that’s entirely on brand for lemmy.ml in my opinion. hopefully that kind of behavior is less prevalent in other instances, but it’s still incredibly annoying that it happens anywhere.

this would also be society if counterclockwise and clockwise were swapped. it’s the universal way to talk about 2d rotations but pretty much nothing (except a clock) ends up turning clockwise. it didn’t have to be this way

the person that you’re replying to said something that’s true about the USA. they didn’t say anything about other countries.

for another example, i can say “if you’re in the USA, then the current year is 2024” and that statement will be true. it is also true in every other country (for the moment), but that’s besides the point.

language!

damn i wish my eyes did that

i think it’s mainly people being cranky and set in their ways. they got used to working around all the footguns/bad design decisions of the C/C++ specifications and really don’t want to feel like it was all for nothing. they’re comfortable with C/C++, and rust is new and uncomfortable. i think for some people, being a C/C++ developer is also a big part of their identity, and it might be uncomfortable to let that go.

i also think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing: when a new way of doing things emerges, many of the people who grew up doing it the old way get upset about it and refuse to accept that the new way might be an improvement.

crazy to think that guy has been on that boat for over 100 years

“damaged by gunfire” is a weird way to frame it. it puts a bit too much emphasis on the property damage side of things and not enough on the terrorism side of things.

what a beautiful language

what if the M1 doesn’t have a touch screen though

it’s floor 5 from monday to wednesday, and floor 2 from thursday to sunday

god i hope so

i wonder why people haven’t made a language that starts indexing at 2 yet. maybe some day

i wish the people making buildings around here knew that. some start at floor 3, others at 5. some start at 0. others at 2. every building has its own story. you need to understand the building before you can understand your position in it.

do you also have minced tables there?

he’s in a better place now

another chicken and egg problem

yeah it sucks

people can’t be in two places at once

the name seems to be an unfortunate choice that stems from their historical usage as “a means to an end”. i.e, they were first used as part of a method to find some solutions to cubic equations. this method would require algebraic manipulations of complex numbers, but the ultimate goal was to discover a real root. the complex roots would be discarded once a real root was found (if it existed).

the wikipedia article attributes the name to Descartes:

… sometimes only imaginary, that is one can imagine as many as I said in each equation, but sometimes there exists no quantity that matches that which we imagine.

which i think helps to highlight how skeptical the people at that time were about the existence of the “imaginary” numbers.

source: memories of my first complex analysis class, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History

i’d strongly recommend reading the history section of that wikipedia page to anyone interested in the topic, it has some pretty fun history