roystgnr
2d ago
keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
...
it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
I have identified the problem.
roystgnr
11d ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
roystgnr
28d ago
Well, that would certainly be easier to square with the need to protect the remaining non-eliminated bombers.
Thanks. Do you have a citation for that?
roystgnr
1mo ago
You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
I love reducing waste, but a few nitpicks: you probably only want to use the rinse water, and you still want to be careful about what kind of detergent you use, and you're only going to get enough waste water from the family clothes washer to cover a tree or two, so do have additional irrigation plans for anything large enough to call an orchard.
(my parents weren't "into" that, but they were frugal and we lived in a desert, so my dad would often switch the washer drain from a sewer line to a hose-out-on-the-lawn for a load's final rinse cycle)
roystgnr
1mo ago
It did just the opposite on my phone. Could be that it's something that was tweaked for one CPU type at the expense of others?
roystgnr
2mo ago
So an arm of the revolutionary government and its precursors. State.
Proto-state, sure, with the benefit of hindsight. The actual State at the time was the government they fought against for 8 years, who wasn't their sponsor.
roystgnr
2mo ago
What makes me cranky is excluding observations because they don't fit to theories (which for all the dunking I do on DARK MATTER is what scientists would be doing if they didn't invent something like it).
We all have to do that all the time when the observations aren't replicable, though. Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom. I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time. Most people who wanted to fool others could have kept doing so, and there were a few famous fakes like the Cottingley Fairies, but for the most part people making seemingly-inexplicable observations must have just been fooling themselves first. The human mind is a particularly fallible recording device.
then why is the Miracle of Calandra not enough for you?
Oh, I'm a rounding error here. I'm just one jerk on a website, but there's one or two hundred thousand amputations a year in the US. When I say "start praying for amputees", I don't mean because you want to win an online argument, I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I (and I am being quite serious about this) would recommend that you consider taking up prayer,
I have. Only occasionally, these days, but also "Try out the Mormons' prayer" seemed like a reasonable hypothesis to test, a couple decades ago. In that case either I got a "no, that stuff's fiction" or I got no answer, but in neither case would it seem, based on the common
understanding that God is not a magic wand
, that it would be treated as contrary evidence rather than an observation to exclude. If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
I think what really got me, though, was seeing that they didn't take their "you can learn through prayer" hypothesis as seriously as I did.
One of the things that interested me about their theology was that their idea that some old scriptures hadn't been translated correctly meshes pretty well with my idea that the genocide in Numbers should be a "what kind of demon are the Abrahamic religions all worshiping" sort of moment for the reader, at least by the time Moses gets mad about his followers letting women and boys live. Indeed, a Mormon leader (I want to say elders here, but that's a different word in that hierarchy; maybe it was a former stake president?) brought up that translation point independently when I mentioned the problem. The epistemology of that seems a bit shaky, but I admit I was happy to see someone choose it over shaky morality.
What I didn't think of until later was ... why didn't it even occur to him to pray about it? Figuring out which religious texts are true was supposed to be the sine qua non of Mormon prayer, and yet it didn't even come up as a possibility worth trying? From the outside it's easy to see why "pray for an answer where there's one interpretation that doesn't detach you from the culture" might evoke a more easily-interpreted response among the believers and the hopeful than "pray for an answer where either way you're likely about to cause a huge rift", but I still wonder what the insider explanation would have been.
roystgnr
2mo ago
That's not crazy, but doesn't it slow down reading even more than a verbal monologue would? And what would the conversation look like? The AI reads, but also stops after each paragraph to ask questions to assess comprehension? I can't think of a mechanism that would be effective enough to work without sounding so patronizing that people would disable it.
roystgnr
2mo ago
My first thought is "brilliant; I'm going to buy some watercress seeds now and see how they grow for me", so thank you. How big do you let the plants get before you harvest?
My second thought is that there are a ton of pros and cons for outdoor hydroponics, and I'm not sure where they balance out.
