R. A. Dehi @radehi@social.cleverlibre.org

@allenholub We always do at least subconscious estimates because there are always more likely improvements than we have the time to make.

Consider [this now-obsolete extreme example from xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1425/). Wouldn't have been reasonable to equally prioritize working on both of these possible features; an afternoon or a week spent on the bird-recognition feature would have been only wasted.

In less extreme cases, an hour or two of estimation work can tell us whether a feature is more likely to take two days or a month. Many features that are worth trading off two days of other features for are not worth trading off a month of other features for.

Unfortunately, almost no companies have incentives set up to reward doing that estimation work, so formal estimates add little more value than subconscious ones.

@allenholub Can extract the principal components of the user/like matrix so that after a few clicks you can project a new user into the low-dimensional likability subspace and re-sort by statistically predicted likability *to you*

@AccordionGuy It showed up in a typewriter font, though? In theory, this version of Mastodon supports Markdown, but it's pretty broken.

@mmasnick Actually on Qoto (my instance) and on Mathstodon we can use LaTeX with Mathjax: \[\mathbb R, \mathcal R\], and maybe even \[\mathscr R, \mathrsfs R\]. But on #Qoto Mathjax is kind of broken, and when the post gets syndicated to other instances it just shows up as raw LaTeX code unless they install Mathjax too.

Everyone ought to, because if people are discussing things without being able to use equations, there's really no hope of coming to agreement on basic facts, and Mathjax makes it enormously easier to use equations.

(Edited: I screwed up the Mathjax delimiters! Possibly because of Markdown actually.)

@AccordionGuy the formatting in that post looks broken to you too, right? It's not only broken on my instance but in the actual post? Haven't yet figured out how to view the JSON-LD source.

@mmasnick Yes, although I imagine screenreaders will have exactly the same amount of trouble. But if your instance supports it (am using Mastodon v3.2.1) you can also format in Markdown: *italics*, **bold**, _**bold italics**_, `typewriter`, [links](https://www.techdirt.com/), _**[`bold italic typewriter links`](https://www.techdirt.com/)**_. Pleroma has a similar feature. For Fraktur, blackboard bold, and script you still need to resort to Unicode.

------

Actually am not sure how much of that is going to work because the "Markdown" implementation in Mastodon is super janky and has a lot of problems. Let's see!

@enoch @mmasnick I just wish they'd put all the Twitter crap behind a birdsite CW so we can see the interesting things they say without having to wade through all their complicated feelings about their abusive ex

@shriramk @rmerriam Which languages would you think mainstream programmers (JavaScript I guess) would learn most from?

@science_quotes@c.im I think this one is particularly informative, BTW; try doing a quantitative estimate, with 95% confidence bounds, in terms of units you can visualize, then look up the answer.

@freemo why is the formatting in this post broken? The pseudo-Markdown implementation seems to be eating all the newlines. How does that happen and how can we fix it?

Is hilarious mistake in Python design. Thanks @elfprince13.

```python
def x():
e = None
while e is None:
try: print(input("? "))
except Exception as e: print(repr(e))

x()
```

Result:
```
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 3, in x
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'e' referenced before assignment
```

@science_quotes@c.im @freemo Okay but what's the volume of Lake Superior?

@science_quotes@c.im @freemo For engineering, is pretty valuable to know that the speed of sound (in air, near STP) is between 100 and 1000 m/s. Among other things, you know that if you compute an expected velocity for something of hundreds of meters per second, you need to think about taking aerodynamics and human safety into account that you wouldn't at lower velocities.

If you don't remember if is closer to 300 or to 400 m/s, sure, you can look that up. But knowing the order of magnitude of *every* potentially relevant phenomenon is fundamental to knowing which ones you can disregard.