zygoloid

The photograph was first invented in around 1761 by the French Science Fiction author Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche in the novel Giphantie, before any technique for capturing a photograph in practice was known.

My new folklore (false) etymology is that the `.gif` file extension is a reference to this, which I think settles the pronunciation debate: GIF should be pronounced following French convention, so it's ʒɪːf.

I hope this is uncontroversial. Kthxbye.

Hot take: big-endian is a mistake caused by a historical misunderstanding of how decimal numbers are written in left-to-right Western languages. Arabic numerals are borrowed from a right-to-left writing system, so decimal numbers in English text should be considered as right-to-left text embedded in left-to-right text, making them little-endian, as they -- and everything else -- should be.

Etymologically-speaking, "rectangle" comes form the same root as "right angle", presumably meaning a two-dimensional non-self-intersecting figure of finite length where all interior angles are right angles.

If that's the right definition, then in a spherical geometry, a rectangle could have one, two, or three sides, but certainly not four. And in a hyperbolic geometry it could have any number of sides >= 5.

#math

@fugueish@wandering.shop
`malloc` from Latin mal locus, bad place. Returns a bad place to store data.

n³ is always n away from a multiple of 10.

2³+2=10
3³+3=30
4³-4=60
5³-5=120
6³-6=210
...

More generally, at least one of n³m ± m³n is always a multiple of 10, for any integers m,n.

Proof:
mod 2, n³m ± m³n ≡ nm + nm ≡ 2nm ≡ 0
mod 5, nm(n²±m²) ≡ 0 if either 5|n or 5|m
otherwise, n²,m² ≡ 1 or 4, so either n² ≡ m² or n² + m² ≡ 5

#math

Hello Mastodon!

Since this is my first post, I thought I'd share some incredibly niche C++ trivia / pedantry:

For an enum whose enumerators all have the value 0, C++ asks us to imagine a hypothetical integer type with minimal width that can represent 0 (https://eel.is/c++draft/dcl.enum#8.sentence-2). This means we must consider the case where the width is 0. For an unsigned integer type, this gives a range of representable values of [0, 0], and that's the type we pick. But before we can determine that that's minimal, we must also consider a signed integer type with a width of 0, for which we get a range of representable values of [-½, -½]! (https://eel.is/c++draft/basic.fundamental#1.sentence-5) Conveniently that range does not include 0, so we discover that we must use an unsigned integer type to determine the range of values of the enumeration. (We also rule out an unsigned integer type of negative width as that would have a range of values 0 to -½ (inclusive) or smaller, which I think we can reasonably conclude is an empty range despite the parenthetical.)

In any case: if you ever wondered whether a zero-bit signed integer type in C++ can represent only the value 0 or only the value -1, now you know: no, it can represent only the value -½. Truly a marvelous compromise.

Follow me for more brilliant insights like this one :)