In many localities voters have used initiative powers to ban red light cameras and in some jurisdictions red-light camera fines are deemed constitutional violations because the US Constitution requires those accused of crimes to be able to “confront their accuser” in court which is not possible if the accuser is a machine.

While it is rude to honk immediately when the light turns green, it is also true that taking too long to accelerate when the light changes severely reduces traffic flow and causes congestion. And this is commonly caused by distracted drivers. You are supposed to release your brake and begin moving at roughly the same time as the car in front of you, i.e. when the car in front of you turns off their brake lights or when the traffic signal turns green if you’re in the front.

Edit: “Too long” realistically means anything more than half a second. If everyone’s reaction time was one second it would reduce the number of cars per green light probably by half. That doesn’t mean it’s polite to honk after half a second but if your reaction time is that bad you should not be driving.

This meme reminded me to turn on my alarm. I turned it off last Wednesday for Juneteenth and the Monday and Friday alarms are separate (less road congestion, can wake up later). So if not for this, I would have overslept tomorrow morning

It would be cringe if you were using a shared server and set this as a default for everyone or if it was interfering with something. But if you’re just minding your own business I could not care less what customisations you put on your terminal as long as it isn’t using excessive resources

And for those who don’t: Plato, a Greek philosopher, was putatively asked by a student while teaching at the Academy what the definition of a man (human) was. Plato responded that a man is a “featherless biped”.

Diogenes, another Greek philosopher and infamous quick-wit, caught wind of this and thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so he gate-crashed one of Plato’s lectures and pulled out a chicken which had all of its feathers plucked out and said “Behold, a man!”.

Euclid’s first postulate: Give two points, there exists exactly one straight line that includes both of them.

Still approaching a decade out of date but here’s one from 2017

The actual reason: Gasoline prices in the United States were customarily displayed in cents per US gallon (about 3.8 litres). This means the sign originally read something like “15”, which meant $0.15 per gallon. Since the US has also a long history of pricing things in 9 or 99 (due to the psychological effect of such pricing), many service stations appended the extra 9/10 at the end to indicate 9/10 of 1 cent, which was a more meaningful price difference when the price of fuel was 15 or 25 cents and not two or three dollars. Legally, although the smallest cash denomination in the US is one cent, the US dollar can still be nominally divided into 1,000 “mills” for accounting purposes.

Inflation has caused the price of gasoline to rise, and when it passed $1 per gallon, service stations continued the same pricing traditions by just adding a third digit to the number. When digital price displays came on the scene, many of them continued to just display a three-digit number with the traditional 9/10 at the end, i.e. 123 9/10

New displays seem to have gotten rid of this tradition and just display a three-digit decimal number, i.e. 3.45 or 4.56.

Ever since the untimely death of CentOS I feel like Debian and its spin-off Ubuntu have been pulling double their weight in server applications.

IDK, my boss is nice to me because she knows that if she’s not and I tell her to kiss my ass then she’ll never be able to find someone with my level of experience who will be willing to work for the quantity of peanuts that they’re paying me.

I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.

Year 3 of using Fedora and I still don’t know what the equivalent of apt purge is

I don’t think a BRICS currency will be successful in replacing the dollar unless the governments of the participating countries force their businesses to use it. The reason why transactions are denominated and settled in US dollars is because of the perceived stability of its value and the openness of the US financial system to international trade. People use the US dollar because they trust the American government to not excessively devalue it and for it to be reliably useful later on.

And yes, I recognise that all of these are under attack by the current US government.

Usually for used stuff eBay is way cheaper. And for many things, it doesn’t matter whether it is new or used.

Facebook Marketplace is pretty good though, at least in the US. All other Facebook features are rubbish

From a formal logic perspective, your statement is true. But in real life, the more important distinction is not between “true” and “false”, but between “purposefully deceptive and ungenuine disinformation” versus “outspoken dissenting viewpoint”. And that is one that people are really bad at telling the difference between, especially if the viewpoint in particular is one that they hold very strongly.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world has over 70 times as many subscribers as the other two asklemmy communities combined.

If the set of all strings of composite length is a regular language, you can use that to prove the set of all strings of prime length are also a regular language.

But it’s also easy to prove that the set of language of strings of prime length is not regular, and thus the language of strings of composite length also can’t be regular.

A more formal proof.

You got downvoted here but you’re absolutely right. It’s easy to prove that the set of strings with prime length is not a regular language using the pumping lemma for regular languages. And in typical StackExchange fashion, someone’s already done it.

Here’s their proof.

Claim 1: The language consisting of the character 1 repeated a prime number of times is not regular.

A further argument to justify your claim—

Claim 2: If the language described in Claim 1 is not regular, then the language consisting of the character 1 repeated a composite number of times is not regular.

Proof: Suppose the language described in Claim 2 is regular if the language described in Claim 1 is not. Then there must exist a finite-state automaton A that recognises it. If we create a new finite-state automaton B which (1) checks whether the string has length 1 and rejects it, and (2) then passes the string to automaton A and rejects when automaton A accepts and accepts when automaton A rejects, then we can see that automaton B accepts the set of all strings of non-composite length that are not of length 1, i.e. the set of all strings of prime length. But since the language consisting of all strings of prime length is non-regular, there cannot exist such an automaton. Therefore, the assumption that the language described in Claim 2 being regular is false.

Average Matt Parker code