I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?

Paying their executives exorbitant salaries

$6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre.

Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for.

In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that?

And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.

I've, in turn, heard much praise for how Estonia is doing it.

Scunthorpe problem seems to be showing in the latter case.

Indeed! :) I noticed it too and decided it was worth the risk. The name was too good to pass up.

I was involved in the 99,999th and the 100,000th one in my FQA days.

We were being onboarded, they were just for demo and were promptly deleted. No one cared about the Cool Numbers.

In my first job I raised JIRA-1337 and was pretty chuffed with myself, being on a team of young, nerdy gamer type folk. My manager not so much, they wanted to raise it (for a meme?) but I was doing actual work rather than watching numbers go up so that was quite satisfying when it was a genuine defect.

Don't they any way?

And a proof by "counting something":

1 + 2 + ... + n = n(n+1)/2

2 divides n(n+1), n(n+1) = 2m

7 * n^3 + n =

2*(3*n^3 + n) + n^3 - n =

2*(3*n^3 + n) + n(n+1)(n-1) =

2*(3*n^3 + n + m(n-1))

I'm trying to have fun continuing this with the reals, and I'm feeling dizzy.

Remember that "almost all" of the Reals are unrepresentable using finite sequences of symbols, since the latter are "only" countably infinite. The next logical step is probably the Radicals (i.e. nth roots, or fractional powers).

I know that nested radicals can't always be un-nested, so I don't think larger sets (like the Algebraic numbers) can be reduced to a unique normal form. That makes comparing them for equality harder, since we can't just compare them syntactically. For large sets like the Computable numbers, many of their operations become undecidable. For example, say we represent Computable numbers as functions from N -> Q, where calling such a function with argument x will return a rational approximation with error smaller than 1/x. We can write an addition function for these numbers (which, given some precision argument, calls the two summand functions with ever-smaller arguments until they're within the requested bound), but we can't write an equality function or even a comparison function, since we don't know when to "give up" comparing numbers like 0.000... == 0.000....

FYI I'm currently playing around with numerical representations at http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2024-11-03-rationalising_deno...

Headlines Register Prone To Garden Path Sentences

Congrats on finding time! Maybe this will push me to get back to my nib stash, ha.

Got any experience with adapting fountain pen inks for calligraphy?

Not really. I used Pilot Parallel pens exclusively for doing this piece, so I avoided most of the nib problems (and experience) myself.

The East/West names for the branches mean "eastern branch/western branch", they both still are pretty much N/S-bound