You could call it an incorrect answer if there was a correct answer to division by zero, but it's undefined instead with no correct answer. Sounds pedantic, but in math pedantic stuff matters, and apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math, https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
> apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math,
You really can't though.
> If x/0 is a value, then the theorem should extend to c=0, too.” This is wrong. The problem is not that 1/0 was undefined. The problem was that our proof uses the multiplicative inverse, and there is no multiplicative inverse of 0. Under our modified definition of division, we still don’t have 0⁻, which means our proof still does not work for dividing by zero. We still need the condition. So it is not a theorem that a * (b / 0) = b * (a / 0).
This is like saying there's nothing wrong with defining 2 + 2 = 5, and addition will still be associative because (a + b) + c still = a + (b + c) unless b = 2. Like, sure, you can redefine division to not have the normal properties that it does, and then argue that your redefinition is sound because the theorems only apply to things that have the normal properties of added numbers. But that's not what + means!
If these people really believed the arguments they're making, they would actually define x/0 = 5, or 19, or something on those lines.
Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning? You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero". Then everyone just goes on to do math as usual, unless there's something inconsistent in the new formalism that makes mathematical reasoning break down.
> Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning?
I'm saying that's a false distinction, because as soon as you have that deviation from expected meaning, you have valid theorems that silently stop being valid and your formal system quickly breaks down. And while you can redefine your way out of each individual instance of this, everything you redefine just means more and more theorems that don't have their normal meaning which in turn means more things that you have to redefine.
> You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero".
This would be a much better approach, because then existing theorems that use or refer to division are obviously not necessarily true of zivision and if you want to use those theorems to talk about zivision then you have to check (and prove) that they're actually valid first.
It's more "nobody else is interested" than "it's not out in the open", but I've made my own structured data format implemented as a Rust serializer https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm and am using it for a growing collection of command-line tools for managing personal notes written as outline files https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm-tools and to run a static site generator https://github.com/rsaarelm/blog-engine . I'm also writing a game that uses IDM as the data serialization format.
Idea for the format was that you can write structured data with a really minimal syntax if you have an external type schema running the parsing, and the syntax emerged from the line-and-indentation based outline note files I'd started writing for myself. It took some months of work and planning and a couple rewrites to get the core IDM library working right. The tools and site generator were simple and straightforward in comparison.
I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things.
Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.
I've been using names of chemical elements. They're nice since they come with abbreviations and associated numbers. So if there's host 'gallium', you know that it can also be referenced as 'ga' and that it's local IP address is going to be something like 192.168.1.31.
People have been trying to do this for at least two hundred years, the Jefferson Bible was completed in 1820. We still can't point to any clear successes.
You can go in the browser URL field and type "archive.is/" in front of the URL and press enter after step 2. It'll either redirect you to an existing archive page or lets you create one if one doesn't exist.
For some reason it isn't loading for me, but if you use a search engine that supports bangs in your URL bar (DDG or Kagi) you can prefix the url with !ais and just search that. Same with !wbm or !ia for Wayback Machine
Thanks for the post. I had also been using MessagEase for years and was blindsided by the popup and confused how there's almost nothing about it online. So now I'm googling for messagease stuff from the last week and found my way here, I guess this thread is buried and invisible on actual HN.
I jumped over to thumb-key for now and am treating the brain-breakage as just some healthy neuroplasticity exercise since I'm not very serious about mobile typing.
1. Thumb-key intentionally doesn't support gestures other than basic taps and swipes. MessagEase uses these quite heavily for "borrowing" keys from other layers without having to switch to them.
2. Thumb-key bakes a lot of decisions into the layout. If you're a pure english-speaker then you tend to have a decent variety of layouts available, but as a swede, having to choose between having Å/Ä/Ö available, having convenient access to special symbols, or having convenient access to numbers is a bit of a non-starter, especially when there is no actual conflict in the layout.
As also a swede I find some keys are forgotten in the swedish layout. The letters aren't in our alphabet but that does not mean we don't use ü, é, à and such. And I find no way of doing dead keys in Thumb-key. Maybe there will be more donations to fuel some additions to Thumb-key now thanks to MessagEase sudden rentseeking.
Will definitely donate, I'm not pro subscription. Especially not this way, locking in users by waiting for them to learn your keyboard layout and then lock the keyboard behind a paywall.
I realized I had an old apk installed and grabbed the newest thumb-key from the site, and it does indeed have a ME-compatible layout now so I don't need to relearn everything. Not having gesture-based capitalization still irks me though.
Meditation before bed and going to bed early after taking some melatonin tends to give me more vivid dreams. The wake-back-to-bed technique often works to give me short lucid dreams. I think the trick is that when you wake yourself up in the early morning, you become awake and alert after the early-night deep sleep phase that would otherwise leave you groggy and completely out of it. Then when you go back to sleep you go to lighter REM sleep because your sleep cycle is still running, but are more likely to be alert and recognize it's a dream.
