Gushi

Tired of seeing this link be red :)

Ambigram article

I reverted your change and also replaced the DMC logo with a photo of a DeLorean grille showing the logo. A (somewhat lengthy) explanation is on the Ambigram talk page. Please, let's hash this out there rather than having an edit war. RoyLeban (talk) 07:19, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry if I scared you away. Certainly not my intent! Discussions on Wikipedia can be a real pain and can appear more heated than they are. And I'll admit I get protective over the Ambigram article. One reason is that there was a particular editor who basically attacked the article, removing stuff he knew to be true and wasted my time finding citations for things that had been in the article for years, long before I ever touched it. He's a first order deletionist. And, it seems like everybody and their brother seem to think that the ambigram that they just created (or found) just has to be in the article.

I glanced through Hofstadter's Ambigrammi, the only real scholarly work on ambigrams and, basically, Doug spends a lot of time describing what ambigrams are, and very little time describing what isn't an ambigram. And, it's a lot of prose -- very little that is short and quotable. And most of the book is about ambigramming (the act of creation), not ambigrams (the created items). Yes, it's easy to infer from what is said, but I would get accused of OR or COI. I did find something else worth citing, which I just added to the article. I didn't look through any of my other books, but I suspect I'd find the same.

From my point of view, it would be great if the ABBA/NIN section could help people understand ambigrams better. But I really don't see how to do that without people calling it OR (and the fact that I wasn't able to adequately explain it to you isn't a good sign either). If you have thoughts on that, they would be welcome. Given the headache, I'm half inclined to just kill the section.

And, again, my apologies.

RoyLeban (talk) 08:00, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Talk:JVC GR-C1

Just to let you know, you were correct that this article (or rather, most of the content which had been added in one go by a single user) was a blatant ripoff- i.e. copyright violation- of another site. The offending material has been removed. See Talk:JVC GR-C1 for the full discussion.

Note that you can also use templates such as (e.g.) Template:Copypaste where there is reasonable suspicion that an article has been copied without permission.

All the best, Ubcule (talk) 19:37, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Floats listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Floats. Since you had some involvement with the Floats redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. feminist 15:39, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Change to UUID article

I reverted this change you made in 2021:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Universally_unique_identifier&diff=1005808116&oldid=1005761622

"one fewer" is grammatically incorrect because the word "fewer" is plural so can't be applied to one of something. This is a common mistake because it is often simplistically said you should use "fewer" when talking about countable objects, but this is an exception.

The change comment said that the old text is ambiguous. I don't understand what is ambiguous; "There are half as many possible version-4 variant-2 UUIDs (legacy GUIDs) because there is one less random bit available" is obvious and only has one meaning to me (certainly not any others that would be ruled out by changing "less" to "fewer". Could you explain what other meaning you think this sentence could be read as? 109.207.23.18 (talk) 22:47, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, OK, I do see the potential ambiguity: "one less random bit" could mean "one bit that is less random" rather then "one less bit that is random". I wouldn't have read it the first way because "one less foo" is such a common idiom even when "foo" includes adjective. There's also only one way to read it that makes sense from the context. Given those facts, and there's not a way to remove that slight ambiguity without the sentence sounding really stilted, I suggest it's best left as it is ... unless you can think of a clever phrasing that's clearer but not distracting. 109.207.23.18 (talk) 22:53, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Take this sentence: Less smart people work at a company than ten years ago. Fewer smart people work at a company than ten years ago. If you're counting the number of bits, it's fewer.

When talking about cryptography (or packets, such as in RFCs), a key can be described as having a certain structure: 32 header bits, a 4 byte mask field, N pseudorandom bits, and N random bits.

GUIDs are a particular example of this -- perhaps an earlier version of the guid spec only had *four* random bits. Perhaps some bits in the guid are not *fully* random, but seeded/salted with the "host" part of the guid, and other bits are truly PRNG random. Given that some parts of a guid absolutely are fixed, and others are deterministic, and others "truly random" (or at least, as truly random as is possible with modern computers).

That's what I was going after. Feel free to ignore my prattle. I'm working on not being willing to die on less big hills lately. Or is it...fewer big hills? Gushi (talk) 16:17, 16 May 2023 (UTC)