The number pi has an evil twin

(mathstodon.xyz)

471 points | by pkaeding a day ago ago

185 comments

  • dclaw 13 hours ago

    This discussion helped me discover my new favorite map. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peirce_Quincuncial_Projec...

    • thih9 an hour ago

      More projections in a friendly pdf: “An Album of Map Projections”[1], the one above is on page 190.

      For a more festive example see Berghaus star projection on page 156.

      [1]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1453/report.pdf (1989)

    • _steady 8 hours ago

      oh wow that's a lot like a maximally extended penrose diagram

  • soneca 18 hours ago

    > ” This ∞-shaped curve is called a 'leminscate', and ϖ is called the 'lemniscate constant'. I'll show you the leminiscate in my next post.”

    This got me confused, so I went to check. Apparently ”lemniscate” is the correct spelling.

    • johncarlosbaez 13 hours ago

      Fixed - thanks.

      • thechao 6 hours ago

        Hey, John — Matt Parker mentioned in one of his ellipse videos the fact that every elliptical ratio has its own pi-like constant. He just quickly rattles the fact off, but never delves into it. Do you know of any research into trying to characterize the family of pi? I mean, beyond its evil cousins.

  • GistNoesis a day ago

    And to protect you from it, you can use the following lucky clover charm (polar plot r=cos(2theta) ): https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+plot+r%3Dcos%282theta%... whose perimeter can also define a constant 4*E(-3) ~ 4 * 2.4221

    https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+r%3Dcos%282theta%2...

  • divbzero a day ago

    π is derived from the circle, which is defined by distance from a single point.

    ϖ is derived from the lemniscate of Bernoulli, which is defined by distances from two points.

    Is there an analogous constant that is derived from a shape defined by distances from three points?

    • dahart 12 hours ago

      Yes, definitely. Pi is just the perimeter of the circle, and varpi is the perimeter of the lemniscate. If you use three points, you get three tear-drops, and you can compute the perimeter of that.

      Let’s call it a trilemniscate. ;)

      Here’s a 3d plot of it. If you rotate to view it from +Z downward, then you’ll see the trilemniscate, which is where the volume intersects with the XY plane. Note I subtracted 1 from the product in order to visualize the plane intersection. (And you can turn off the 3 points version and turn on the 2 points version to compare.)

      https://www.desmos.com/3d/dl9v2vqbqb

      One interesting note about 2 points vs 3 points. The area inside the lemniscate and trilemniscate is the same! (True for more points, as long as they’re evenly space on a circle). The perimeter, of course, goes to infinity as you add more points.

    • VHRanger 14 hours ago

      I mean the concept of distance from 3 points introduces a mess of metrics or even measure theory.

      2 points always have a shortest path between each other, so the constant is about this fact. For 3 points you have the whole universe of possible triangle shapes to contend with.

      • vitus 13 hours ago

        Shortest path between two points still depends on your metric.

        For instance, if you're constrained to travel along the surface of Earth, your shortest path is going to travel along a great circle, rather than pass through the interior of the sphere.

        That said, you could, for instance, pick the three vertices of an equilateral triangle (using the Euclidean distance as your metric of choice, as we do in order to derive the lemniscate and the circle), and again deal with the product of the distances from each vertex.

        You again start with small circles around each vertex, which eventually expand to a single looping curve, and then into ovals encircling the entire triangle.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini_oval#Generalizations

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_lemniscate#Erd%C5%9...

      • jovial_cavalier 14 hours ago

        It's easy to generalize this to more points.

        https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fo7tqlfjgo

    • clort 21 hours ago

      it sounds like you are suggesting it might be turtles all the way down?

  • cl3misch 17 hours ago

    > I'm not enough of a cultural relativist to believe there's a civilization that cares more about the shape ∞ than the shape ◯.

    Maybe these are "logarithmic" beings, as opposed to us "linear" beings? The lemniscate is based on geometric mean, which is basically multiplicative mean and/or mean in log-space -- as opposed to the additive mean in linear space.

    If we assume we are linear beings good at intuitive addition but somewhat bad at intuitive multiplication, there could exist beings which live in log-space and whose minds are based on multiplication. Their circle would be the lemniscate.

