necarion : iliiuan : cannoli-reader : iliiuan : I can’t figure out if Verin was foolish for making her letter to Mat seem like an obligation rather than critical information, or if Mat refusing to open the letter is out of character. It’s Sanderson’s writing, so I’m going to say both. The whole thing is so clumsy 😭😭😭 Like, I get what he was aiming for, but it did not…
kata4a : i hate “words have meaning” as a rejoinder so much because it’s such a transparently bad-faith move. like, could someone disagree with me about the meaning or application of some term? of course not. they must be against the very idea of coherent communication itself The problem is, words don’t have meanings. People have meanings. Words have frequently-predictable…
necarion : jadagul : Lots of discourse around the reflecting pool, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything about the new (temporary) monument they’ve built like forty feet away. What is it for? Other than “to be tacky”? Standing tall in Washington, D.C., The National Military Monument™ is a living tribute to the generations of military members whose service and sacrifice…
Lots of discourse around the reflecting pool, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything about the new (temporary) monument they’ve built like forty feet away.
jadagul : raginrayguns : nostalgebraist : jadagul replied to your post “I described Yudkowsky’s TDT writeup as “unreadable” to someone today,…” That seems about correct. I still claim it’s not at all novel–it’s the entire idea behind precommitment. Hmm, I am having a hard time understanding the connection to precommitment (but it’s late and I’m tired). Even then, though, it seems worthwhile to…
femmenietzsche : eightyonekilograms : Man. Okay, the next bar AI needs to clear is to solve a problem I’ve ever heard of in my life I know Closest Vector is connected to some of the post-quantum encryption issues, but I don’t know that this result matters all that much to them. (It’s a little technical in terms of setting a bound, rather than just saying something is impossible,…
necarion : Learned today that some of the better 3D movie tech comes from using dual laser projectors where each has its own set of RGB values, and individual glasses are tuned to reject half of them. (This works without the lasers, but is cooler with them). Dumb proposal: Multiplex theater One absolutely massive theater hall playing all the movies simultaneously on different spectral bands. You…
You can tell I’m Latin-brained because I do genuinely reach for words like “maximandum” when I’m trying to talk about optimization theory to my friends.
Scott’s recent post on AI chip regulation made me absolutely livid, in a way that’s definitely not healthy for me, but I’m going to process it by blogging a bit and then hopefully I can stop thinking about it as much. It feels very confident and smug about how this isn’t going to be a dystopian surveillance state. But the main thing I was thinking through the entire first…
maggiedeshiboux : ngl it’s been incredibly wild to me watching the Martian blow up and then Project Hail Mary blow up even bigger when I previously knew Andy Weir from a webcomic where he dates Satan, who had previously secretly been Frances Folsom
Higgledy piggledy isn’t a difficult rhythm to write in if you can take time. But it is tricky to write a good higgledy piggledy where you sound natural and rhyme.
wildgifthorses : Formal experiments make it so tempting to irritate followers with a conceit forcing unnatural snytax and wording on sentiments lacking in substantive meat. Rather than keeping a regular meter a proper expression of well-defined views has to conform to the structure of thought and proceed at the rhythm of actual news. There’s a linguist, Anne Cutler, who studied how everyday…
bubbloquacious : Are all conditionally convergent series that don’t converge absolutely ‘equally’ conditionally convergent? Or is there some way to measure whether one series converges more conditionally than another? Ooh! One of my favorite calc II theorems is the Riemann series theorem , which I would argue says that all conditionally convergent real series are equally…
For some reason, my brain is convinced the second line of a higgledy-piggledy should be “Cedric Diggory”, with the first name pronounced as three syllables. More recently it’s also decided the third line should be “Sind einer Hand breit”, with “Hand” drawn out for two beats, which makes even less sense.
jadagul : Found myself wanting to say that “consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch” and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say. #well. on tumblr you get the thunderous applause. Yeah. I posted the same thing to Bluesky and got two (2) likes. And one of those is someone I met here! (To be…
markwateneymemorialcrater : kiragecko : jadagul : Found myself wanting to say that “consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch” and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say. #well. on tumblr you get the thunderous applause. #I recall watching Hank Green talk about how under intense stress he…
Found myself wanting to say that “consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch” and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.
tanadrin : twocubes : tbh “religious liberty” always felt like a uniquely weak reason that you should be allowed to do something. “I know it seems bad, but have you considered that I’m doing it because it’s important for no reason?” idk like. even modern secular liberal societies display such a common penchant for using innocuous feature of religion as an excuse…
king-of-men : jadagul : youzicha : jadagul : youzicha : One response to Gödel incompleteness is to postulate iterated consistency statements: instead of just PA one can work in PA+CON(PA)+CON(PA+CON(PA)) , etc. Alan Turing’s phd thesis was about iterating this process transfinitely many times. I think at least the first few steps are usually considered unproblematic, we “know” PA is consistent, so…
youzicha : jadagul : youzicha : One response to Gödel incompleteness is to postulate iterated consistency statements: instead of just PA one can work in PA+CON(PA)+CON(PA+CON(PA)) , etc. Alan Turing’s phd thesis was about iterating this process transfinitely many times. I think at least the first few steps are usually considered unproblematic, we “know” PA is consistent, so we may as well…