SOTGO (u/SOTGO) - Readit News

SOTGO commented on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/alephnerd

kgwxd · 2 days ago

Everyone is talking about it like a problem that need correcting. Why? Less people seems like it could be better for everyone and everything already here, assuming "great social systems" are in place.

SOTGO · 2 days ago

I think it's that assumption is the problem. Most social systems are predicated on having enough net contributors to provide for net recipients, but with a declining population the ratio of contributors/recipients can get small. There may be solutions to this, but current social systems will likely fail if left unchanged. That doesn't mean the only solution is population growth, but we do need to do something

SOTGO commented on Exploring Different Keyboard Sensing Technologies lttlabs.com/articles/2026... · Posted by u/viraptor

dcminter · 9 days ago

I don't know how their switches worked, but the Wang 2200 terminals¹ that my father worked with had an interesting angle on tactile feedback; on each keypress a single chunky solenoid attached to it physically moved to give a satisfying "chunk" noise and vibration.

The idea presumably was to give solid mechanical feedback to professional typists used to the same from electromechanical typewriters throwing the type arm onto the platten.

Note this was late 70s/early 80s so I may be confusing/conflating it with other machines.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200#/media/File%3AWang22...

SOTGO · 9 days ago

I can't say for sure about the Wang terminal keyboards, but what you're describing sounds a lot like a mechanism from some IBM Model B keyboards (usually called Beamsprings). I have an IBM 5251 keyboard that has a solenoid that hammers the side of the metal case whenever you type, and I've heard that it was added as users would have been used to typewriters and wanted to know for sure when they had registered a keypress

SOTGO commented on Disrupting the largest residential proxy network cloud.google.com/blog/top... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

direwolf20 · 13 days ago

All of this sounds legal, so on what basis did they get them shut down?

SOTGO · 13 days ago

I haven't looked at any court documents, but the WSJ article from Wednesday reported that "Last year, Google sued the anonymous operators of a network of more than 10 million internet-connected televisions, tablets and projectors, saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them... an Ipidea spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in “relatively aggressive market expansion strategies” and “conducted promotional activities in inappropriate venues (e.g., hacker forums)...”"

There was also a botnet, Kimwolf, that apparently leveraged an exploit to use the residential proxy service, so it may be related to Ipidea not shutting them down.

SOTGO commented on Light Mode InFFFFFFlation willhbr.net/2025/10/20/li... · Posted by u/Fudgel

efilife · a month ago

Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it

SOTGO · a month ago

There can be other causes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_palinopsia. I think mine is caused by HPPD, but I can't say for sure

SOTGO commented on Parental controls aren't for parents beasthacker.com/til/paren... · Posted by u/beasthacker

SOTGO · a month ago

Not to avoid the point of the article, but GroupMe is sometimes used for academic purposes. In the 2010s I used it in school for clubs, sports, and group activities, so that may be why it wasn't blocked.

SOTGO commented on The most famous transcendental numbers sprott.physics.wisc.edu/p... · Posted by u/vismit2000

nuancebydefault · a month ago

I would have expected more numbers originating from physics, like Reynolds number (bad example since it is not really constant though).

The human-invented ones seem to be just a grasp of dozens man can come up with.

i to the power of i is one I never heard of but is fascinating though!

SOTGO · a month ago

To prove something is transcendental we would need to know how to compute it exactly, and I’m struggling to see how that would come up frequently in a physics context. In physics most constants are not arbitrary real numbers derived from a formula, they’re a measured relationship, which sort of inherently can’t be proved to be transcendental

SOTGO commented on How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs quant.engineering/exchang... · Posted by u/rundef

thijson · 2 months ago

The article says it's not enough to accurately timestamp orders at the various order entry portals. I didn't understand why that's not enough.

GPS can provide fairly accurate timestamps. There's a few other GLONASS systems as well for extra reliability.

SOTGO · 2 months ago

It's probably possible to use timestamps, but I suppose you would have to handle ties in more places, with sequence numbers you only break ties once. It appears that the FIX specifications allows up to microsecond precision, but given the volume of messages it's still likely a problem. It's also easier to work with integer sequence numbers than timestamps, but that's also a small consideration.

