roystgnr
3hr ago
"our generation"
I coached my first after-school MathCounts session of the year today. One of the kids grabbed a sparkling water from my bag of juices and sodas. The other kids ragged on him: "What are you, thirty-five?", because of course that's like the Pinnacle Of Old to them. I'm about half a generation past that now...
with grey hair
This is my only reprieve; my hair may have thinned to the point where I have to buy spray-type sunscreen or get sunburned through it, but there's so little grey that whatever's there is still managing to hide itself among the dirty-blonde.
roystgnr
8hr ago
A valid proof in the mathematical sense is simply one where every single step is justified by either an axiom or an already-proven theorem. You see some of these in a good Algebra 1 class where just going from "z=2(x+y)+x" to "z=3x+2y" uses left- and right-distributivity once each, associativity twice, commutativity once, and identity once. Then if you're lucky you never see them again, at least until you're using a formal proof verifier that actually wants a complete proof, yes, even if it's a hundred times longer. What's in the literature instead are "proofs" where we skip five or fifty steps at a time because we know our audience will be able to fill in the obvious bits inside those gaps between the big checkpoints, even though the definition of "obvious" depends on the audience and is famously a little slippery. So don't feel bad. Even when your audience is a professor, "obvious" still isn't a well-defined adjective and everyone is still stuck trying to intuit it. At least with theses and papers your advisors and reviewers will come back and say "step 23 wasn't clear enough; fix it". With homework or tests requiring proofs, professors' only options are to let it slide or to mark you down if you skipped a step they don't think was obvious.
roystgnr
13hr ago
Al Qaeda was so angry at ISIS because they were worse than wrong, they were early.
It'd be funny if Bin Laden actually had read the first Foundation book, and only the first. "I was becoming a military leader who was going to restore the full glory of the Empire Caliphate, but structural-demographic forces caused our own people to undermine themselves! How could we possibly have ever expected something like to happen?! Hush, Marwan; why are you babbling about 'Foundation and Empire'? We don't have time to read now!"
the two greatest titans of early SciFi
Clifford Simak and Murray Leinster?
Only half-joking here - Asimov and Heinlein were the two greatest titans of Golden Age SF, but Asimov at least was very cognizant of and pushed for more long-term recognition of the "Silver Age"/"pulp era" greats preceding them. And Asimov was an utter egotist (in fact, it looks like he backdated a previously-unsalable short story of his own to shoehorn it into that anthology?) so praise from him in his own fields was very high praise.
obviously modeled himself after the main character.
With a few significant divergences. But other than that, Mrs. Tate, how did you like the book?
roystgnr
14hr ago
If the story was written from Hermione's perspective, it would be much more interesting.
I'm sorry to join the "reading QCs a month later" pile-on, but I have to ask: are you sure this is true?
I've always thought of it as a bit of genius for Rowling to make Hermione a side character. From a Watsonian perspective Hermione is halfway to being a Mary Sue, but that turns out to be fine, because she doesn't fit the most important part of the Doylist definition of a Mary Sue: she's not Our Main Character. We don't live in her head, we spend a bunch of time away from her, and we don't even meet her until several chapters into the first book, so we don't ever begin to relate to her as a Wish Fulfillment stand-in. She can face a threat capable of incapacitating her for half a book without readers missing the climax. She can be a Double Witch with extra-secret time-turner powers or be the focus of a love triangle with a celebrity athlete, without those things feeling like just a Twilight-style annoying paean to how great Our Protagonist is, because we see those things from the outside. She doesn't need to break characterization and seize the Idiot Ball to get into interesting conflicts, because we get emotionally invested enough into Harry that we don't get too annoyed when he's idiot enough for the both of them. (which he kind of has to be; since he fits a ton of other Mary Sue traits, he'd get pretty annoying too if he wasn't regularly failing and getting smacked around)
roystgnr
1d ago
The intuitions required for formal proof verification are "it's worth rewriting this proof in another language that's an order of magnitude more verbose just so you can get a computer to tell you what you're sure you already know" and "the verifier doesn't have any soundness bugs that will invalidate any of its verifications" Historically the latter has sometimes been untrue and the former has usually been untrue. LLMs are fixing the first problem, which is exposing and leading to fixes for the second problem, but that's all a relatively new development. It's going to take a while to go back through all the mathematical literature and see how much of it might have problems due to predating the coming era of formal verification.
