explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3092: Baker's Units

2025-05-23T08:52:19Z

HaruruChanDesu:

Why did he go with only 9/13ths of a Baker's List? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.8|172.69.65.8]] 23:48, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
:This suggests that the "expected" length of a list is 12. [[User:ISaveXKCDpapers|ISaveXKCDpapers]] ([[User talk:ISaveXKCDpapers|talk]]) 07:24, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

A ruler for a "baker's foot" is, apparently, similar to a metal casting patternmaker's {{w|shrink rule}}, although in practice those top out at 2.5%, versus 13/12ths or 8.{3}%. [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 23:59, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

It appears to me like g marked by the g-clef is on the second space making the notes b and c which wound be 13 semitones apart. Two compensating errors or just a bit more cleverness for lagniappe?[[User:Lordpishky|Lordpishky]] ([[User talk:Lordpishky|talk]]) 01:07, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

There's also baker's percentages. All the ingredients are defined as a percentage of the weight of the flour. So if you have 1kg (1000gr) of flour and 600ml (gr) of water then the water is said to be 60% hydration.

<blockquote>"which are not Platonic solids and cannot be used as dice due to having multiple face types, rendering dice-based games unbalanced"</blockquote>
Being a platonic solid is sufficient, but not necessary, for a fair die. The simplest shape for a fair 13-sided die that I can think of off the top of my head is two 6-sided pyramids joined at the base, with one of them truncated for the 13th side. To make it fair, the lengths of the pyramids and the truncation would have to be fine-tuned, but that's certainly possible. Where's John von Neumann when you need him? --[[User:Coconut Galaxy|Coconut Galaxy]] ([[User talk:Coconut Galaxy|talk]]) 10:45, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
:I'd imagined two 6SPs joined by a ''barrel'' (maybe a smooth ring, maybe a set of squares/triangles for either a primsatic or anti-prismatic hexagonal-faced centre-section, but all the way round counting for the same 'roll', either way.) Too short, the chances of landing on the 'edge' is greatly lowered, too long a mid-section, it'll be almost impossible to land anywhere ''but'' on it (imagine a pencil, sharpened at both ends).
:Thus there's a point where a symmetrical (lengthwise, as well as by rotations) shape has ''just enough'' 'middle band' to have equal chances of landing with that as with any other single 'point ends' face (landed on; with it being prismatic, an obvious and readable 'face-up' also presenting itself).
:But it'd be a tight specification, perhaps need emperical testing. The angle between adjacent 'pointy end' triangles with each other would be different from the angle between any of them and the 'barrel', so sharper or rounder edges between faces (not an issue with platonics, as the rolling-resistance is equal by all edge-/corner-intersections being exactly as equal as the faces are) could decrease or increase the probability of mid-roll tumbling. As could deliberately rolling along the prismatic axis to either try to stay on 'that face' or to make it more likely thst the random-walk of tumbles sends it off it (I'd have to run a few simulations; either bias, ''or both'', might be easiest to manipulate by a bit of practiced handling).
:I do rather envisage it being 'numbered' as having +1..+6 and -1 to -6 on the pyramidal ends (by tradition, every +n is on the opposite triangle of the opposite pyramid to its -n counterpart, but you can alternate +s and -s between adjacent pyramid faces), and 0 on the mid-section, so that it'll give symmetrical chance distribution across the good/bad range, which might make the "natural zero" midpoint a not quite so vital number to ensure is as strictly equally likely as all the others. Alternatively, 1..12 (similarly distributed to add up to 13 when taking sat-upon and face-up together) leaves either 13 (beyond-lucky) or 0 (the ''most'' critical of fails) on the ring which is ''deliberately'' mad less-likely to get.
:For even better game-symmetry, supply ''two'' "D12±" dice, design your system on rolling them in pairs. Rolling ''either'' the 0 on the 0..12 ''or'' 13 on the 1..13 gives you the critical [failure|success] on top of the sum-of-the-dice result. Rolling ''both'' 0 and 13 invokes a "critical funny" result (or a "fortunate fail"/"pyrrhic success"), in whatever way suits the game style, current encounter or even the scenario/plot's ultimate challenge. (To contrast a Toons-type game from a Paranoia one, or a straight-up Dungeon-Dive where extreme peril/hilarity needs to be more tightly modulated by the GM.)
:Of course, I'm generally working on the assumption that "12 (or 13) is good, 1 (or 0) is bad", but there's nothing to say the D13 rolls are ''for the players'', and a D13 with a ''higher''-than-normal chance of a 13 would be just the thing for a Horror-themed RPG, invoking the latest plot-stage of whatever cthuluesque escalation is lurking and awaiting the (un?)wary players. I've played all kinds of dice-led games (favourite variation, amongst them is "Babylon 5 dice" - roll two D6, one red, one green... ''lowest'' pips counts, dice-colour dictates if it's positive or negative (upon the baseline for the task attempted), equal dice is zero-offset ''except'' for double-6/double-1 which are critical success/failure ...all nicely symmetrical, as a modified version of a 2D6 distribution 'around' the result of 7), and a 'cursed dice' would not even be amongst the strangest treatments I've seen. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.224.82|172.69.224.82]] 13:35, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
Is “baker’s noon” a distant jab at Daylight Saving Time? [[User:HaruruChanDesu|HaruruChanDesu]] ([[User talk:HaruruChanDesu|talk]]) 08:52, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Talk:3020: Infinite Armada Chess