SOTGO commented on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023) info.arxiv.org/about/acce... · Posted by u/el3ctron

ComputerGuru · 2 months ago

If the Unicode consortium would spend less time and effort on emoji and more on making the most common/important mathematical symbols and notations available/renderable in plain text, maybe we could move past the (LA)TeX/PDF marriage. OpenType and TrueType now (edit: for well over a decade, actually) support the necessary conditional rendering required to perform complicated rendering operations to get sequences of Unicode code points to display in the way needed (theoretically, anyway) and with fallback missing-glyph-only font family substitution support available pretty much everywhere allowing you to seamlessly display symbols not in your primary font from a fallback asset (something like Noto, with every Unicode symbol supported by design, or math-specific fonts like Cambria Math or TeX Gyre, etc), there are no technical restrictions.

I’ve actually dug into this in the past and it was never lack of technical ability that prevented them from even adding just proper superscript/subscript support before, but rather their opinion that this didn’t belong in the symbolic layer. But since emoji abuse/rely on ZWJ and modifiers left and right to display in one of a myriad of variations, there’s really no good reason not to allow the same, because 2 and the squares symbol are not semantically the same (so it’s not a design choice).

An interesting (complete) tangent is that Gemini 3 Pro is the only model I’ve tested (I do a lot of math-related stuff with LLMs) that absolutely will not under any circumstances respect (system/user) prompt requests to avoid inline math mode (aka LATeX) in the output, regardless of whether I asked for a blanket ban on TeX/MathJax/etc or when I insisted that it use extended unicode codes points to substitute all math formula rendering (I primarily use LLMs via the TUI where I don’t have MathJax support, and as familiar as I once was with raw TeX mathematical notations and symbols, it’s still quite easy to confuse unrendered raw output by missing something if you’re not careful). I shared my experiment and results here – Gemini 3 Pro would insist on even rendering single letter constants or variables as $k$ instead of just k (or k in markdown italics, etc) no matter how hard I asked it not to (which makes me think it may have been overfit against raw LATeX papers, and is also an interesting argument in favor of the “VL LLMs are the more natural construct”): https://x.com/NeoSmart/status/1995582721327071367?s=20

SOTGO · 2 months ago

I'm almost surprised that Gemini 3 uniquely has this problem. I would have expected that responses from any LLM that require complex math notation would almost certainly be LaTeX heavy, given the abundance of LaTeX source material in the training data. I suppose it is a flaw if a model can't avoid LaTeX, but given that it is the standard (and for the foreseeable future too) I don't know what appropriate output would look like. For "pure" mathematics or similar topics I think LaTeX (or system that represents a superset of LaTeX) is the only acceptable option.

SOTGO commented on Constraint satisfaction to optimize item selection for bundles in Minecraft robw.fyi/2025/10/12/using... · Posted by u/someguy101010

SOTGO · 4 months ago

I get that the author wanted to explore constraint solvers, but why can't you use a greedy algorithm for this problem? Sort the inventory slots by how much bundle space they consume, and insert the cheapest slots. The only way I see this failing is with multiple bundles, but in practice in Minecraft (which is admittedly not really part of the constraint problem) bundles only help when you have many distinct items but a large number of items occur only a few items. In that case it isn't hard to find combinations that fill each bundle completely by only inserting all of a given item (as opposed to inserting only part of an inventory slot) since many items will have only 1 or 2 copies.

SOTGO commented on Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too theguardian.com/lifeandst... · Posted by u/Freak_NL

ahmeneeroe-v2 · 4 months ago

I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now.

Right? Am I the crazy one?

SOTGO · 4 months ago

There's enough places where em-dashes are inconvenient to type that I find it to be a reasonable indicator, particularly on the web. I don't think most people know how to generate an em-dash with a hotkey, so if I see one in a Reddit comment for example there's a high likelihood that the comment was either LLM generated or at least copy-pasted from somewhere else. Generally speaking in the past I observed a low prevalence of em-dashes on the internet except in more formal writing, so if I see an em-dash in a context where I ordinarily wouldn't expect one I do get suspicious. It's the same thing with the green check emoji, it's possible that a regular user typed it, but pre-LLM I can't recall ever seeing them, so these days I automatically assume it's AI generated content