daughter My, hence MySQL. He sold it to Sun for $1 billion in 2008. He then turned around, forked the software, and produced MariaDB (I always wondered why it was named that) starting a new organization around it in 2009. It’s functionally nearly identical, often able to be used as a drop in replacement, assuming you aren’t using new features developed after the fork. Last month, he sold it again, the same fucking base software, to some private equity firm (yay…). What a guy.

    Unfortunately, he’s run out of daughters to name software after and already used his son’s name for something else, so we might be at the end of open-source, community-driven DB solutions from Michael. To be fair, relying on any projects from him to be free and open indefinitely is apparently not a good idea anyway.