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I think I have some sort of intuition why all the probabilities are the same.

Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the starting position. At some point, the ladybug will be guaranteed to appear either to the left of you or to the right of you for the first time, and this cannot happen as the second-to-last step, because then the ladybug would have had to have visited both of your neighbors. At this point, for your vertex to be the one last visited, the ladybug would have to turn around and loop all the way around the circle to your other neighbor. But this means the previous trajectory of the ladybug and which vertices were visited before is irrelevant, as the ladybug will have to pass by them anyway. By symmetry, this situation is completely equivalent to being at the very start of the process on one of the vertices neighboring the starting position. Hence any randomly chosen vertex not next to the starting position has to have the same probability of being visited last as those two vertices. Hence all vertices have to have to same probability of being visited last.


I agree with this reasoning. I think this is more than intuition, it's pretty much a formal proof.

I had to read this a few times to get it, but I now that do it I like it.

In that case following Alice's input is still the best strategy, but you'll be worse off: you'd only be right if both tell the truth, at 80%80%=64%, or both lie, at 20%20%=4%, for a total of 68%.

In the general case of n intermediate occasional liars, the odds of the final result being accurate goes to 50% as n grows large, which makes sense, as it will have no correlation anymore to the initial input.


Thanks. I came up with this Python simulation that matches your 68%:

    import random

    def lying_flippers(num_flips=1_000_000):
        """

        - Bob flips a coin and tells Alice the result but lies 20% of the
          time.
        - Alice tells me Bob's result but also lies 20% of the time.
        - If I trust Bob, I know I'll be correct 80% of the time.
        - If I trust Alice, how often will I be correct (assuming I don't
          know Bob's result)?

        """

        # Invert flip 20% of the time.
        def maybe_flip_flip(flip: bool):
            if random.random() < 0.2:
                return not flip
            return flip

        def sum_correct(actual, altered):
            return sum(1 if a == b else 0 for (b, a) in zip(actual, altered))

        half_num_flips = num_flips // 2
        twenty_percent = int(num_flips * 0.2)

        actual_flips = [random.choice((True, False)) for _ in range(num_flips)]
        num_heads = sum(actual_flips)
        num_tails = num_flips - num_heads
        print(f"Heads = {num_heads} Tails = {num_tails}")

        bob_flips = [maybe_flip_flip(flip) for flip in actual_flips]
        alice_flips = [maybe_flip_flip(flip) for flip in bob_flips]

        bob_num_correct = sum_correct(actual_flips, bob_flips)
        bob_percent_correct = bob_num_correct / num_flips

        alice_num_correct = sum_correct(actual_flips, alice_flips)
        alice_percent_correct = alice_num_correct / num_flips

        # Trusting Bob should lead to being correct ~80% of the time.
        # This is just a verification of the model since we already know the answer.
        print(f"Trust Bob -> {bob_percent_correct:.1%}")

        # Trusting Alice should lead to being correct ?% of the time.
        # This model produces 68%.
        print(f"Trust Alice -> {alice_percent_correct:.1%}")

        print()

That's actually a message from the (Arch) initramfs[1], in case it can't mount the root filesystem or find an init to hand off to.

The kernel has a different error message: "No working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel."[2]

1: https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/blob/2dc9e12814aafcc... 2: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d358e5254674b70f34c84...


That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.

A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program


There are many more kinds of masters than just owners of slaves. The word "master bedroom" only appeared in 1920, it has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.


No, that's just one of those made-up lies people repeat often enough online to become "true" because it's the top search result and because it makes them feel good about continuing to use that term.

Here it is for example in an Australian newspaper ad from 1844: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31742822

> TO LET, Westmoeath Cottage and Garden, situated near to Cook's River, only three miles from the city. the cottage contains parlour and drawing room,and four large bed rooms ; detached kitchen, bakehouse, landry, storeroom, four stall stable and double coach-house, servants' rooms neatly fitted up, together with hay-loft and granary, school house and master's bed-room. A cottage containing four separate rooms for overseer and workmen ; two excellent wells of water on the premises, about six acres of garden neatly laid out and planted with the best vines and fruit trees, 'This property is fit for a family of the first respectability.

