Weekend Plans Post: Thinkin’ ’bout Numbers
We had an emergency meeting today, due to a massive number of critical problems that the scanner picked up.
Apparently, the recent batch of updates resulted in a *HUGE* patch of red on the report and we had to go in and have a meeting about who dropped the ball and how.
Well, first, we hammered out exactly what was going on.
(Numbers are made up for privacy reasons, you know how it is.)
The errors all read more or less the same thing: “YOUR KERNEL IS OUTDATED! YOU NEED TO BE RUNNING A KERNEL NEWER THAN 9.6!”
And we quickly checked uname -r and hammered out that, yes, indeed… we were running 9.25.
And everybody in the room immediately sighed. Wait, what the heck is going on?
And we brainstormed for a minute or two and I remembered a conversation that I had with a buddy about a fun way to test AI’s thinking processes is to ask it “Is 9.9 a bigger number than 9.11?”
9.11 is bigger than 9.9. pic.twitter.com/zBrdLGAoH2
— Riley Goodside (@goodside) July 15, 2024
This caused a fun little argument over the whole number thing and how people thought about numbers versus how computers thought about them and… well, the argument flashed to mind and I yelled “THIS IS THE AI THING!” and drew the problem on the whiteboard and explained that our definitions were making the inverse mistake.
9.25 is a smaller number than 9.6.
Therefore our kernel was outdated.
We digressed into the whole discussion of what numbers are, really, when you think about them and talked about how we were going to use new scanner definitions on Monday when this, surely, will be cleaned up.
And it was so nice to click and see the exact mistake that the scanner definitions made.
We were so used to having semantic problems that it was refreshing and confusing to see a syntax problem.
Anyway. Maribou gets home tomorrow and the weekend will be spent having Maribou back again. A trip to the grocery store to restock her staples, a trip to Costco to make sure that everything else is stocked up… and, of course, getting the kitties reacclimated to The Nice One being home again.
It’ll be good to get back to normal.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Package Inspector”. Photo taken by the author.)
this weekend is apparently Recover From Shingles Shot 2 weekend. (Today is my “mid fall break day,” a sop given since we don’t really get any of the Federal holidays, and to help balance with spring break in spring semester.) So I got the shot late in the day yesterday.
Got up this morning and first was like “well,, maybe I’d be OK to go in and catch up on grading” but then I was like “oh hey I need to sit down for ten minutes before I think about getting dressed.’ And now I have chills, which, yeah, our nights get cold now and I don’t set the furnace very high, but…yeah.
hoping there’s a good old movie on TCM or something.Report
Yeah, the shingles shots were something else.
I found myself debating stuff like “how badly do you want to toast the bagel? Maybe you can just put cream cheese on it and eat it untoasted” the day after the 2nd one.
Good luck!Report
Shingles #2 kicked me in the butt! I had to knock off work after just a few hours. It didn’t last beyond that day for me, though. Hope it’s the same for you.Report
If I had a dollar for every time an ISSO needed training from an SA on how to do their job… 🙂 🙂Report
Not sure what my plans are. Tomorrow is supposed to be my boardgame meetup, but I had a vitreous detachment, and the vision in my right eye is still fished up, so I’m not sure if I really want to go. I guess I will see how I feel in the morning.
If I don’t go to the meetup, I’ll probably take it easy at the house. Maybe watch some movies and play some video games. Sunday, I get my COVID vaccine. My wife got hers a couple weeks ago, and she suffered no ill effects, so hopefully it will go smoothly. In the past, I was usually pretty wiped out for about 24 hours.Report
You know, I would assume that the order of release would be 9.2.5, then 9.6, then 9.25
Is that not what happened?
Is that not how kernel releases are ordered? That would have messed *me* up, not just a pattern matcher.Report
It goes 9.1, 9.2, 9.3… and so on. Once you hit 9.10, you’re on iteration number 10.
There are folks who look at 9.1 and 9.10 and, not digging into “significant numbers” issues, see the same number. Others look and see that 9.10 is larger, by 9, than 9.1.
I wouldn’t even say “this is a mistake!” as much as “we’re not talking about the same thing!”Report
A side benefit of the standard Major.Minor.Patch convention is that the second decimal point prevents the whole value from being treated as numeric.Report
Game patch logic infiltrating business patch logic.Report
I really don’t get it. Was I the only person that learned about significant digits in high school and didn’t forget it?
It took me a while to understand the story because to me, 9.6 IS ALWAYS bigger than 9.25, or 9.259999999999999 for that matterReport
Plus, in FORTRAN, which is the only computer language I know ( I’m old) there’s no possibility that the machine would ever answer 9.25>9.6? with anything but a HELL NO!!!!!!!!Report
One of the things I had to learn recently was that, in some computer languages, what we think of as a number is really just a string.
So, like, imagine saying “hot + dog = hotdog”. Right? That makes sense.
In that perspective, “1+1=11” is the expected output.
And if you see letters as similarly incrementable, something like abc would be followed by abd and then abe rather than, as a human might guess, abcd.
They’re just symbols, man.Report
Gentlemen – Hello, it’s been a while. After the last attempt on Trump’s life, I’ve lost a lot of faith in how we (both big we and OT we) are talking about politics. I don’t think we’re succeeding at our mission. I do think there’s some genuine good-faith pursuit of truth here, and to those who are involved in it, I wish you well. I wish all y’all well.
That out of the way, I saw this thread, and I just wanted to pass along a relevant-to-this-topic and memeable challenge: try to list the months in alphabetical order. Like, right now, no prep or writing them down, first try.Report
Things should get better after the election.
There are a lot of J’s.Report
April, August, December, Eleven, February and so on.Report
Dot-decimal notation for indicating structure or ordering has been around for a long time. ISO Standard 2145 (1978) covers dot-decimal notation for use in document subdivisions. It’s been used to identify tables and figures and such for pretty much as far back as I can remember, eg “Figure 2.6”. Are there people who think figure 9.25 comes before figure 9.6?
It gets used in unusual places. The sequence 88.5.3.2 is used in some orthopedic trauma situations to indicate a break in the little toe, outermost bone, in the center.Report
Yeah, your assumption is correct. It appears to me that either the scanning software fished it up or the people interpreting the results did.Report
We’re doing woods-work this weekend getting one of our older hunting spots opened up with better sight lines and cutting back as many honeysuckle bushes and tree of heaven as we possibly can without a skid steer. Now I want a skid steer again; skid steer concupiscence is never far from the heart.Report