    • tibbetts 17 hours ago

      Humans are actually intuitively log scale thinkers. That is, humans without the kind of early arithmetic training that Westerners get will think more in terms of ratios than differences. There are theories it is more evolutionarily adaptive.

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/

      • jcelerier 17 hours ago

        Isn't it also related to our physical perception? Both hearing and vision at least have somewhat logarithmic properties (e.g. response to point-source brightness, and hearing frequency response)

      • dustingetz 8 hours ago

        fibonacci retrace shows up in liquid markets a lot

    • nayuki 10 hours ago

      Humans have quite a few logarithmic responses: Brightness of light, loudness of sound, musical octaves and relative pitch.

  • dxbydt 12 hours ago

    aside: As the Professor points out, the ratio of pi to its evil twin is ~1.198, the arithmetic-geometric mean of sqrt(2) and 1. The geometric part involves a square root, and square roots are expensive. So I was like, well, if the AM converges to GM, then due to AM-GM-HM inequality, it must converge to the harmonic mean as well. And the HM does not need an expensive square root!

    https://imgur.com/a/UkxkPzW

    Its quite wild that the AM GM convergence is almost immediate - in just 2 steps, whereas to get a decent convergence for the Gauss's constant via HM, you need like 15 steps.You can dispense with expensive operators like square root but you end up paying for it with numerous iterations.

    • Chinjut 6 hours ago

      The c value you compute depends on computing the b value, though. It's not a recursion carried out in a way which avoids square roots. It's just carrying out the same AM-GM sequence computation, and then taking a certain weighted harmonic mean over that sequence, which converges just because that original sequence converges anyway.

      Note that the arithmetic-harmonic mean I think you were going for is just the geometric mean (not the arithmetic-geometric mean, just the geometric mean simpliciter; see https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Arithmetic-HarmonicMean.html).

  • TaurenHunter 9 hours ago

    Other notable constants and where they show up:

    Euler–Mascheroni Constant (integrals and sums involving the harmonic series, Gamma functions)

    Catalan’s Constant (certain trigonometric series, lattice Green’s function)

    Feigenbaum Constants (logistic map, chaos in dynamical systems)

    Khinchin’s Constant (partial quotients in simple continued fractions)

    Glaisher–Kinkelin Constant (asymptotic expansions of the Barnes G-function, combinatorial limits and certain product expansions)

    Ramanujan’s Constant (complex multiplication of elliptic curves)

    Omega Constant (Omega times e to the power of Omega = 1, Lambert W function, x^x^x^... = 2)

    • rak1507 6 hours ago

      What do you mean by x^x^x^... = 2? Isn't the solution to that sqrt(2)?

    • 867-5309 5 hours ago

      please explain how Ramanujan’s Constant is relevant to operations on elliptic curves

    • ctrlrsf 8 hours ago

      How do you even know this?

  • yukioikeda a day ago

    It seems obvious that these are not twins. We can only say that π and ϖ are two among the infinite multitude of siblings ϖₙ.

  • slippy 21 hours ago

    Hmm. Why only 2? Why not 3 points? Can you find an interesting curve produced by a constant product of distances from N points? Maybe even in higher dimensions, for 1 point, you have a sphere. What is the shape for 2 points? Is it more like an hourglass-like double droplet?

    • amelius 21 hours ago

      There is a generalization:

      > Back before Twitter became a Nazi bar, I issued a challenge there: find a whole series of numbers like pi, each with its own bunch of formulas. @duetosymmetry took me up on this and invented the numbers ϖₙ: (...)

      • plank 16 hours ago

        Yes. But the question remains: is there a geometrical analogue?

  • mst 19 hours ago

    Having that shape become more important to a civilisation than the circle because it has something to do with the geometry of hyperspace seems like it could be an interesting conceit for a sci-fi setting.

    • pavel_lishin 15 hours ago

      The Anvil of the Stars, by Greg Bear, featured a race of aliens whose mathematics weren't based on integers.

      • mst 9 hours ago

        This somehow reminds me of Egyptian mathematics where they refused to admit to the existence of any fraction with a numerator other than 1 (except for 2/3).

        Learning how to expand e.g. 3/7 into 1/n + 1/m + ... using their methods was a fascinating experience.

