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  • 8 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
Cake day: April 4th, 2026
  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Banana for scale
    3·
    3 hours ago

    In the olden days sciencey types and engineers kept fact books listing such relations. They had a specific name that escapes me.

    Likely a “CRC”: CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, which is probably the same book as the pre-calculated mathematical operations you mentioned. It has a lot of good mathematical stuff in it such as basic formulas, trig functions, log tables, integral and differential functions, and formulas up through around Fourier analysis.

    If we were doing that thought exercise where you can take a “go bag” back in time to build science up more quickly, a CRC and a slide rule would probably be in mine. I’d probably throw in a prism and as compact of a microscope that uses a mirror as a light source as I could get away with; both for showing small stuff living in water and for showing what couldn’t be manufactured yet (depending on when I went back). I wouldn’t waste space in the bag for anything dealing with the imperial system.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwroteEnglish
    2·
    21 hours ago

    We could put a lot of nicer groceries up front and hope nobody looks deeper!

    But then what happens if someone notices we’re selling a lot of fridges? They could buy insurance on the price of our fridges (options), and that wouldn’t be good because we know the price is going down, that’s why we’re selling them (duh). So we’ll have to sneak all these things out the door and hope nobody looks or notices until we’ve got them all sold.

    I guess that’s kind of a rough metaphor, but that stuff all still goes on. The math that tells you when to sell the fridge is where all the real value is.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwroteEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Like the article says, their internal risk management models are telling them to get the risk off their books.

    Taking on the debt in the first place is like agreeing to store a gallon of milk in a fridge for an undetermined amount of time. The milk is going to go bad, and when it does the jug (or bag) might explode forcing a cleanout of the fridge, throwing out other things in the fridge, and maybe replacing the fridge altogether if the milk leaked down into a lot of crevices. Everyone knows the milk will go bad, but the big banks will know how old the fridge is, what coolant it uses, how old the compressor is, how many times a day the fridge has been opened, the average time it stays open, the dairy the cow who produced the milk, and the name of the cow if they can get it. The milk is going bad quicker than expected, and they’re finding out they don’t want to be the ones to guess when the jug will explode, and they’re also finding out that nobody else wants to buy the jug.

    Oracle pulling a “god did it” was probably a part of this, but nobody involved is going to give a real answer.