Or here it is in London-based The Examiner from 1845: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/The_Exam... (page 523, middle row, a couple of lines below the "Police" headline)

I'm sure I could find more examples, but I think two will sufface.


You couldn't own slaves in London in 1845, and in any case the name derives from the "Master of the household", so if you want to be mad about it, you should call it sexist, not racist. Or you could just be chill, stretch the meaning a bit and say the couple together are the masters of the household. But, now I'm curious: Where do you draw the line? You don't like git master branches and master bedrooms, but what about other uses? You can have a master key, master record, master a skill, create a masterwork, be a master to an apprentice, join the toastmasters, be a master of ceremonies at a formal event, you can dress up for comic con as Master Yoda, Master Chief, or Dumbledore (the Headmaster of Hogwarts), you can be a Master Chief in the US Navy, be the dungeon master for a game of D&D, get a Masters' Degree and so on. Which of these things are in your opinion bad and should be renamed?


This is very much like asking why are you focused on fixing one bug at a time in your software when you can fix every reported bug simultaneously?

I don't know man, maybe it's because fixing this one completely inconsequential bug faces so much backlash for no particular reason other than "change bad"?

And well done with using an example from a book series where the only Asian character is named Cho Chang and where there are elves with long noses in charge of the "central bank". That really works in your favour, you totally owned me [pun intended] with that one!


Good job finding something to complain about in one of the 13 examples I listed. This unassailable refutation utterly destroys my whole argument :(


> A footman in his lordship's service stated he went into his master's bedroom [...]

isn't an example of the phrase "master bedroom".

I am also skeptical of "school house and master's bedroom". The main cottage has "four large bed rooms". Why would the "master bedroom", if it is meant to be read as it is today, be listed after the list of detached outbuildings?


Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.

Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.


+1 on the train, mobile internet in the train is really bad. I kinda get it because you're in a faraday cage, moving between cells quickly, and frequently far outside of inhabited areas but still.

I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.


But in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?


In Newtonian gravity, the relation between the orbital period T and the semimajor axis a of the orbital ellipse is a^3 / T^2 = GM / 4π^2, where M is the reduced mass of the system (in this case, with 99% of the mass being in one of the two black holes, it's simply the mass of the heavier one).

Plugging 12 years and 18e9 solar masses gives about 2e12 kilometers, or roughly a fifth of a lightyear. This also means the smaller black hole is zipping around the bigger one at around 6% of the speed of light, which is low enough that the Newtonian approximation is probably reasonable accurate (at least to give a rough idea of how large the distances must be).


I sort of understand the reasoning on why Arxiv prefers tex to pdf[1], even though I feel it's a bit much to make it mandatory to submit the original tex file if they detect a submitted pdf was produced from one. But I've never understood what the added value is in hosting the source publicly.

Though I have to admit, when I was still in academia, whenever I saw a beautiful figure or formatting in a preprint, I'd often try to take some inspiration from the source for my own work, occasionally learning a new neat trick or package.

1: https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html


A huge value in having authors upload the original source, is it divorces the content from the presentation (mostly). That the original sources were available was sufficient for a large majority of the corpus to be automatically rendered into HTML for easier reading on many devices: https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html. I don't think it would have been as simple if they had to convert PDFs.


I understand there are API limitations, but isn't 15 minutes a lot for an object that orbits around the entire Earth in 90 minutes? On average you're going to be off by about a twelfth of the circumference of the Earth, or roughly the distance between Lisbon and Istanbul


Yes. As I say in the post, you shouldn't use this for docking operations.

If you know of a DNS update which allows for per-minute updates for free, I'll happily move to it.


> As I say in the post, you shouldn't use this for docking operations

Remember people, DNS stands for "Definitely Not for Space-docking"


or "Docking Not Supported"


> If you know of a DNS update which allows for per-minute updates for free, I'll happily move to it.