        I wouldn't want to suffer under such constraints day to day but it was one of the most memorable parts of the History of Mathematics course I took alongside what was other a mostly pure maths degree.

    • tibbetts 17 hours ago

      Sounds like a Greg Egan writing prompt.

      • dmd 17 hours ago

        Baez and Egan are close friends, so don’t be surprised if you see it pop up.

      • mst 9 hours ago

        Egan would probably be my first thought of somebody who could take a concept like that and make something well worth reading out of it.

        Second thought would probably be Derek Künsken. (no claim he's necessarily the second best option but he's definitely the second author I've read recently enough to have the name of in brain cache to come to mind as "could almost certainly pull it off")

      • szundi 16 hours ago

        People just prompt themselves

    • TuringTest 15 hours ago

      Bob Shaw's Night Walk has something like that as a major plot point.

      It's not aliens but humans, and it's not an 8-loop geometry, but without spoiling it too much it's safe to say that discovering how hyperspace works is the central concept guiding the story.

      • mst 9 hours ago

        Kindle Edition: £2.99

        Sounds like at least £2.99's worth of fun to me from the blurb, so it's now queued up.

        I swear I'll get to it eventually.

        ... honest.

  • metaphor a day ago

    > This ∞-shaped curve is called a 'leminscate', and ϖ is called the 'lemniscate constant'. I'll show you the leminiscate in my next post.

    Two of these...do not belong?

    • bregma 18 hours ago

      Shakespeare often spelt the same word differently at different times. If it was good enough for Billy Shakespeare, it should be good enough for modern-day mathematicians, forsooth.

      • initramfs 12 hours ago

        I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare would spell the same wird dyfferntli as if heez noom is Sheikhspier een uh deefirind koontri.

      • somat 12 hours ago

        "It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word."

          -- Andrew Jackson
        
        Unfortunately Daniel Webster ruined that for the rest of us.
      • stogot 14 hours ago

        This might feed the “Shakespeare was not one person” theory

        • zdragnar 13 hours ago

          The first of Shakespeare plays predate the first published English documentary. It was uncommon for spellings to be inconsistent or change between writings to be easier for a particular audience (in this case, actors) to be able to read.

          • mckn1ght 10 hours ago

            I’m still making my way through it, but reading a history of shakespearean/elizabethan england, the first written publications of shakespeare’s plays that were accessible to the general public weren’t written by the man himself (if indeed he was singular).

            There were entire efforts put towards pirating the plays by writing them, mostly from memory. It’s believed that someone in the crowd creating a stenographic copy would’ve been noticed so this is a less likely explanation. The memorial effort likely involved both audience and actors. “Official” versions meant to direct the stage productions might have been smuggled out or lost and found.

            I haven’t gotten to the part yet that connects to the standard versions we have today. Some official versions were released to correct the record on bad pirated versions. Sometimes theaters would sell official versions to shore up funds.

            Maybe this would explain the multiple shakespeare theory as well as writing inconsistencies?

            • lupire 2 hours ago

              You wouldn't download Hamlet's pirate story!

          • drivers99 12 hours ago

            I guess you mean:

            first published English dictionary

            and

            It wasn't uncommon / It was common

            • zdragnar 11 hours ago

              Yes, I was rather tired and typing on my phone required more correcting of the autocorrect feature than I could manage.

    • adrian_b a day ago

      "Lemniscate" is the correct spelling. All the other variants are mistyped.

      • yard2010 a day ago

        It's quite funny imo that someday english people were like "forget about latin or german, greek is lit! Let's use greek"

        • msravi 13 hours ago

          Why stop at greek or arabic when you can go all the way to sanskrit?

          The words for sine and cosine derive from the sanskrit jiva (meaning bowstring, i.e., the chord of a circle)[1]. Sine and cosine were respectively jya and koti-jya, which got transcribed into arabic without the vowel (where it meant nothing). They then pronounced the vowel in the wrong place, calling it jeb (which meant pocket or fold in arabic)[2]. Then this wrong word got translated into latin as sinus (fold), and hence we have sine and cosine!

          1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jy%C4%81,_koti-jy%C4%81_and_...

