That’s the placebo effect, baby. That’s part of why’s we’s gots control groups in medical studies - to filter out the noise of just having hope now that you’ve got something new.

To take a stronger tack on what loonsun has said: IQ tests are bullshit.

Measuring intelligence - that is, the ability to find patterns and integrate experiences to synthesize solutions - is still an unsolved problem, and any psych major will happily tell you that - they’ll have learned it in their first course, even. No one’s figured out a way to do it that isn’t just testing knowledge instead of the actual “intelligence” of someone.

To give you just one reason they’re bullshit: there’s no IQ test in existence where studying for the test does not significantly improve your score. Clearly that means the test is at least in part testing what you know, instead of some “base aspect” of your mind.

Another reason often quoted is that tests made in different cultures produce different results for people who aren’t from that culture. So clearly, again, learned cultural knowledge - not some “base intelligence” - is involved in the test.

So instead of worrying about IQ tests, put them out of your mind. The only people who care about them are charlatans. If you’re having trouble functioning in daily life, you’ll likely go a lot further finding resources that help with the tasks you’re struggling with - which may not be easy, but will help you. A therapist may also be a good person to chat with this about - mine has certainly been a big help to me. Good luck!

Oh jeeze, that’s been around as a plugin in inkscape since at least 2011, I remember vectorizing an episode poster from Adventure Time using it. But I’d believe it wasn’t quite as good as whatever photoshop had. I used the “never learn photoshop” trick to be happy with what I’ve got, but then I only edit images for fun.

Was in 2021, headline is a paraphrase Sauce

Vance quote from the podcast discussion they’re paraphrasing:

American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins," Vance said." And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyper-woke, coastal elites. The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years. And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people. That’s just a fundamental thing that’s happening in American politics."

…on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

• Douglas Adams

He’s exploiting exactly the same weakness that llms exploit to appear so smart: he just sounds confident all the time, and since people use confidence as a shortcut to evaluate accuracy, anyone who isn’t paying attention to the actual substance is going to just nod and smile at the confidence and assume everything is perfect.

Well that’s the sort of thing that might end up with you getting a rod in your knee

Lol, you did good, but got tripped up by reading “Scheißposts” as a verb. It’s capitalized, so it’s a noun. The “make” at the end gets folded into the “kannst” - or “can” - so it’s “Then you can make shitposts in two languages.”

Oh dank, I had no clue there was a video. Good callout, the new album was great

Because your information is what a number of services use to make money. Even before VPNs come into the equation, you’re undercutting the service’s ability to sell you by anonymizing yourself.

That said, as noted elsewhere here, VPNs can be used by bad actors which can get you just put on a massive block list; and in addition, VPNs can be used to circumvent regional protections such as provisions on what countries can watch what content on video streaming services, which those services also want to prevent and so can block known VPN addresses to avoid.

Every Time We Touch in my ass

Someone has calculated the first 100 Trillion digits of pi, so if I understand the equation you’re suggesting they means it is possible to know if pi contains all permutations of all phone numbers.

Yep, it definitely means we’re above the average chance we could find a given 10-digit number in what’s been looked at so far, if we’re up to 14 digits! But here’s the trouble: that calculation gives the “average” chance.

In the same way you could see the number “1” more than once in pi, you could see “11” more than once in pi, and so on for all sizes of patterns, as long as they’re part of a larger not-yet-seen pattern (and as long as mathematicians’ as-of-yet unproven guesses about pi are accurate). So if you’re unlucky, even if pi does turn out to contain all numbers, we still may not have hit exactly your number yet, because larger patterns have been ahead of it that include things that aren’t your number. But the odds are in your favor as far as I know.

Does pi contain my phone number?

We can’t yet answer this because we don’t actually know whether or not Pi contains all permutations of all numbers. It’s conjectured that it does, however.

Didn’t say anything about compression.

You didn’t, but “compression” using pi actually asks the same question you do, iiuc, of " How far do I have to search in order to find a thing of a given length?" And the answer is - if pi truly does contain all permutations of all numbers - probably 10^length /2 - for phone numbers, 10^10 /2, or half the length of all of the permutations of 10-digit phone numbers next to each other.

Which, coincidentally, and the reason I was aware of this, is why indexing into pi doesn’t save you space on average if you’re being a nerd and trying to use it for compression.

If you explore compression using pi - i.e., giving an index and a length of pi as your compression method - what you’ll end up finding is that the length of the data you want to compress is about the same as the length of the index in pi your data is at.

So if you wanted to “compress” five digits by just linking to its index in pi, you would most likely need a five-digit index into pi to find the spot where pi has that number. So, you save nothing on average.

There’s a good blog post that goes into this, but I’m having trouble finding it. The rough explanation I can remember is: if you have every permutation of a given length n in a row with an even distribution, then a random string you choose is likely to be in the middle of that length. Using our numbers 0-9 as our base, that puts you at index 10^n/2. Given our example of 5 digits, that’s 100000/2 - 50000, itself a 5 digit number, saving us no space.

In the mean time, you can use pifs to “store” your data using similar ideas.

Can confirm. I remember my seeing a first “hey, did you guys by any chance happen to see the new episode” post on /b/ back in 2010, quickly followed by it exploding on 4chan and people setting up the first pony tf2 servers, moot creating /pony/ as a containment board, and everyone saying “don’t post on /pony/ or you’ll get IP banned in two weeks” - because a decade prior, moot had created the /furry/ containment board when furries got big, let it sit for two weeks, then IP banned everyone who had posted to it and deleted it.

Of course, he didn’t replicate the action with /pony/, which is still around. And early brony culture was fascinating, because on a site where shock humor ruled and the experience was like digging through a sewer to find gems, suddenly a subculture emerged that was heavily anti-irony, kind, and genuine. Absolutely bizarre to watch.

Worth noting, as others have, that this was pre-gamergate, which was the social movement that took 4chan and turned it from a place that let Nazis post (usually “iRoNiCaLly” under the premise of being part of the ocean of piss that was the shock humor on /b/) and rolled it into a full Nazi bar.

Y’know you jest, but when I was very young I didn’t understand why all the other kids I could just call by their first name, but the girl across the street I had to call “Miss Shell”

Moby. Says on the sign, eh

I have a take on this that I think no one will have fun with:

In my opinion there is no moral way to keep a cat as a pet.

Allowing cats to roam as they desire results in the aforementioned ecological damage. The opposite - keeping cats locked in a few thousand feet at best for twenty-odd years of life - is cruel.

As someone who was raised in the woods with outdoor cats and couldn’t imagine keeping them inside - even though we lost two as I grew up - it’s a circle I just can’t square. So I figure that if and when I get cats, I’ll dodge the question and adopt some older cats who were already raised inside and couldn’t be trusted to go outside safely anyway.

Go Phils! Didn’t see the game, but happy news to get