Why not setup your own name server?


This is the correct way - dynamic DNS servers frequently have very low TTLs set.

Serving DNS yourself is such an incredibly small bandwidth impact - most of the packets are in the 10's to 100's of bytes - and authoritative DNS servers do not do a lot of processing, just send back RR's from zones which are read at boot time, or updated in an in-memory database.


I couldn't be bothered to set up a DNS server for such an ephemeral joke.

But I would love to read your blog post about setting one up and what you learned.


mailinabox.email. Just use the DNS part and not worry about mx if you want something fairly simple


Coredns is so simple to configure and is a barebones container deployment.


Cool! Please set it up and write a blog post about it.

I'm not being snarky. I've never set up something like that and I'm sure lots of people would be happy to ready about it.


hi, i haven’t made a video but i have some stuff set up for it:

https://youtu.be/AJ2Q12vYojY https://youtu.be/GoPWuJR6Npc

and i host https://dnsroleplay.club which lets you answer real people’s dns requests, there should be links to the github for how it’s done


Unless you send any reply that is significantly largest than the request, like this one, and then you can be exploited to DDoS someone else via an amplification attack. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-amplification-d...


zdw mentioned an "authoritative" server, i.e. a content DNS server. CloudFlare is not talking about content DNS servers there. It cannot decide from paragraph to paragraph what it is calling the DNS servers that it is talking about, but it is talking about proxy DNS servers, that respond with the actual grunt work of query resolution done.

People like me have been recommending not running public proxy DNS servers for the entirety of the 21st century thus far, and the world has taken some notice, although more work is required, world!

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/proxy-server-ip-addresses.html

In any case, ANY queries do not work nearly as well for amplification attacks as they used to. Many people have read RFC 8482. I, for example, changed all of the DNS servers in djbwares to respond to ANY queries per RFC 8482 back in March 2019.

The task at hand in this discussion only involves running a content DNS server, serving LOC records from some file/database or other.


CF does say "dns resolvers" right in the lead


> As I say in the post, you shouldn't use this for docking operations.

Brilliant. :-D


You totally could use it for docking. A real ISS docking manoeuvre takes several hours. Orbits are very predictable and I'm quite confident that the error you'd get projecting your orbit 15min into the future would be good enough to get within close radar range for the final approach. In fact you probably could do it, even if your spavecraft doesnt have DNS at all, and you have to do the DNS resolve from a ground laptop before you board it. Soyez can dock within 3 hours of lauch. Orbits are very predictable in this timeframe.


If there's no timestamp, all you know is a Lat/Long that was accurate sometime in the last 15 minutes (or more, "best effort basis"). But you don't know when, and you don't know the altitude. That's gonna make using that information for docking...difficult.


I shall make the suggestion to NASA that they start using this ;-)


Sure they're predictable, but since you don't get the exact timestamp for those expired coordinates, it's still useless.

Oh, and accuracy is shit anyway (altitude is rounded to 10m)


It’s quite easy to run your own DNS server — I've found it a worthwhile exercise. Of course, you’ll need a server to run it on.


> If you know of a DNS update which allows for per-minute updates for free, I'll happily move to it.

Does Cloudflare not allow this?


I'd say the API can take up to half a minute to propagate, so API updates every minute is running up against their own performance. If you're a free customer, they may block you after a while, but first they'd have to notice you, and I doubt one update per minute would bother them.


Cloudflare does this with an API. If you have any money, I'd suggest dnsimple.com instead.


At orbital speed of ~7.66 km/s, the ISS travels approximately 6,900 km during a 15-minute interval, which is indeed significant for precise location tracking.


Perhaps that's meant to be 50GB (and that still seems like a serious underestimation)? Just the Bible is already 5MB.


English Wikipedia without media alone is ~24 GB compressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia


I don't see how the size of Wikipedia has any bearing on the 50MB figure given for pre-20th century literature by the parent.


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