          2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_and_cosine#Etymology

        • rsynnott 18 hours ago

          A healthy mixture was always preferred in maths and science. This is occasionally taken to extremes; the name reverse transcriptase, an enzyme used by retroviruses, is a combo of English, Latin and Greek!

          Arabic is also popular, particularly in maths.

          • flobosg 14 hours ago

            > Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device.

            ―C. P. Scott

          • xanderlewis 18 hours ago

            Is it? I can only think of (the very frequently noted) ‘algebra’ and ‘algorithm’.

            • rsynnott 17 hours ago

              Also ‘zero’, and ‘cipher’ (which, oddly, derive from the same word). And ‘average’. There are a few of them.

              • xanderlewis 5 hours ago

                Interesting. I'm not sure we can really call these arabic-derived, though. They do seem to ultimately trace back to fairly unrelated arabic words, but their first use in mathematics (much later) seems to have come in the form of a mixture of words from European languages. The two examples I gave seem to be more legitimately Arabic in origin.

              • dizhn 16 hours ago

                Not math but I just learned alkali is the word for "ash" in Arabic.

            • DiggyJohnson 10 hours ago

              As others have said, there are a few celestial terms that come to mind:

                - azimuth
                - zenith
                - nadir
              
              Also some chemistry terms, again just from top of brain, might be wrong:

                - alchemy
                - elixir
                - arsenic
                - alkali
              • xanderlewis 5 hours ago

                Nadir always seemed very obviously Arabic to me. Weirdly, I first encountered it in a book on category theory, and only after that did I start to hear it used in everyday English to mean the opposite of 'apex'.

              • pfdietz 3 hours ago

                Sofa!

            • dudeinjapan 14 hours ago

              And “alcohol”, frequently consumed at science and math conferences

              • Sharlin 12 hours ago

                "Alcohol" has a very interesting etymology, too.

            • ajmurmann 16 hours ago

              Dolphin, music (from muse), logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, pharmacy, angel, comedy, drama. The list of Greek loan words that are shared by many European languages goes on and on

              Edit: I think almost every word with "ph" in it is from Greek and "th" in languages other than English.

              • lolinder 13 hours ago

                They're asking about Arabic loanwords.

              • FredPret 13 hours ago

                If you add all Latin words with Greek origins, most European languages are really forms of Greek

            • nicwilson 18 hours ago

              azimuth is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head

          • jjtheblunt 13 hours ago

            The sheriff says "hold my beer".

        • ajmurmann 16 hours ago

          Don't most European languages use Landis loan words from both Latin and Greek? Both used to be taught in classical education.

        • laurent_du 21 hours ago

          What makes you think it was the English? I am pretty sure it comes from continental Europe.

        • cgio 19 hours ago

          Latin is lemniscus, so someday Latin people were like “let’s use Greek”

          • dmurray 17 hours ago

            Latin writers have been like "let's use Greek" at least since Virgil, so modern writers can be excused for getting their roots mixed up.

    • saghm a day ago

      It's so evil that it defies spelling

    • brookst a day ago

      Even the word has evil twins

    • dotancohen 21 hours ago

      I understand the confusion. Lemons smell good. The second root, on the other hand, far less pleasant.

    • Netcob 18 hours ago

      Not to be confused with the "lemonscape", a hallucinated world you enter when you've eaten too many lemons.

    • thaumasiotes a day ago
  • sapphicsnail a day ago

    If I saw ϖ in the wild I would have assumed it was an omega (ω) with a macron over it. Makes me wonder how many more varient Greek letters are out there.

  • divbzero a day ago

    The Fourier transform is composed of trigonometric sines and cosines.

    There must be an analogous transform composed of lemniscate sines and cosines?

    • ttoinou 20 hours ago

      You could try to make a transform based on a sum of lemniscates in the complex plane

  • efortis a day ago

    Infinity symbol with Lissajous curve:

    x = Asin(at + delta)

    y = Bsin(bt)

    https://ericfortis.github.io/lissajous/?preset=Infinity

    • jan_g 21 hours ago

      Interesting! I can see it in two ways: (1) as elongated U-shaped ellipsis that rotates sideways and (2) as bent lemniscate that rotates vertically.

