roystgnr
14hr ago
Honestly, in my opinion their collaborations were purely win-win. If you look at the novels Pournelle wrote on his own, they were relatively dry and often a little hard to maintain interest in. If you look at the novels Niven wrote on his own, they were relatively fantastical and (except for the fantasies, where you know what you're getting into) sometimes a little hard to take seriously. Their collaborations don't all thread the needle between those SFF extremes perfectly, but they do better than either alone. There was definitely always conflict between their characters, or between their characters and the worlds/universes they built, but that's a good thing. "Inferno" in particular worked well for me solely because (spoiler alert, albeit such an extremely vague spoiler it's probably fine) they took a clash between one of Niven's major styles vs one of Pournelle's influences and really leaned into it and wrapped the whole book around it.
roystgnr
15hr ago
Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.
I want to switch to whatever programming language this is describing.
I can imagine a language where I just name classes, then write a bunch of short method declarations and invariants and postconditions, and finally the compiler/AI figures out what long complicated algorithms and data structures will satisfy everything most efficiently, but right now it's still just not enough to be merely clear and consistent.
Eventually the systems will just understand intent or outright demand clarification, and fancy prompting won't add much to the equation.
This, though, is hard to argue with. It feels like skill with "prompting" is more like what you need to do to trick a language model into emulating AI, not something you'd need to do to the extent a model is actually AI.
roystgnr
16hr ago
The Lord of the Rings is more accessible to children than I'd thought it would be; IIRC I waited until my youngest was 8 or 9, but probably didn't need to. The biggest limitation for me was that I wanted to let my kids all watch the movies shortly after we finished with the books, but I wanted to start with the Hobbit movies (because that way you get LotR second as a climax rather than the Hobbit trilogy second as a disappointment), and aside from quality concerns, those movies are more graphic and gory about the violence than I'm happy with. But if you just stick with the books, the main issue with LotR for kids is that it demands a level of attention and patience that younger kids might not have yet, especially if yours just got to the point where the Hobbit wasn't too much for her. IIRC my youngest was fine with the meat of the books, but perhaps just barely, because both she and her (then 10 or 11) brother decided to skip most of the history/sociology/geography prologue. Maybe that's a good touchstone? If your daughter is so interested in hobbits that she can make it past "Concerning Pipeweed" then the rest of the books should be a breeze.
The sequel to Mote is probably worth reading, but "worth reading" is a big letdown from "one of the best science fiction books in history", so go into it with tempered expectations if you don't want to be disappointed. There are no other Niven/Pournelle collaborations as good as "Mote"; IMHO the only ones that are close in limited ways are "Footfall" (first contact, with a psychological gulf), "Lucifer's Hammer" (civilization as a character), "Inferno" (wild plot), and "Legacy of Heorot" (page turning suspense+action), but they're all more flawed in other ways.
roystgnr
1d ago
Thanks!
How long have you had yours? I do like to drive cars into the ground, and I worry that everything but the Model S still has less than a decade of track record. On the other hand, my current 20yo car is a Hyundai, and IIRC when I bought it their track record was so bad that they had started offering extra-long warranties to try to prove to customers that their latest models weren't more of the same, and I didn't regret it.
Are pluggable hybrids still a reasonable thing, or did they get squeezed out of the market by full EVs?
I used to think they'd be the best of both worlds, with electricity for the bulk of our driving on short commutes/errands but with gas range/refueling-speed for road trips.
roystgnr
1d ago
Could you explain why? I'm driving an ancient car into the ground, but I'm going to need a new car (or two, depending where my oldest goes to college) in the next couple years, and I'm still struggling with both "new vs used" (one of our current cars was new, one was used, and the tradeoffs seem to change with warranty policies and market fluctuations) and with "EV vs ICE".
roystgnr
3d ago
Do you mean fluid intelligence?
Fluid intelligence is "figuring out a new unfamiliar problem", crystallized intelligence is "accumulating enough learned knowledge that you can apply some of it straightforwardly". IMHO the latter is what LLMs are already really good at, the former is where they're still shaky. I can ask qualitative questions of AIs about my field and get answers that I'd be happy to see from a young grad student, but if I ask questions that require more precise answers and/or symbol manipulation they still tend to drop or omit terms while confidently stating that they've done no such thing. That confidence is why I'd never use a yes/no question as a test; even if one gets it right I'd want to see a proof or at least a chain of reasoning to be sure it didn't get it right by accident.
roystgnr
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d ago
That's exactly the sort of contrast I was thinking of. I personally liked Worm from the start, but I had to tell my kids "wait until chapter 5 before we decide whether to finish reading this or not" about Mother of Learning.
