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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • But that’s not what TypeScript does. The joke in the meme doesn’t really even make sense.

    A better analogy would be you have a basket that’s explicitly labeled “Fruit” and TypeScript complains if you try to put laundry detergent in it because you said it’s supposed to be a basket of fruit.

    This meme was clearly made by someone who doesn’t use or understand TypeScript.




  • Voyager was especially notorious for this. TNG had its share of technobabble, but it felt like every character in Voyager apparently had intricate knowledge of advanced engineering concepts that magically solved every problem in almost every episode.

    Chief Engineer B’Elanna: “There’s this new problem no one has ever faced before and we don’t know how to fix it!”

    Commander Chakotay: “Have you tried realigning the dilithium matrix?”

    B’Elanna: “It wouldn’t work because it would cause an interference pattern in the warp attenuation field.”

    Chakotay: “What if we harmonize the polaron emitter to reverse the polarity of the chroniton field so we can convert the matter/antimatter reaction into a photonic gamma burst and triple the power of the warp core?”

    B’Elanna: “That could work!”

    Not real, but this feels like almost every episode in Voyager.


  • The short answer is that it’s ultimately down to the number 43 (the number of protons technetium has) and the number of neutrons that could potentially form stable isotopes being atomically weird numbers.

    The picture below shows relative stabilities of isotopes of different elements. N represents the number of neutrons, Z represents the number of protons. As a starting rule, moving above or below the N=Z line (creating an excess of protons or an excess of neutrons) tends to decrease overall stability.

    You can see for lower atomic numbers, the most stable isotopes closely follow N=Z because protons and neutrons “balance” each other in the nucleus. But as you increase the atomic number (and therefore the number of protons), the protons begin to repel each other more strongly, which means additional neutrons are needed to make the nucleus stable. This is why the “line of stability” (the line of dark red “stable” elements) increases above the N=Z line as you increase the atomic number. Deviation from this line means an atom is less “beta stable” (and therefore more likely to beta-decay).

    There are certain “magic” numbers of protons and neutrons that are more stable than others because they comprise a full shell. These occur at 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This means nuclei that have (or are very close to) one of these numbers of protons, or neutrons, or protons + neutrons, are inherently more stable. If you look at the other stable isotopes on the graph, you would expect a stable isotope of technetium would need around 55 neutrons to follow the line of stability.

    As it turns out, the combinations of 43 protons and 55 (± a few) neutrons just can’t form a stable enough configuration to not beta-decay.


  • I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.

    North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They’re all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they’re filthy, selfish capitalists.

    Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).

    The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There’s definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They’re just all-inclusive resorts with free “cultural lessons” to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn’t consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we’ve heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they’re all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur “resorts” to prove to the world that it’s a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!


  • During computer learning in a computer lab 15 years ago, I figured out that the student passwords were sequential, so I could easily guess other students’ passwords. If I logged in to their account while they were logged in, they would get booted and I’d hear the inevitable “Mrs Teacher! It says my session expired!”

    I did that 2 or 3 times over the course of a few minutes before I got caught. The vice principal rambled on and on about how I was “disrupting learning” and how I “should be suspended for this” before finally telling me, “my mentor taught me a really important lesson. If your students don’t hate you, you aren’t doing your job.”

    What a horrible piece of shit.