2024-12-05T11:21:21Z

HaruruChanDesu:

Did I do well? Added a very very basic explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.147.132|172.68.147.132]] 04:25, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, yes but I wonder if just one tiny fix is needed. If you replace the white side with a simplyfied artillery tower, you reinvented space invaders.{{unsigned ip|172.71.160.70|04:57, 5 December 2024 (UTC)}}

I was personally hoping for an explanation of the Infinite Armada thing, and I feel like a link to the TV Tropes page doesn't really. Explain that at all. So I would love a bit of an expansion on that part! Just want to be sure I didn't miss some reference or something. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.23.91|172.68.23.91]] 05:48, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
: Likewise. I get the comic, but I assumed the 'armada' part was a reference that I just did not get. But it seems it is just a word choice. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.102.105|172.71.102.105]] 09:39, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I think that since the error was "out of bounds", not "out of memory", it's referring to indexing outside of the region of memory that the program allocated to deal with the board. This would happen since instead of addressing rank 1..8, you could address rank 9, 10, 0, or -1. Unless bounds checking is performed when converting the board coordinates into linear array indices, you'd get an out-of-bounds error (or worse, succeed in reading or modifying memory that you weren't intending to). --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.30.253|172.71.30.253]] 05:45, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
:It was "Out of Bounds memory access". That means it was trying to access a memory address that was out of the bounds of the computer, as if it were trying to access the ω-th index of the board array, which would put it out of the memory range of any computer [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you want to]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 06:15, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
:: There is no hint that the bounds are those of the computer, the simplest explanation really is that the bounds are those of an array. The error message does come up. In addition, to try to access the memory at the ω-th index, you would need to construct the ω-th index itself first (which would fail or not terminate) [[User:Jmm|Jmm]] ([[User talk:Jmm|talk]]) 07:01, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Is this a reference to [https://youtu.be/rav29N0-h2c infinite chess by Naviary?] [[User:HaruruChanDesu|HaruruChanDesu]] ([[User talk:HaruruChanDesu|talk]]) 11:21, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

2928: Software Testing Day

2024-05-04T04:56:38Z

HaruruChanDesu: /* Explanation */ Mention the leap day MS Azure outage and how invalid dates are or aren’t handled IRL

{{comic
| number = 2928
| date = May 3, 2024
| title = Software Testing Day
| image = software_testing_day_2x.png
| imagesize = 255x408px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a NEGATIVE ONCE BOOKED EMPLOYEE - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are responsible for ensuring the quality of some software product through the use of testing. This process often involves entering bizarre and/or nonsense inputs in an attempt to break the software. Cueball, a QA engineer in this case, expresses concern that the scheduling system doesn't crash. This could either be because as a QA engineer he is concerned about crashes in general, or that as a system used by QA engineers it likely has a lot of weird/invalid values that could cause a crash.

For example, here it seems that Software Testing Day, a day likely celebrated by QA engineers, takes place every -1 years on January 0th at 25:71 PM. All values except for "January" and "PM" are invalid and make no sense, suggesting that a QA engineer picked this date to test the scheduling system. Apparently, though this date is nonsensical, the QA engineers have decided to make this date a celebration day. Both "January" and "PM" are likely correct values because for QA reasons these two items tend to be selected from predetermined lists since they have an extremely limited number of possible values, it's rarely possible to enter an invalid value for either of these.

The title text suggests that the recordkeeping system used to see how often employees celebrated Software Testing Day kept crashing, possibly due to the employees celebrating on January 0th or any nonsensical values.

In real life, such invalid dates would be rejected or coerced to be valid dates. Failing to account for invalid dates may result in errors, sometimes catastrophic, such as [https://www.theregister.com/2012/03/12/azure_leap_day_confirmed/ the 2012 Microsoft Azure outage] caused by the server trying to generate a certificate valid until February 29, 2013.

Treatment of invalid dates varies by the chosen programming language and date-time library. Javascript, for example, would coerce January 0th into December 31st, and 25 o’clock into 1 o’clock the following day. While there is no way to directly create a Javascript Date object using 12-hour notation (because that requires text parsing, and the validation of the text input would just result in an invalid date), the following code snippet represents how far this correction can be abused:

// In Javascript, month 0 is January
const d = new Date(2024, 0, 0, 25+12, 71);
console.log(d); // prints “Mon Jan 01 2024 14:11:00” (exact format depends on your locale)

An event happening every -1 years is equivalent to one that happens every year, but the numbers are reversed; i.e. if this year hosts the 1st Software Testing Day, next year will host the 0th Software Testing Day. This is expected to cause issues in software that assumes that the 2nd Software Testing Day will occur after the 1st Software Testing Day, a reasonable assumption given that time only moves in one direction{{citation needed}}.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Megan and Cueball stand facing each other.]
:Megan: So, do you and the other QA engineers have any fun plans for the holiday?
:Cueball: Yeah, assuming the scheduling system doesn't crash.
:[Caption below the panel:]
:Software Testing Day is a holiday celebrated every -1 years on January 0th at 25:71 PM.

{{comic discussion}}