  • ComputerGuru 12 hours ago

    The post mentions that ϖ is called “varpi”; I just wanted to add that this is actually short for “variant of pi”, also known as an “archaic form of pi” from old Greek writing.

    • flatline 11 hours ago

      I read it as “omega-bar.”

  • big-green-man a day ago

    You just blew my mind. I'm taking a dive on this.

  • mettamage 9 hours ago

    So are there an infinite amount of constants like this? In terms of pi, e and this number?

    Just wondering, there are an infinite number of shapes I suppose? But does that mean there is an infinite amount of constants?

    • dwaltrip 4 hours ago

      There are infinite integers [1]. So even if we just look at basic polygons — shapes formed by connecting some (integer) number of points with straight lines — we easily get infinite shapes.

      Math is crazy. The universe is crazy. Happy holidays!

      ———

      [1] At least, that’s what they tell us… :p

  • nthingtohide 21 hours ago

    Change pi to ϖ in this setup.

    2022 - Non-Euclidean Doom: What happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159… https://youtu.be/_ZSFRWJCUY4?t=406

    • seba_dos1 20 hours ago

      Such a promising yet disappointing talk.

  • nektro an hour ago

    how close is ϖ to e?

  • BearOso 14 hours ago

    I thought it might be e. e is often used to model unbounded growth, so it's chaotic, while pi is harmonic.

    Plus, evil starts with 'e', so why not.

    "Laugh with me Jocko!" "Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

    • anyfoo 13 hours ago

      Can’t have harmonics (i.e. harmonic oscillations, or any oscillations really) without e, though. sine and cosine are both sums of e, and if you look at the beauty of analytical sinusoid signals (which only have one component in the entire spectrum, lacking their negative frequency one) it’s just one exponential and nothing else.

  • initramfs 12 hours ago
  • babbledabbler 5 hours ago

    Woah it even has a w for wa-pi-rio.

  • sourcepluck 19 hours ago

    > This ∞-shaped curve is called a 'leminscate', and ϖ is called the 'lemniscate constant'. I'll show you the leminiscate in my next post.

    I think others have commented, but this three-way spelling certainly got a chuckle from me.

  • cluckindan 14 hours ago

    Side by side, there is a clear parallel to monopolar and bipolar fields. Is this found in any version of Maxwell’s equations?

  • AlecBG 21 hours ago

    The lemniscate really looks like a homoclinic orbit in a 2d dynamics problem

  • Morizero a day ago

    Is there an abstraction of a leminscate/consonant with 3+ center points?

  • avalys 10 hours ago

    I thought this was going to be about tau, which is not pi's evil twin, but rather, the One True Circle Constant.

    https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto

    • ssalka 9 hours ago

      upvote for tau, the one really running the show while pi gets the fame & fortune

  • candlemas 17 hours ago

    >On our planet, it was Bernoulli, Euler and Gauss who discovered this math.

    You don't say. Newton must have been sick that day.

  • whamlastxmas 8 hours ago

    Wish people wouldn’t inject weird social jabs into stuff like this

    • kolbe 8 hours ago

      Just like advertising--if they have earned my attention by saying things I want to read, then they have the right to dilute its quality with whatever else they want, up until it net doesn't interest me anymore. In this case, the jab is tiny and the quality content is bountiful.

  • layer8 14 hours ago

    Is there something like ThreadReaderApp for Mastodon?

  • aap_ 13 hours ago

    Wow, pomega is such a terrible name for it!

  • SubiculumCode a day ago

    Is there an evil twin to the set of prime numbers?

  • TomK32 21 hours ago

    Am I the only one who expected the evil twin to be 3 ?

    • incognito124 21 hours ago

      For some reason, I imagined a number where every digit of pi was transformed into a [9-digit] and that it has special properties. This one is more magical, though.

  • waldrews 10 hours ago

    Seems like a fine number, but I bet there's quite a few more irrational computable numbers out there.

  • Bengalilol 20 hours ago

    mupi (mutant pi) or piet (pi evil twin) would be better names

  • doffen 21 hours ago

    > Back before Twitter became a Nazi bar,

    Would've been a better thread without this irrelevant aside, which isn't even true anyway.

