• 24 Posts
  • 142 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 17th, 2023
  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyztoData Is Beautiful@lemmy.ml•People overestimate the percentage of immigrants in their country
    2·
    3 days ago

    People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.

    Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.

    Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.

    Oh yes absolutely, people would definitely just “eyeball” their estimate and the percentages we see in the graphs are population (well, sample) level averages, but I’d still say that the differences between these average estimates and actual reality are by and large much worse that “on the money”. To illustrate, if the estimate for some country was eg. 30% and the real proportion 40%, the relative error – off by a factor of 1.33 – would be smaller than if the estimate is 12% and the real value 2% – off by a factor of 6 – even though both have a 10 point error.

    So eg Poles’ and Argentinians’ estimates are both 12 percentage points off, but because Poland’s immigrant population is smaller that means that they overestimated its real size by 650% and so their estimate was 7.5x higher, but Argentinians were “only” off by 460% / 5.6x. 'Strayans were off by 7 points, but their relative error was only around 23%, which is still almost a 1/4 error and their estimate looks like it was the best out of these. The average global error was 100%, so on average people think there’s 2x as many immigrants as there actually are, and characterizing that as “pretty much on the money” is, well, maybe a bit generous

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOPtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•`"☹️".reverse() == "🙂"`
    4·
    2 months ago

    I dint know many OO languages that don’t have a useless toString on string types.

    Well, that’s just going to be one of those “it is what it is” things in an OO language if your base class has a toString()-equivalent. Sure, it’s probably useless for a string, but if everything’s an object and inherits from some top-level Object class with a toString() method, then you’re going to get a toString() method in strings too. You’re going to get a toString() in everything; in JS even functions have a toString() (the output of which depends on the implementation):

    In a dynamically typed language, if you know that everything can be turned into a string with toString() (or the like), then you can just call that method on any value you have and not have to worry about whether it’ll hurl at runtime because eg. Strings don’t have a toString because it’d technically be useless.

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOPtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•`"☹️".reverse() == "🙂"`
    11·
    2 months ago

    Everything that’s an Object is going to either inherit Object.prototype.toString() (mdn) or provide its own implementation. Like I said in another comment, even functions have a toString() because they’re also objects.

    A String is an Object, so it’s going to have a toString() method. It doesn’t inherit Object’s implementation, but provides one that’s sort of a no-op / identity function but not quite.

    So, the thing is that when you say const someString = "test string", you’re not actually creating a new String object instance and assigning it to someString, you’re creating a string (lowercase s!) primitive and assigning it to someString:

    Compare this with creating a new String("bla"):

    In Javascript, primitives don’t actually have any properties or methods, so when you call someString.toString() (or call any other method or access any property on someString), what happens is that someString is coerced into a String instance, and then toString() is called on that. Essentially it’s like going new String(someString).toString().

    Now, what String.prototype.toString() (mdn) does is it returns the underlying string primitive and not the String instance itself:

    Why? Fuckin beats me, I honestly can’t remember what the point of returning the primitive instead of the String instance is because I haven’t been elbow-deep in Javascript in years, but regardless this is what String’s toString() does. Probably has something to do with coercion logic.

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•This is unironically fine
    6·
    4 months ago

    Ah well that’s certainly fair enough, I had no idea it’s a Google-encumbered format.

    Not sure I’ve ever “voluntarily” converted something to webp. Many Lemmy instances’ pict-rs setups seem to use it, my home instance sopuli.xyz obviously being one of them, which I guess is a sort of a funny choice considering

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•This is unironically fine
    21·
    4 months ago

    Exactly so!

    While I’ll definitely do what I can to try and influence the trajectory we’re on I’m just one person with very little power, and I’m not exactly optimistic about how things are going and figure that at some point something like this meme will be the best I can do

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.ml•Math
    40·
    5 months ago

    Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90’s.

    I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I’d learned just about everything they taught that wasn’t specific to the US or the English language (and even some of those…) either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.