On the one hand it could be better than soil planting because you have full control of pH and nutrients and drainage and you shut out weeds, and better than indoor hydroponics in most locations because you get free full-intensity sun and natural airflow and insect pollinators.
On the other hand, you don't get any more control over temperature and diseases and pests than you do with soil planting, and if it's hot enough in your location then you probably need to keep an eye on your water tank more frequently to account for extra evaporation, so you lose a little of the benefit of not having to water as often.
I guess the big question is how much you want to grow versus how much space you have in full sun. If you have a bunch of ground that's not needed for anything else, you might as well put up a raised bed and plant there. If you don't have that, but you do have a nice south-facing wall or fence, I think I'd much rather go vertical with a hydroponic system than with traditional hanging planters.
Psychologically, I think the extra work in setting up an outdoor system might make a big difference to me. When I bury a bunch of seeds and half the crops grow great but half the crops die off, it feels like a fun experiment. But if I'd built a big hydroponic system instead of a few raised beds, losing half of the result would have felt like a failure. I can't always get good output from indoor hydroponic plants, but since the "growing season" is very long and the "cleaning season" is far shorter than even our mild winter, I can just replace underperforming plants with new plantings and that doesn't feel like a failure either.
roystgnr
2mo ago
difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Difficult, but not impossible. The clearest candidate so far is the Bullet Cluster, where we can see the shock wave from regular matter in the galactic collision, but we can also see the lensing from a bunch of something invisible in EM (i.e. "dark") that is a major source of gravity (i.e. "matter") that managed to shoot through the collision without itself colliding so much.
has never been observed
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe
This was the motivation for dark energy, not dark matter. Dark energy is a much better candidate for your metaphor here. If it's uniformly distributed in space (which it seems to be on large scales, plus or minus 10%) then the volume of the Earth would include about 6 septillion kilograms of matter and 1 milligram of dark energy. Our best candidate for dark energy right now is probably "Einstein's equations are still consistent if we add a constant, so maybe that constant is super tiny instead of zero", and even that runs into a problem where, when we try out different particle physics theories for predicting the constant, we either get "zero" or "A septillion septillion septillion septillion septillion times larger than what we see". This definitely feels more like an "invention" than a "discovery" still.
I'm not sure you want to take the "ha, scientists invent invisible things too" metaphor too far, though. The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster. When scientists invent such things we sometimes get discoveries like neutrinos (predicted just to try to balance particle physics equations, and nearly impossible to see because they barely interact with anything, but we can detect them now), or the planet Neptune (predicted based on irregularities in Uranus' orbit, and essentially discovered by an astronomer "with the point of his pen" before we could figure out where to point our telescopes). Even when they fail at it we still get things like General Relativity (which explains irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were once hypothesized to be due to a planet "Vulcan" even closer to the sun). Neutrino detectors are still huge and expensive, but now anyone can see Neptune with a home telescope or use the corrected-for-relativity GPS system in their phone.
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I think he could probably get $100 billion by pledging 300% collateral, which is his whole net worth.
According to the quote you posted, he's been borrowing 1% of his collateral when taking out personal loans, right? 33% is a much harder sell.
Elon has already successful borrowed tens of billions to Fund X/Twitter buyout.
That's a better example, I admit. His personal loans there were $6.25B backed by $62.5B of Tesla stock. I wouldn't say that deal turned out great overall for his lenders and partners, but despite that I wouldn't be surprised if he could pull off 10% again - if TSLA dropped 90% it would be at a solid P/E for a value stock, regardless of how strongly Musk was signaling that he might have lost faith in it's nominal value.
roystgnr
3mo ago
The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.