    • mnsc 19 hours ago

      Curiously that made the thread better for me and the author's opinion about Twitter is exactly as true as the opposite opinion, that it is now the unfiltered source of objective truth. Or do you believe your opinions on the threads value or twitters reputation is special?

      • veltas 17 hours ago

        I also found it extremely helpful that the author virtue signalled to agree with me, so I know whether I am supposed to like it or not.

        • pera 10 hours ago

          What's more likely: (i) famous mathematician expressing his frustration regarding how his previous internet community is now full of Nazis, or (ii) famous mathematician casually saying Nazis suck so to be perceived as morally superior by some random readers?

          To me the second option is an extremely bizarre take and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider it.

          • mnsc 9 hours ago

            Interpretation 1 is more likely and made the dry mathematician more relatable/human which made the writing better imo.

    • nthingtohide 20 hours ago

      > Hence neither a man's contemporaries nor the man himself can form any final estimate of him or of his fitting position, because their knowledge is too imperfect. History often reverses the decision of contemporaries.

      Probably true about Elon.

      • I_complete_me 18 hours ago

        But I think mainly in the direction of demotion. Offhand I can't think of examples of someone ... oh, wait Van Gogh.

        • nthingtohide 13 hours ago

          Baruch Spinoza is another. He was excommunicated.

    • rsynnott 18 hours ago

      It’s a metaphor (ironically originating _on_ Twitter, not _about_ Twitter, pre-Musk); essentially, once you allow Nazis in a bar, they metastasize, and pretty soon you’re a Nazi bar. It’s perfectly applicable to the current state of twitter.

      • himgl 15 hours ago

        It's not at all applicable. Makes me wonder if you even use Twitter if you're making claims like that. More likely you're just parroting nonsense from your echo chamber.

        • rsynnott 11 hours ago

          I was a Twitter user from 2007 to late 2022. That idiot wasted no time in ruining it; by Dec 2022 it was very clearly time to go.

        • nuancebydefault 14 hours ago

          Nobody uses twitter these days.

          • himgl 13 hours ago

            What a daft claim to make. A simple web search would have informed you that Twitter has over half a billion monthly active users.

      • xigoi 15 hours ago

        Twitter already contained a lot of hateful speech before Elon acquired it.

        • lern_too_spel 12 hours ago

          Those tweets would typically be demoted instead of promoted.

      • veltas 17 hours ago

        I absolutely agree, a dead 1920's German nationalist movement is exactly why we shouldn't allow free speech online.

      • gosub100 12 hours ago

        what metaphor was it called back when they allowed far-left hate speech but censored, shadow-banned or otherwise slowed stories that their secret thought-control departments didn't like? what would you call that?

    • johnp314 13 hours ago

      Since it's an "evil twin" should we not expect to find it in an alleged Nazi bar?

    • mongol 20 hours ago

      Yes, that is when I stopped reading. I left Twitter recently, but I would not call it a Nazi bar. It is just not for me, any longer.

    • Johanx64 19 hours ago

      Crikey! The dude can't even write a maths article without delving into tribal politics garbage halfway through. This is depressing.

  • notpushkin a day ago

    > I'm not enough of a cultural relativist to believe there's a civilization that cares more about the shape ∞ than the shape ◯.

    Rumor has it there is one civilization of lizard-people out there. One is in fact running a company here on Earth with this shape as a logo!

    /s

    • kvdveer a day ago

      You mean Arduino is ran by the Illuminate?

      • ta988 a day ago

        yes you can blink leds

  • BeetleB a day ago

    I follow John on Mastodon. He never fails to disappoint.

    • hinkley a day ago

      Then why do you follow him?

      • barrell a day ago

        Oddly enough, “never fails to disappoint” can have the meaning “never disappoints” as well as “routinely disappoints”. I’ve never thought about that one before

        • heresie-dabord a day ago

          Native EN parser here. I would never consider this usage correct except as a rhetorical (facetious) insult. People may well repeat it without understanding the original nor their mistake. Although if enough people bust the syntax, it may attract descriptivist reporting, as with the widely observed malapropism "irregardless".

          https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139448/never-fai...

