I see students obsess every day over their SAT scores, which to some is a measure of individual intelligence. But what SAT score would a pair of students working together on a single test get? Or a dozen students working together? Would it be higher or lower? What sort of strategies would maximize their ability to collaborate? What would be the effect of giving/removing access to a calculator on a student's score? Access to scratch paper? Access to textbooks? Access to a dictionary? Access to unlimited time?

If we want to claim to understand intelligence, these are the sort of questions we should be able to answer. Can we?

> From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased

We want our languages to make it easy to write correct programs. And we want our languages to make it hard to write incorrect programs. And trying to have both at once is very difficult.

I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.

https://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~ucoluk/yazin/William_and_Mary...

What this article says: *The median apartment rent in Austin has dropped X% over the past 5 years*

What this article does not say: *Apartments in Austin cost X% less to rent now than they did 5 years ago*

It's completely possible for the cost of the average apartment in a city to go down, while the cost of existing apartments increases. How does this happen? The enshittification of rentals. Units get smaller (apartments in Austin are shrinking), they get built near highways (air pollution), they lose amenities like parking, they pop up places where they previously weren't allowed (smaller ADUs, basement units, see article), they get subdivided (landlord throws up a wall and turns a large 1br into a cramped 2br).

If supply and demand were really working the way its heralds claim, then we'd see the price of existing units going down. This article offers no evidence that this is happening. I don't believe for a minute that it is.

Instead, it's the same story as always: your rents will keep going up. You can move somewhere cheaper and shittier if you want. The people who profit will congratulate themselves while decrying the thing they actually fear: rent control.

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/real-estate/2025/05...

IEEE floats should be a base on which more reasonable math semantics are built. Saying that Python should return NaN or inf instead of throwing an error is like saying that Python should return a random value from memory or segfault when reading an out-of-bounds list index.

What should sorted([3, nan, 2, 4, 1]) give you in Python?

A) [1, 2, 3, 4, nan] is an good option

B) [nan, 1, 2, 3, 4] is an good option

C) An error is an good option

D) [3, nan, 1, 2, 4] is a silly, bad option. It's definitely not what you want, and it's quiet enough to slip by unnoticed. This is what you get when Nan != NaN

NaN == NaN is wrong. NaN != NaN is wrong, unintuitive, and breaks the rest of your code. If you want to signal that an operation is invalid, then throw an error. The silently nonsensical semantics of NaN are the worst possible response

If NaNs were meant to represent unknown quantities, then they would return false for all comparisons. But NaN != NaN is true. Assuming that two unknowns are always different is just as incorrect as assuming that they're always the same.

I'd also push back on the idea that this behavior makes sense. In my experience it's a consistent source of confusion for anyone learning to program. It's one of the clearest violations of the principle of least astonishment in programming language design.

As others have noted, it makes conscientious languages like Rust do all sorts of gymnastics to accommodate. It's a weird edge case, and imo a design mistake. "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

Also, I think high level languages should avoid exposing programmers to NaN whenever possible. Python gets this right: 0/0 should be an error, not a NaN.

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.