Are there really people who need to read like 25% of Worm before they're hooked? That would finally be something to tie with Babylon 5 as the world champion of Most Difficult Fiction To Recommend. "Just spend 15 hours or so on this so you don't miss important backstory, and then, THEN it really gets good! Unless it's just not to your taste after all, in which case I'll be out of town for a while; I can come back when you're no longer enraged."
roystgnr
4d ago
Thanks for this! That sounds like something I could let the 12yo read to himself, or at least something that I could read to him and the 10yo.
if you can read and understand something, it's for you.
I consider this to be a goal of fiction but not a tautology. One of my favorite books is "Citizen of the Galaxy", a book aimed at 10-12 year olds where one of the side characters is obviously (to adults) a brothel owner-operator but where the evidence to that effect would go over little kids' heads. I also have the greatest of respect for whoever wrote the line "If I had a black light, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting" in "Guardians of the Galaxy". And even for less clever writers, "there's a scene change and everybody who should know what happened off-screen can probably figure it out" often isn't too hard to set up.
But my kids all started reading at age 2 or 3, and started reading long-form stuff like Harry Potter at 5 or 6, and precocious intellect runs in my family in a way that precocious maturity ... does not. My kids are much more mature than I was at their ages, but even though they'd survive darker/grosser/etc. well enough, they still have their preferences. They all thought HPMOR was good enough to be worth its most upsetting scene, but they clearly thought there was a scale there with weight on both sides.
Aw, well, thanks; glad I checked anyway.
Though ... instead of asking a long-shot question on my own behalf, I probably should have asked an obvious one on my son's behalf: what age would you say "Thresholder" is appropriate for? My kids loved HPMOR and he's currently re-reading "Mother of Learning", so I'd like to be able to find other long /r/rational -style work I could recommend for him, but my own next two favorites would be WtC and Worm and both get too frequently explicit about the horror/gore/trauma/etc. sides of their stories. The only warning I see on "Thresholder" is for profanity, and if even that's really excessive (or if his little sister wants in) I could probably read out loud to do a little light censorship on the fly.
roystgnr
4d ago
Any thoughts on "Shadows of the Limelight"? I loved "Worth the Candle" and "Metropolitan Man" (and "The Randi Prize", and "Instruments of Destruction"), but I couldn't get in to SotL and I still wonder if I just gave up too soon and didn't make it to the good part.
roystgnr
4d 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
4d ago
My kids really like sparkling red grape juice for things like New Years' celebrations.
My favorite mocktail is a virgin Moscow Mule - the ginger and acid leave it with enough "bite" even without vodka.
I've only tried a non-alcoholic red wine once, though, and it was lousy, so I can't help directly, sorry.
Congratulations and good luck on the pregnancy!
roystgnr
7d ago
Sci-fi with only touches of horror, but A Fire Upon The Deep was pretty good at this. The worldbuilding is a bit contrived, but cleverly so and no more than necessary to make the power+horror plausible.
roystgnr
7d ago
I made sure my kids watched The Hobbit, but only because they'd want to see it eventually anyways and they enjoyed it much more by watching it before the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so it was a source of excitement rather than disappointment.
Beware reading Harry Potter to kids who might still be too young for the later themes. I started reading the first book to my oldest, figuring it would take us half a year to get through each book at a few pages a night, which would give her a few years to mature as the sequels got more serious and frightening. Instead she decided that this was going to be when she started reading chapter books by herself, and then I couldn't bring myself to make her wait on the later books, nor or to forbid her watching the movies after she'd blitzed through the whole series. She at least didn't have any nightmares that she told me about...
roystgnr
8d ago
I'd guess a mix of predator and salience bias, but possibly also one or two you missed:
- The MFSP as moral self-licensing: if it's really those men who are the bad ones, then why would the male feminist bother to get too introspective when his own behavior turns creepy? He already knows he's a good person, even if maybe there have been a few misunderstandings here or there. Wiki says this effect may have been exaggerated pre-replication crisis, but I think anyone paying attention to the culture war has seen people insisting Our Heroic Adventurers are nothing like Their Brutish Invaders too often to count; imagine how much easier it is to rationalize failures in one's self rather than just one's favored politicians, activists, and commentators.