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless

          • barrell 21 hours ago

            It’s not a matter of correctness, but of understanding. OP definitely intended to imply the content does not disappoint, and used a colloquialism most native speakers would understand

            • slippy 21 hours ago

              I am a native speaker and got the gist and saw the paradox, and found the phrasing a bit tortured by the triple negative. Thank you for explaining that this was a colloquialism. Now I have to go look up the etymology... And upon further inspection, this usage is actually a misnegation.

              "It is a veiled insult: an ironic form of insult delivery which is misinterpreted as flattery to the buffoon who is targeted by it, much to the entertainment of anyone else within earshot who understands the true meaning."

            • hinkley 19 hours ago

              Only in the same sense that “could care less” is understandable but also means the opposite of the intention.

              • ftmch 7 hours ago

                There are East European languages, mostly Slavic ones, that have these weird double negatives which are grammatically correct and mean the opposite. A sentance such as: "I haven't never been there" means you've never been there.

          • hinkley 19 hours ago

            I have only ever heard it used as a high brow burn, and a wickedly hard one at that.

          • kazinator a day ago

            I've never failed to win a game of mahjong against a bunch of grannies a Chinatown back room joint.

            I've never tried such a thing; therefore, I've never failed.

          • scubbo 20 hours ago

            Frankly, I could care less

        • jrmann100 a day ago

          Here's a StackExchange thread on this exact mix-up (a "misnegation"):

          https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/139448/never-fai...

        • Agingcoder 21 hours ago

          This is the first time I come across this mistake / non-mistake so I misunderstood your comment. Are you sure it’s a common enough misnegation for people to understand what you meant ?

          • barrell 21 hours ago

            I didn’t use the expression, I don’t think I would have myself, but it didn’t even strike me as odd until I read the comment by hinkley. Did you read the original comment and think BeetleB follows John and thinks all of his content is disappointing?

        • jacknews 21 hours ago

          Never heard that one, but maybe it's like 'could care less', which has acquired the opposite of it's actual meaning (the phrase should be 'could not care less') by repeated incorrect use.

          • hinkley 10 hours ago

            I’d say that’s more tolerated than embraced. We know what you meant, you just didn’t say what you meant. Not everyone tolerates it.

        • reshlo a day ago

          > can have the meaning “never disappoints”

          How?

          • kazinator a day ago

            A complete stranger who has nothing whatsoever to do with you, who has never tried to do anything for you, nor has been expected to, has never disappointed you. They've also never failed to disappoint you, because they have not failed in any regard whatsoever.

            This is an example of a vacuous truth.

            I've never failed an airliner landing. While that may sound like I'm boasting of being a good pilot, in fact I'm not a pilot at all, and I've never attempted such a thing.

            Another vacuous truth.

            Every crow in an empty set of crows is white.

            Also, every crow in an empty set of crows is black.

            Propositions universally quantified over an empty set are all vacuously true.

            Statements with always and never are universally quantified over some set of events. If that set is empty it leads to vacuous truths.

            "Every time I've seen a crow, it has always been white" is vacuously true if I've never seen a crow. I.e. the set of crows I've seen is empty, and consequently is a true statement that they're all white.

            • reshlo 18 hours ago

              > A complete stranger who has nothing whatsoever to do with you, who has never tried to do anything for you, nor has been expected to, has never disappointed you. They've also never failed to disappoint you, because they have not failed in any regard whatsoever.

              Nobody who uses the phrase ever means it in this way. The point of using the statement is to convey that you are familiar with the person’s history.

              As another commenter has already pointed out, “has never failed to disappoint” is not the same statement as “never fails to disappoint”. The habitual present can’t refer to empty sets, as it is only used to refer to repeated actions.

              • kazinator 11 hours ago

                > Nobody who uses the phrase ever means it in this way.

                That is true. Outside of formal logic situations, deliberately uttered vacuous truths are only ever used by nerds to be clever, or for sarcasm, or insult and such.

                Someone habitually using "never fails to disappoint" intended as a compliment has somehow latched onto an incorrect idiom; they likely intend something slightly funny like "never manages to disappoint" (tries hard to disappoint, but never does, due to being so good!). Or maybe it's supposed to be a deliberately funny mixup of "never fails" and "never disappoints".