I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"
roystgnr
3mo ago
But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
roystgnr
4mo ago
On the other hand, as a correction to the correction, I should point out that there are some very unrealistic things about math competitions too. The level of speed that's beneficial for even MathCounts sprint rounds is purely a contest thing rather than a simulation of any real-world work, and especially the "you ought to be able to answer the question before most people are done reading it" level of competition among the kids who make it to a big MathCounts countdown round is basically just a fun game show for the audience.
roystgnr
4mo ago
It is uncomfortable to be wrong and it seems a lot of girls shy away from it more than boys do, but if you're going to keep going in STEM-y stuff you're going to be wrong. You're going to be confused. You're going to not get it when other people do. She needs to be ok with that and if possible even embrace it.
Oh, wow, I can't believe I didn't think about this when talking about math competitions.
Coaching MathCounts, I think this is probably the biggest benefit I see for the kids vs a typical math class. In a class, you're given all the material before you're given the test, and the test problems are all pretty similar, and getting 100% is a reasonable expectation. In MathCounts, well, I just got the results of our chapter-level competition, and among the hundreds of top math students in a big techie city this year there was only a single kid who (barely) broke 90%. The experience of seeing problems you have no idea how to solve, and not panicking, and going on to solve the ones you can along with perhaps figuring out creative ways to solve some of the ones you initially couldn't, is huge.
roystgnr
4mo ago
As a parent:
For "mathy":
The best thing for my son was Khan Academy, which basically covers everything you'd want in grade school, up to a little basic undergraduate-engineering-major-level math. When Covid hit and all the other kids' brains started atrophying, he instead was thrilled to discover he could now go as fast as he wanted (or occasionally as slow as he needed to?) He started squeezing it in to the sad little "online school" schedule that had been hectically thrown together, then he eventually got permission from a teacher to let his little sister do his "real" math homework so he could spend more time studying way ahead, and he got far ahead before testing out of a few physical classes and joining others. (or "auditing" others; they have to call his Calculus class "independent study in math" due to some age/grade restriction, but fortunately there's no restriction on the AP tests).
When he got a bit older he really started getting into math competitions, so instead of just racing ahead he's spent a lot of time getting better at the sorts of questions that a typical kid his age knows enough math to understand but still can't necessarily solve. These have also been helpful at avoiding ego inflation, putting him up against the sharpest math students in the city or the country rather than just a few classmates and a standardized curriculum.
We've done a lot of talking together about the basics of things like set theory, boolean algebra, group theory, linear algebra. There's a lot of math that's understandable to very small kids but that doesn't get covered in a standard curriculum. This is reasonable of the standard curriculum, since most non-scientist non-engineers will never need to know e.g. what a power set is, and even most scientists and engineers can get away with believing theorems without picking up the groundwork to prove them themselves ... but if you've got a kid who's interested in math, then she may be interested in math enough not to worry too hard about which of the things she's learning have what future applications. Being able to learn multiple things at a time can also be helpful if one doesn't "click"; even professional mathematicians often just dive into one subfield they really enjoy, or end up mostly on one side of a divide like the "algebraist-vs-analyst" rift.
For "daughter":
I'm actually not sure? I might have screwed this one up badly somehow! My oldest daughter has a great talent for and a great dislike for math. She's taking Calculus at 15 and doing a couple math competitions, but solely to spruce up her college applications and get ahead on engineering major requirements. Watch from 4:55 through 6:10 of NewsRadio "Houses of the Holy", but imagine a girl doing math instead of a man doing magic tricks.
My youngest doesn't really dislike math, but she doesn't have any of the interest her brother does. She's joined him in a math club, but whereas he's there for the "math" part she's there for the "club" part. Your daughter might not have the stereotypical people-vs-things gender difference, but for any child having a community to work with and (to a limited extent) compete with can be strongly motivating.
As a former mathy child:
I really wish I'd grown up with more resources like Khan Academy, but also Wikipedia and especially math YouTube. The adults around me all tried to help me hit my full potential, to great effect, but there are interesting subfields that I didn't even know existed until I stumbled across references to them somewhere else.