Consider the recent construction of a complex structure on the six-sphere. The simplest English explanation I've seen is under a thousand lines of (admittedly difficult!) writing and mathematical notation. The Lean formalization is a quarter-million lines of code. It's ... probably correct, people seem to think? But if it is correct, the construction would (reportedly; this is outside my field and way beyond me) contradict a 2020 paper (which itself was a correction to a 1998 paper), so we're almost certainly either producing new broken proofs or revealing old invalid proofs here.
roystgnr
2d ago
I've not yet made it through the whole story, which logically does undermine my criticisms of it ... except perhaps for this specific criticism ...
roystgnr
2d ago
I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring)
To someone who just specifically listed "get rid of sixty percent of the text" as something that would improve most web fiction?
roystgnr
2d ago
I haven't read author commentary, so you could be right. My read is that
IIRC the other big perspectives that might engender disagreement (or stronger disagreement, when there's disagreement presented in-story):
roystgnr
2d ago
There's basically three types of "great men" in the Foundation books. There's the ones who can learn psychohistory, and they really do fit the "great men of history" historian-speak definition, figuring out how to steer history using what they learn. There's the ones who can't learn psychohistory (either because they're just not among the galaxy's geniuses and/or because the psychohistorians deliberately kept it from them to keep their steering from being upset), and a society full of the latter is basically running on History From Below rules with no Great Men in the historian-speak sense, despite having great men in the colloquial sense. And there's [redacted due to spoilers], who don't appear for a while, for Watsonian "that was really improbable until whole centuries had elapsed" and Doylist "the arc plot really needed a twist by the time whole books had elapsed" reasons.
After Hari Seldon, the "great men" in the Foundation stories are basically the people whose skill is "be clever enough to realize that there's only one solution to the crisis besetting them, then use it" at best, and it's not even clear to what extent that's necessary because there are other cases where the heroes fail to see the right solution but it essentially enacts itself under their noses.
roystgnr
2d ago
very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with
I'd love to find out what you're talking about here. The obvious candidate that jumps to mind is
roystgnr
2d ago
Wales actually has a handful of great short stories. IMHO they're better on average than his long fiction!
Also, although I loved Worth the Candle, it's long and some of its twists and turns are controversial. IMHO every revelation was utterly sensible in hindsight and made a good story even better, but de gustibus non disputandum, and I recognize that if I didn't like a major twist after I'd read 200-odd chapters to get to it I'd be massively disappointed.
You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and deconstructions that lead to unique differences from the canon. 80k words, so more "short-length web novel" than medium-length, though.
roystgnr
3d ago
I was taught "records" at some point, but on the other hand it's been 40 years since my first trip to a "Museum of Natural History" where it was considered unremarkable that "Natural" basically meant "Pre-".
roystgnr
3d ago
just because it wasn't practical for some rando writing a weird one-off novel in the universe to talk to the chief
This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.
Not a perfect solution, since the suits might be unanimously idiots or might have not seen some foreshadowing or planning that part of "established" canon was a lie, or the chief might still change his mind later and not care that a random novel gets invalidated by it, but still better than adjudicating canon by majority suit vote.
roystgnr
3d ago
Harry Potter as an example is kind of strange. Harry's parents being dead is intro backstory. Mid-book 1 you find out that Wizard Hitler murdered them. Book 1 climax, you learn WH is coming back. Clearly there's some deadly shit about to go down.
Yet it takes until Book 4 before we get a major character death, and Book 6 before we get one that Harry and the readers really care about! The Watsonian explanation (Dr., not Emma) appears to be that Wizard Hitler is just even more outnumbered and incompetent (excepting the wizardry) than Regular Hitler was, and needs to lay low a lot, but the Doylist explanation is clearly that Rowling knew she was writing for kids and needed to pull her punches a bit.
roystgnr
4d ago
"Rowena herself would tell me to get out more, whatever that means"; "I'll undoubtedly end up in Ravenclaw House if the hat isn't screaming too loudly for the rest of us to make out any words"
roystgnr
5d ago
It's pronounced like "ngwin", but the leading ng- is hard for most English speakers (when not preceded by a vowel), and "win" is a totally acceptable Anglicized pronunciation.
I can say the leading ng- well enough ... but the real trick is that even "ngwin" is Anglicized. The Vietnamese name is Nguyễn, and those accents all affect pronunciation.
The ê is easy enough, already part of "ngwin". That "hat" is just one of the diacritics that better distinguish vowels. Vietnamese e sounds like the e in English "petty", ê generally like the e in English "pretty".
But adding the tilde ễ means you've got a tonal vowel. These are six completely different vowels in Vietnamese and you can get completely different words with each. Oh, and I think that particular tone comes in both a North-Vietnam-accent and a South-Vietnam-accent flavor. I cannot say either correctly.
roystgnr
5d ago
The Wikipedia graph here isn't bad. Looks like Gaza was ruled by Egypt at six points, maybe seven if you count the latter phase of the Fatimid caliphate.
If you look in to the details of the transitions in that graph ... well, it's only a bit of an oversimplification to say that there's acts of war all the way down.
roystgnr
5d ago
The confusing thing about America's constant change and upheaval is that, although dispositional/Burkean/"small-c" conservatism still makes some sense here, and it's still true that traditions which have stood the test of time are less risky than new ideas that haven't, "for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition". California didn't get to be California by clamping down that hard on housing and industry; that's a new idea that makes Burkean conservatives shriek, even if the alternative of endless new construction is also worrying. Riding the tiger of modernity is scary, but we're already on it, and jumping right off is scarier.
roystgnr
5d ago
I'm upvoting you not because you've convinced me, but because I love reading things I disagree with so strongly defended so eloquently. Cheers!
