But (-i)^2=-1 as well. So we still need a convention to distinguish i from -i.

Sorry – I misread it as you reported it. Makes sense, thanks!

If you read the copyright notice on the website, it links to the relevant law, which starts with:

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

So it’s not a copyright violation, since it’s a US government work (and doesn’t fall under the exceptions listed in the law).

Ooh! There was an episode of the Past, Present, Future podcast a couple of months ago that touched on this very subject. Tariff policy was set by congress up until the Smoot-Hawley act, which was considered such garbage that they decided that it should be left to the executive.

Back when it was a congressional power, it was also the source of some of the worst horse-trading, as representatives from rural areas would seek protection on agricultural imports (with low tariffs on imported machinery), while representatives from manufacturing areas would seek to lower food prices and increase the cost of imported manufactured goods.

Edit: Not saying that handing it to the executive is the best plan, as we can see by what’s going on now, but letting congress do it was also problematic. It’s funny how a lot of us grew up with the idea that no/low tariffs are the natural order, when it’s actually been a fairly short-lived anomaly in historical terms.

Oh, maybe! I didn’t understand how it chose the points, but it does look like the random convergence approach.

Nice, thanks!

I’m disappointed that none of them seem to have gone with the random convergence approach.

Set the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Pick a random starting point on the canvas. Every iteration, pick a random corner from the triangle and your next point is the midpoint between the current point and that corner. While the original point is almost guaranteed not to be a point in Sierpinski’s triangle, each iteration cuts the distance between the new point and the nearest Sierpinski point in half.

If you start plotting points starting with (say) the 50th one, every pixel is “close enough” to a Sierpinski point that you see the triangle materialize out of nothing. The whole thing could be programmed in about 20 lines of QBasic on DOS 30 years ago.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but after the 2019 Supreme Court ruling that federal courts can’t address partisan gerrymandering, a couple of blue states (New York and Illinois maybe?) tried doing some gerrymanders after the 2020 census. Then their state courts struck them down.

Several blue states – I think Washington and Oregon are among them – created non-partisan redistricting commissions before 2019, so they can’t be gerrymandered.

FFS, “between Lando and me”. Grammar, folks. Use it.

Wow… Indiewire should find someone who reads their own site to proofread their articles.

If you click on Jeff Bezos’s name, it links to other articles mentioning him, like the 2021 article saying that he would step down as CEO of Amazon in 2022, which is what happened. Yet this 2025 article refers to him as “Amazon CEO”.

Sure, he still owns a lot of Amazon stock and nobody knows who Andy Jassy is, but getting facts that that wrong is pretty ridiculous.

False. The Liberals are generally centre-right even within Canada. Your compass is off.

Your Newtonian physics argument is nonsensical and frankly rude.

So when you zip some files and then unzip them, some of the bytes are missing? Really?!

Wait… Is that community run by Gerald Holmes?

http://www.l8r.net/geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/ (a 25 year-old, very likely satire site)

Around 500k without power in the Seattle area.

(Posted in the dark as I’m told that we should expect power by around noon on Saturday.)

What I’ve read in recent weeks is that people have been donating to the “Biden-Harris campaign”, so Harris has access to all that money by default.

While I would love a stronger candidate (Whitmer, perhaps), I understand that Harris is a lot less complicated. My understanding is that she can just take the money and run (for the presidency).

Edit: Personally, I think (and thought back in 2019/2020) that Biden should have pulled the same move as James K Polk, and declared upfront that he would be a one term president. Then we could have had a competitive Democratic primary, which would have stood out against the Republican coronation.

The quick adjustments to tileable blueprints sound amazing. Such a great idea!

Somehow I thought the pipette on water to get an offshore pump (like how you can pipette on an ore field for a miner) was already a thing. That and the quick access to landfill will save so much time when designing nuclear plants.

The spidertron stuff sounds nice too, but they’re usually so late game that I haven’t minded the slightly clunky v1.1 status quo.

The ASF has renamed their conferences from ApacheCon to Community over Code, so foundation leadership seems receptive to moving away from the Apache name.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the name is changed in the next couple of years.

The name was originally just a silly joke, since it was “a patchy web server” (as it was an open source web server abandoned by the original author, but kept going by a community sharing patches to fix bugs and add features).

To be fair, Avril Lavigne signed away the movie rights to Sk8ter Boi to Paramount in 2003, and we still don’t have that movie.

Selling IP rights into another medium is not the same as a guarantee that it will be developed (though it is a first step).

Trump’s second impeachment came after he lost his second election.