I wish I'd somehow challenged myself more in high school. I took a few night courses at the local university after exhausting the available high school math classes, but still had a sudden shock when I got into a selective university and could no longer just ace every math test without serious study first.
I ended up in applied math, after nearly just going full engineering, and in hindsight this was more of a good idea than a mere diversion. The state of the art in pure math is so far ahead of us lowly applied mathematicians, and I think it's good for my morale to come up with ideas that I can then immediately implement and use, rather than ideas that for all I know might be foundational to 22nd century physics but that might more likely then be nothing more than footnotes in papers nobody reads. And despite what I said above about proper math brains not caring about future applications, it's still easier for me to remember new ideas I learn if I can immediately see a few ways to apply them to something connected to reality rather than if they just feel like a neat self-contained game.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Thematically I wouldn't say Lovecraft emphasizes alien power so much as human powerlessness; it's just that those are two sides of the same coin. His is a universe where humans are alive not because we're strong enough to survive so much as because we're weak enough to go unnoticed.
The first Gateway book is probably a good answer in the same sense as the Chernobyl miniseries; I'd say the final book in the series ("The Annals of the Heechee") is a good answer in other ways. I don't think I can say much more about the distinction without spoilers for both, though.
The rest of the Gateway series isn't as good as the first book, though - bigger ideas but without the same depth of characterization.
roystgnr
4mo ago
I was expecting a link to this. "I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench..."
roystgnr
4mo ago
One of the ideas I liked from LessWrong was that of "anti-inductive systems": systems where a proposition about them can become false via the process of discovering it was true. At first glance the idea sounds paradoxical; then at second glance you can come up with a couple cases where it's so obviously correct you don't need to think about it, but there are cases in-between where consciously worrying about the problem is helpful, and I think "don't take your own or your group's own virtue for granted" encompasses a whole category of them. "I'm too rational to fall for simple human biases" is like "we can trust the priests/feminist-allies/cops/non-profits/Crusaders/etc. completely" - even if such a proposition is actually true at the moment you conclude it, as soon as you come to believe it you're likely to drop your guard too far and eventually be betrayed by your own overconfidence.
I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine.
Just looking at the last 40 days of computers is enough to support "less" rather than "more". My favorite from quickly skimming reports from the last month or two would probably be Rsync contains six vulnerabilities: "When combined, the first two vulnerabilities (heap buffer overflow and information leak) allow a client to execute arbitrary code on a device that has an Rsync server running. The client requires only anonymous read-access to the server, such as public mirrors. Additionally, attackers can take control of a malicious server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client. Sensitive data, such as SSH keys, can be extracted, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as .bashrc or .popt"
The vulnerabilities are "present within versions 3.3.0 and below" of software that has been heavily used for nearly 30 years now. I'll agree with you that this is "thanks to the internet", but can we really call it "suddenly" now that the internet is four decades old, especially for cases like this where the software was specifically written to make use of the internet? I'm sympathetic with (and a perpetrator of) mistakes of the form "Joe writes a program that reads a file, and expects it to be used by very clever people reading only files that they and their personally-known friends/coworkers created, but then it becomes more popular and now every nescient email user who double-clicks strange attachments is one JoesInstaller away from putting a backdoor on their computer." But for web browsers, mass-market software, servers listening for arbitrary TCP connections, etc., surely there's a better solution to e.g. heap buffer overflows than expecting every software author to finally Git Gud.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Beat Saber seems to be the most popular, and I definitely had fun with it. I prefer Supernatural, but that does have a recurring fee.
roystgnr
5mo ago
The Night Court theme is asked the question of "how can you possibly give an appropriate introduction to such an awesome show", and yet manages to answer with a confident "don't worry, I got this".
Oh, it seems entirely reasonable to me, just a very specifically weird way to be reasonable, out of a lot of alternatives. As a choice pushed by narcissists it would make sense to me. But as a request specifically made by a blind person it's an interesting mystery.
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