I suppose you're actually swaying me a little bit. Although I wouldn't say "freedom" must necessarily include the idea that property rights in real estate extend indefinitely above it, even that idea would often be better than the common NIMBY status quo, and finding a good balance in between the two is hard.
Online, I'm with you, but in public physical spaces, I disagree so much
At least in principle, I feel exactly the opposite way!
Consider a billboard: it's basically taking up part my view of the sky, and potentially distracting me while I'm driving, for no benefit to me in most cases! (the exceptions being any case where it's not informing me about some product that I wouldn't otherwise hear about and would genuinely prefer to my other options) But an online banner, no matter how obnoxious or pointless to me personally, is at least paying some fraction of a cent towards the maintenance of a website that I chose to visit and probably want to keep running.
In practice, though, I'd count your Fenway Park example as a private physical space, not a public one. And just like online, there the people who are providing us with something we want are getting paid for the ads they're showing us. I might have preferred a higher ticket price for a more ad-free experience, personally, but if they're not just giving me a plain green wall plus a higher ticket price to compensate then I'm probably outnumbered on that and it's overall good that they're catering to the majority instead of me.
roystgnr
6d ago
A black and brown majority capitalist country does not exists. It’s a fiction that doesn’t exists.
The Index of Economic Freedom does show a pretty obvious geographic correlation.
But "doesn't exists" is still wrong. We can still go down the index and find Cabo Verde (roughly 2/3 Creole/Mulatto, 1/3 Black, 1% unmixed European heritage) and Barbados (90+% Black, 3.5% White) within spitting distance of the United States, plus Chile (roughly 2/3 Mestizo, 1/3 White) a bit higher than the US.
And there are also outliers in the other direction, leading to greater overlap. If instead of the US we take the level of economic freedom in Hungary (still 92% Hungarian White, most of the rest other-European ancestry, with 3.4% Romani as the biggest arguable-outlier) as par, that's now surpassed by 4 more Caribbean countries (3 super-majority Black, the other super-majority mixed) and 4 Central American countries, and 2 out of the 3 South American countries surpassing it are super-majority Mestizo. We can count MENA as a subcategory of White, but that'll still leave us with 5 sub-Saharan African non-White countries (2 mostly-Creole island nations, 3 supermajority-Black nations on the continent) beating Hungary.
There's room to argue about the Heritage Foundation's metric for economic freedom, but bear in mind I'm already spotting you a lot of handicap here by defining "capitalist" as "more economically free than Hungary", much less "more economically free than the US". The list of seriously non-capitalist countries these days is like 6 entries long, and three of the "communist" countries on it still have stock markets, two of them big ones.
roystgnr
6d ago
Gary, Indian is 88% black and doesn’t have electricity.
By yesterday the number of remaining customers without power was down to 863 from the peak of 374,500; when I check today it's at 113.
Two weeks of major outages (including a full week for the majority of Gary) is pretty awful, and some population factors did contribute a little to that, but I think the main culprit was clearly the "at least three (3) confirmed tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, extreme straight-line winds, and flooding". When "Straight-linewind speeds reached up to ninety-nine (99) miles per hour near Gary, Indiana", that was effectively the peak wind force of a Category 2 Hurricane.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last instance I can find of a Cat 2 hurricane making landfall in a majority-white area (super-majority white, as it happened) was the (ironically named in this context?) Hurricane Juan. In addition to the 8 dead and $200M of damage, Wiki recalls that "Nova Scotia power reported that they had restored power to the last of their affected customers by October 12, 2 weeks after the storm had passed."
roystgnr
6d ago
Less than we ended up with in Afghanistan, by a factor of roughly 2 in each case if you count per-capita (more for Germany if you don't), yeah.
roystgnr
7d ago
this is how Trump's terms look up there
The source at the bottom - https://globalnews.ca/news/12026323/canada-trade-tariff-demands/us/ - redirects me to a weirdly-photoshopped image of a guy in his underwear. Removing the "us/" gets me to a normal 404 page. Neither URL is in archive.org. Searching for phrases from the purported headline of the source just gets me URLs of a hundred other people speculating about what looks like an AI hallucination. I can't entirely argue with "how Trump's terms look up there", because the tweet does have 10,000 likes, but I am kind of curious about what Trump's terms look like up there to people working from actual sources. Got any of those (actual sources, or reactions to actual sources, or ideally both)?
Germs don't inhabit much possibility-space at all, for the same reason that evolved life forms in general don't: any living thing must be a chain of neutral-to-positive mutations away from a prior already-viable population of living things. You can eventually get sharp claws and powerful wings via a long chain of gradual changes to keratin scales and tetrapod forelimbs, but natural falconry has nothing modern militaries desire or fear, because with intelligent design unconstrained by intermediate-form viability we can just go straight to bullets and missiles and jet engines. Maybe no leaps like that are possible at the nanoscale and microscale? I'm not looking forward to finding out.
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