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buttermeup commented on To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps   nytimes.com/2026/03/04/sc... · Posted by u/jimnotgym
Retric · 11 days ago
A lot of early work into physics seemed like dumb questions at the time. When taken to the extreme “Do heavy objects fall faster?” tells you quite a bit about how the world works. And critically people intuited the wrong answers to many such questions before careful experimentation.
buttermeup · 10 days ago
Obviously we have the benefit of hindsight, but “do heavy objects fall faster” doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me in the same way that “do chimpanzees like crystals” does.
buttermeup commented on To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps   nytimes.com/2026/03/04/sc... · Posted by u/jimnotgym
iberator · 11 days ago
Microwaves were invented as hamster defrost machines. Seriously!
buttermeup · 10 days ago
While that sounds like an interesting tidbit, it also doesn’t appear remotely true based off of the history sections in the wiki pages for microwaves and microwave ovens.
buttermeup commented on To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps   nytimes.com/2026/03/04/sc... · Posted by u/jimnotgym
omegared8 · 11 days ago
Sure seems stupid on first glance but most science seems pointless. It’s only when several loosely interconnected ideas that prove something MIGHT be commercially viable do we find out that it was the first curious question that … again seems stupid… was the seed of inivation
buttermeup · 11 days ago
What are some examples of questions that at first seemed stupid yet became brilliant when connected with other seemingly stupid ideas?
buttermeup commented on Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)   health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/earthboundkid
potatoproduct · 13 days ago
We are living in increasingly weirder times.
buttermeup · 13 days ago
Not really, although things may be trending in the wrong direction. Pick any “weird” current event and you can find much worse examples in relatively modern history. Just compare whatever you think of to the siege of Leningrad, for instance.
buttermeup commented on AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder   ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/... · Posted by u/saikatsg
buttermeup · 14 days ago
All of these articles about AI’s impact on engineering are so short sighted.

Software engineering is a means to an end. The computers need to do something and software engineering is how we’ve traditionally done that.

But it should be abundantly clear that this is no longer required. Before AI, engineers needed to care about every line of code. With current AI, engineers need only worry about larger architectural issues. But at this rate, even those concerns will be driven by AI. One can easily imagine a world where relevant architectural trade-offs are surfaced to prompters. We’ll live in a world very soon where no human will have to concern themselves with code.

So while the premise of this blog post may be true, it’s a bit like complaining that hopeless carriages don’t take to stirrups very well.

buttermeup commented on New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?   quantamagazine.org/the-ma... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Chinjut · 14 days ago
I don't like the way it's written, but what they are talking about is completeness in the sense of "Dedekind completeness"; i.e., that given any two sets A and B with everyone in A below everyone in B, there is some number which is simultaneously an upper bound for A and a lower bound for B.

Note that this fails for the rationals: e.g., if we let A be the rationals below sqrt(2) and B be the rationals above sqrt(2).

buttermeup · 14 days ago
In school, we talked about “Dedekind cuts” but we never formalized the definition. Kind of disappointed now because your explanation is very simple and elegant.

u/buttermeup

KarmaCake day3February 28, 2026View Original