Most likely written down somewhere. The seed phrase is the backup method of storing a private key to a crypto wallet. You’re supposed to put it somewhere safe as a way to recover the wallet if the normal way to access it (a software app or a hardware device) fails.

Brute-forcing a full 12 or 24 word phrase would take centuries to millennia, so there’s only a few possibilities:

1. They just found the full phrase written on a card in a safe somewhere, in which “deciphering” it is as simple as typing it into a fucking wallet app;
2. He was smart enough to split the phrase up and keep different parts of it in different places, so they might have had to brute-force part of it;
3. They found a hardware wallet and hacked into it to recover the phrase;
4. (exceedingly unlikely) they figured out that the random number generator he used to generate the phrase was broken and had predictable output patterns.

Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.

Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.

And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.

Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.

You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.

The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.

I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.

It takes a real class-act to happily play a parody of himself.

He was a true American treasure.

This is the whole idea behind Turing-completeness, isn’t it? Any Turing-complete architecture can simulate any other.

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/505/

The URL made me think of this:

[…]anduril-unveils-barracudam[…]

More like Barracu-DAMN, am I right?

This is undeniably hilarious, but if you’ve ever seen actual dissection photos or videos of surgery, you kinda recognize that good anatomical drawings required a lot of mental effort to create.

Imagine making a completely accurate diagram of everything in a car’s engine bay, either while the engine is running and it’s doing 70mph down the highway, or after it’s had a head-on collision at the same speed.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.

The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.

But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

Do you have a charging cable?

Is it an Apple cable?

Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

And it’s not worn out?

You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?

It’s fine if they reduce the price accordingly.

If it’s still the same price after they take the cable out, it was never about reducing waste to begin with.

Knowing Apple, that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, which is why I never have and never will own any of their products.

I feel like you either fear and/or despise generative AI, or you think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

There seems to be very little in-between.

Car manufacturers have brilliantly managed to convince me never to buy a car made after ~2015.

It’s an ideal that’s only achievable when you’re able to set your own priorities.

Managers and executives generally don’t give two shits about yak shaving.

Tip #1: if you’re gonna post your programming blog to social media, make sure it can handle the traffic…?

Make sure that the other person has a very easy way out of anything they might not like. Then you know they’re enthusiastically consenting for whatever comes next.

Well yes, absolutely. Consent is paramount and enthusiastic consent is the best kind. Bad choice of hyperbole on my part, I’ll admit.

But even so, if you’re not conventionally attractive or charismatic, even just checking can result in getting treated like a creep. The people who constantly say “they worst they can say is no” have likely never gotten “eww, no” as a response before.

But if you have, especially more than once, you kinda just get used to assuming that’s the default answer. That’s kind of what I was getting at.

I’d rather just not have to guess.

Yeah, even when you’re 99% sure the person is flirting with you, you gotta balance that with what might happen if you’re wrong.

Read the situation wrong and you could end up handcuffed on the sidewalk with pepper spray in your eyes.

Fuck that. If not being willing to take that risk means dying alone, I’ll choose the latter.

And what about from the woman’s perspective? Do you really want strange men making guesses about whether you’re flirting with them or not? Knowing exactly what could happen if the wrong guy gets the wrong idea and won’t take “no” for an answer?

I’m not trying to victim-blame or make excuses for anyone. But there’s nothing to win by playing these kinds of mind games, so what’s the fucking point?

Don’t show them this, it’ll shatter their reality

What can I say, it nerd-sniped me.