            • seba_dos1 20 hours ago

              > A complete stranger who has nothing whatsoever to do with you, who has never tried to do anything for you, nor has been expected to, has never disappointed you. They've also never failed to disappoint you, because they have not failed in any regard whatsoever.

              "never failed" != "never fails"

            • nuancebydefault 14 hours ago

              They said they were a follower of them though.

          • barrell 21 hours ago

            ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ linguistic drift. Technically it means you routinely disappoint, but it’s often used idiomatically to mean the opposite

        • ykonstant a day ago

          What a country!

    • BeetleB 13 hours ago

      Heh. This comment blew up on me. Yes, it was a typo.

  • d_burfoot 14 hours ago

    > Back before Twitter became a Nazi bar

    Why does this guy think it's acceptable to bitterly insult so many people, in an offhand way, by making comments like this? What does he think he's gaining?

    I think HN should have a policy for submitted content that is along the lines of the policies in place for comments. If the content violates the rules ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle") it should be flagged and removed, like a comment would be.

    • ryanmcgarvey 14 hours ago

      Is it a political statement if it's also a statement of fact? Sure, the comment has some color to it, I'll concede that, but one can no longer post these kinds of things on Twitter and get the honest engagement from community members one used to. It's no longer a welcoming place for this kind of discussion.

      • BearOso 13 hours ago

        With no account, I can no longer read comment chains on Twitter. It will only show the direct comment linked to. If you go to the user's page, all you see are the promoted tweets. There's no way to access the timeline sequentially anymore.

        With those restrictions, you're writing only to a captive audience if you post on Twitter.

        So you are technically correct, you literally cannot post these things on Twitter.

    • foogazi 13 hours ago

      > Why does this guy think it's acceptable to bitterly insult so many people,

      Won’t someone think of the people?

      My mom is on X - I don’t see how that offhand remark insults her

      > I think HN should have a policy for submitted content that is along the lines of the policies in place for comments

      We can already flag and vote - what more censorship do you want ?

  • yason 18 hours ago

    Offtopic but oh boy was that page difficult to scroll. Up/down arrows jump to the next post and page up/down isn't too helpful for reading. I have the keyboard overrides forbidden in my browser but obviously the web page can still bind events to keys not usually reserved for browser shortcuts... So, the usual navigation breaks up, leaving me to learn one particular site's idiosyncratic behaviour in the user interface space. No thanks, I just left.

    Some people saw this right from the start. I remember the time when disallowing javascript would mostly spare you from unnecessary and irritating opt-ins, and you could still consume the actual content of the page using the browser as basically a text reader with hyperlinks, like originally intended. Now you can no longer, in effect, do that as pages consider the browser a VM to present themselves, and this just leads to a tug of war between the browser and its users vs the page creators. Both assume a level of control of a more than Turing complete medium and there's no compromise into that. The working solutions I see are either you write programs that run in the browser-VM to implement web stores etc. or you write effectively HTML 1.0 level structured documents to deliver information and leave the presentation to the browser-reader.

    Back in the old days HTML was a huge step up from text files and proprietary hypertext documents but these days I'm more like hoping everything was ultimately, mostly plaintext.

    • NoboruWataya 18 hours ago

      > Up/down arrows jump to the next post and page up/down isn't too helpful for reading.

      I didn't experience this at all on Firefox, up/down and page up/down scrolled in the normal way.

      • davorak 14 hours ago

        The issue existed from me in both firefox and chrome. Click on outside columns will result in normal scroll. Click or highlight in the center column will result in the jumpy scroll that does not quite scroll one comment at a time with up/down arrow.

      • RobotToaster 18 hours ago

        It kinda happens to me on firefox, one press of the down arrow scrolls so "Here's a formula for the lemniscate in polar coordinates" in the first reply is at the top of the screen, not helpful.

    • kuschkufan 12 hours ago

      here's a nickel, get a new browser.

      no idea why i even go for bait like this. because i like doing unpaid support work i guess. i tested in firefox and chrome. both work fine and don't do it like op decribes - no keybinds, keys behave normal.

      maybe one of the dudes from yesterdays thread that had his own chatgpt programmed browser extensions installed that break the web for him.