Probably around the point where the consequences of being wrong are much larger than the bias itself

Exactly. 2^64 not being divisible by 3 means one residue occurs once more than the others, but that difference is one outcome out of roughly 2^64

Sometimes the caller really does need a uniform integer range, and hiding too much randomness machinery can make performance or reproducibility harder to reason about

The description is interesting enough that it almost feels incomplete without the video

Even a 10-second slow-motion clip would probably explain the result better than half the article

> “The first slow-motion video of a butterfly I put through our bird-vision computer model was glowing with downwards motion even though the butterfly was moving up.

Yep, really would have loved to see that video. Why mention it and not link to it.

What I like about this is that the camouflage isn't really in the pattern itself, but in the interaction between the pattern, the wing deformation, and the predator's visual system.

The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already maritime

I think this is mostly a disagreement over semantics.

What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up

One still has to do field work to gather all the linguistic data. It's rather easy with settled societies only. Researchers studying indigenous languages had to travel to hard to reach places and often live with the tribes for a quite long time.

It's a lot easier nowadays, but ease of transportation also correlates quite well with a levelling of linguistic distinctions. That's a problem because the comparative method of reconstructing older stages of a language relies on the assumption that different dialects maintain aspects of the older language.

Yes, etymology is amazing. You carry tens of thousands of artifacts in your head.

The weird part is that the LLM isn't really replacing the debugging loop here, it's inserting itself into the middle of it