- The MFSP as under-policed serial offender: Joss is the guy who casts the Strong Women Characters! Neil's writing subverts the misogyny in Patriarchal Society! If you've heard some dubious rumors that seem to conflict with that, do you really want to thoughtlessly spread them around? Even if people in such positions aren't initially more likely to offend than male non-feminists, if they don't get as much pushback when they cross lines then they're likely to end up committing more and more serious offenses before they're finally outed.
roystgnr
9d ago
I've seen "the PI is barely getting paid" budgets before, but they weren't lies, they were common cases where the bulk of the work was being done by a postdoc or one or two grad students, with a faculty member PI just providing supervision and answering questions for a couple hours a week for each such project. Arguably the most important thing the PI was doing in those situations was "having the paper qualifications for the bureaucracy to allow them to be a PI", and maybe that should raise some eyebrows, but about bureaucratic requirements rather than funding. Even then I'm not sure changing requirements would change much, because the second most important thing the PI was doing was acting as a guarantor, using their track record of good collaborative work to indicate that they were good at picking successful postdocs and students and that they'd help keep that record up if the current project ran into problems.
I might have just been lucky enough to be around honorable people, though. E.g. these were the sorts of PIs who would insist on a paper's first author being the lowly student who did most of the work, whereas I've heard that "the first author is the one with seniority" is sometimes the rule elsewhere.
roystgnr
9d ago
Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on.
"Indirect costs" are overhead, and 60% is too high (much higher than average in the US right now), but it's not all administrative overhead. Everything from lab equipment and computers to the lights and air conditioning in the research buildings is being paid for by that indirect take. You could make grant recipients itemize instead, but then you either have administrators (more administrative overhead!) do the itemizing, or you have often-highly-paid researchers wasting time on figuring out what fraction of their PC upgrade needs to come out of grant A vs grant B.
This feels like the ivory tower version of "What do you mean the plumber is charging $200! He worked for an hour to replace a $50 part!" You might want to look for a cheaper plumber next time (and in this analogy, I do think it's a problem that spending other people's money doesn't give grant committees so much incentive to price shop), but if you can't find any cheaper plumbers then it might just be possible that you're not considering his whole cost accounting.
roystgnr
10d ago
I was wondering if maybe your citation would be nutpicking, and worried when I didn't recognize the name, but shame on my ignorance. The "chairman of the Communist International from 1919 to 1926" is a pretty solid reference. Thanks.
roystgnr
10d ago
And when the man Cheney shot got out of the hospital, he told the press conference, "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with."
On the one hand, it was an accident, and it's possible that the victim contributed to it by moving too far ahead of the line of hunters too soon, and legitimately felt guilty about that.
On the other hand, it was Cheney, who you can absolutely imagine walking up to the guy he just shot and stating "If you survive this, the first thing you're going to do is apologize for getting in the way of my shot."
roystgnr
10d ago
The west (well, mostly the US) fought against Pol Pot taking control of Cambodia, but even the US opposition was incidental enough that we don't even think of it as an American war; we were mostly bombing the hell out of North Vietnamese logistics routes plus any Cambodians unfortunate enough to be in the blast radii, and none of it stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking control in the end.
The fight which took Cambodia away from the Khmer Rouge was accomplished by, of all nations, Communist Vietnam. I'd like to imagine that this proves the existence of a "what the fuck are you doing with those babies" red line that even most Communists don't want to see crossed, but I think the reality was more like "territorial disputes got violent and that snowballed". Regardless of Vietnam's motives, at this point for obvious reasons the west was giving them no support, and a little political resistance, and so when it turned out that Chomsky was wrong we didn't exactly have any reasons to be proud of or want to talk about the whole affair.
Huh; thank you. Looking around, I think "The simplicity of Prolog" makes a compelling argument ... but on the other hand it's a little disconcerting not to find any Prolog examples in e.g. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. If it were a new language I'd assume there was a chicken-and-egg problem here, where people shy away from interesting-but-unpopular languages for economic reasons and then those languages don't become popular ... but Prolog is older than I am, as old as C, with open source implementations decades old. What's the catch?
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