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Most results get celebrated. I am interested in the opposite: theorems whose truth or falsity was a letdown, where the mathematical community had been hoping for the other answer. I do not mean results that were merely…
I work on two Macs and keep a working file on the Desktop, which is synced through the cloud service. Changes do propagate, but sometimes with a long delay: long enough that I have edited the stale version on the second…
Writing and code review mostly, working from home, no hard interruptions to blame. Short timers make me stop exactly when it has finally started working, and long ones make starting feel enormous so I do not start at…
Southwestern Ontario, about 1,800 sq ft, gas furnace from 2009 plus a fifteen year old AC that is clearly on borrowed time. Since I need to replace the AC anyway, a cold climate heat pump ought to be the obvious swap,…
I mistyped my password several times on a console login and the account is now locked, with a message saying it is locked due to failed attempts. I still have root access to the machine through another route, so I am…
I live essentially at sea level and I am planning a trip where the option exists to drive up a mountain of around 2700 metres in one day and walk from there. Everything I read about acclimatisation is aimed at much…
Two hundred emails over three weeks, hand picked, personalised first line, sent from my own domain with a real signature. First hundred got eleven replies, four of which turned into calls. Then I got efficient and added…
About 900 visits a month. The dashboard says roughly 70% direct or none, then a long tail of referrers that add up to nothing. Three things are running: a monthly email, posts in two communities, and a docs page that…
Stock and similar liquids often come in cartons with a screw cap over a foil seal. Twisting the cap the first time breaks the foil, and there is no way to take the cap off without breaking it. That means the cap alone…
Crested gecko, enclosure already bought, so I am pricing drainage layer, substrate, leaf litter, plants, cleanup crew and a light. Every guide I read lands near 150 and my basket sits at just over 300 without a single…
Ireland, €318,000 outstanding, fixed at 3.55% until 2030, and my lender allows overpayments up to 10% of the balance a year without penalty while I am fixed. I have €26,000 sitting in savings earning far less than the…
I drink coffee from several sources brewed at home, from cafés, occasionally from a can: and I have no idea how they compare in caffeine. Published figures are broad ranges and clearly do not account for what I actually…
Rural edge of town, our septic is twelve years old, tank was pumped last year and looked healthy, field has never backed up. The town is running a main past the property and hookup plus abandonment of the old tank is…
Travelling alone, my main cost is always the room. A hotel in a large city runs well over a hundred a night, and I am paying for a double bed, a desk and a bathroom I barely use, because I am out all day and asleep the…
About forty hours of lessons, manoeuvres are fine, roundabouts turn me into a passenger. I have one attempt before a job start date that requires me to drive, so a retest in eight weeks would be a genuine problem. I am…
Broad shoulders, strictly on my side, and I wake up two or three times a night with a dead arm and a stiff neck. Budget around £70. I have been through a memory foam contour pillow that was too tall, a down one that…
Bought my first cast iron six weeks ago, seasoned it three times before first use, and I've cooked in it maybe four nights a week since. Steak and vegetables are fine. Eggs still weld themselves to the surface every…
Reading around for a standard response shape, the recurring recommendation is an envelope containing a boolean success field, then either data or an error object. This seems redundant. HTTP already carries that…
A well known evasion technique is to detect a virtual or analysis environment and stay dormant, so that researchers see nothing. Some families do this quite thoroughly. The obvious thought is that this could be turned…
Talking to an engineer from a different background about a program I had written, I referred to it as code. He said he did not know what code meant, and that the correct word was algorithm. I think I know roughly what…
Support agent over our own documentation. One user question something about the refund window and the loop made 38 calls to before hitting and giving up with an apology. Trace is attached. Nine of the calls are byte…
400 tests, nine minutes for the whole PR check including build and typecheck. Right now everything is mocked, including our own Postgres layer, which I know is silly and which I inherited. Options: keep mocking, or spin…
Ten days in Portugal, small hatchback, and the counter upsell costs roughly as much as the car. My card claims rental collision cover but I honestly cannot tell from the benefits PDF whether it's primary or secondary,…
I bought shares in a single company shortly after it listed. It is now down about a quarter. I am fortunate enough not to need the money, so this is not a crisis. What I want is to understand what I did wrong, in…
Renamed to in the schema file, generated, applied to staging in the deploy script. The SQL was a DROP COLUMN followed by an ADD COLUMN. 41,802 rows of names are now NULL and the migration exited 0 with no warning.…
