Cushman

Indeed. Bittersweet consequences, I’ve always thought, since it implies we wasted centuries recording empirical data that didn’t add up, while pure logical coherence was pointing straight at quantization and a universal speed limit.

Modern philosophers are (obviously?) most interested in how this historical fact should affect our handling of, say, our current best model for QG. That’s a fascinating thing for lay people to ponder, which is one reason I wish the context weren’t so opaque to HN.

(I should caveat that I’m less familiar with the “history of philosophy of science” side of this— there may be a live debate as to whether this would obtain with the logic Newton himself had access to, for example.)

Yeah, exactly! You can see why the dome is the famous one, even though it’s the most recent. Previously there were models to finitize whatever term one was worried about specifically, but they all had an infinity somewhere. Even since Cantor, that makes philosophers antsy.

The dome is analogous to a loophole-free Bell test— most people already accept the conclusion, so it’s not a surprising result, but having it in one simple argument closes the door to a lot of nitpicking.

Oh, of course! SEP’s summary is pretty readable. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#ClaMe... Past that you’ll probably need to read the papers, it’s very niche.

Sorry, I should have remembered that’s not actually an easy google :)

Mmm, I promise I haven’t taken any position. Is that a position? In which case, mea culpa, I really don’t care if the dome holds. Even if I cared, I wouldn’t care, because space invaders already gets us all that plus sound effects.

Not for nothing, even historians and philosophers of physics broadly don’t care if the dome holds. Some do, of course, but unless you're thinking of a specific paper it’ll probably be less frustrating for everyone to leave it there— with no hard feelings!

I’ll take my lumps for saying this: If you’ve downvoted me I’d love to know why!

Did I sound preachy? I really don’t mean to! I’m not an educator, and it’s hard to communicate a discipline’s “common knowledge” without coming off a bit patronizing.

It’s just, every time the dome comes up people want to talk about the physics of it— but the author isn’t a physicist, the journal isn’t for physicists, it’s not making any claims in physics…

It’s a (famous) philosophy paper, specifically philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of physics. If you aren’t a philosopher, physics is annoyingly irrelevant here.

There’s so much more to say— space invaders! It’s way weirder than this! The math still checks out! Philosophy is cool actually! Sorry to take up your time!

Good hypotheses both! “We’ve never been able to pin something this size before” covers a lot of wiggle room. So to speak.

(FWIW I’m thrilled about the possibility of a rtrp drop this year, and I have to assume 'pera is as well. But this video doesn’t look just like flux pinning we’ve seen before. It’s visibly a little different in a way that wants explanation. I wouldn’t come out the gate calling it a hoax, but I’d feel better about not doing that if the basis for skepticism were at least acknowledged.)

> I don’t think this is a right approach.

You’re welcome not to think so! I’m just pointing out the relevant context. This isn’t an argument in a vacuum, there’s an academic discipline that has thoroughly engaged with it.

Part of that is a vast body of literature that in turns agrees and disagrees with your observations— to take a side, I’d start clicking links from “theory-ladenness”.

But the dome is rather boring. P1, this math describes a deterministic system; P2, here is a non-deterministic result; QED, P1 is false.

Since we know that P1 doesn’t describe the universe, it should be hard to have a strong opinion unless you’re invested in a philosophical position about pre-modern scientific practice.

(I’m not invested, so I don’t have an opinion other than that it isn’t trivially refutable as stated.)

Hoping I’m not too late to head off the usual confusion: this is an interesting result in philosophy of physics, not in physics.

We already know that classical mechanics is non-physical. This result (and others) show that it is not even internally consistent— that is, you shouldn’t need any empirical evidence to know that there’s something else going on.

That’s interesting to philosophers and historians, but since you and I already know empirically that it’s non-physical, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Anyway, if you enjoyed learning about the dome, you may also look up the lesser-known “space invaders”, in which arbitrary objects can appear at infinity, with infinite velocity, and then be brought to rest at any time T. But again, don’t look for reasons that doesn’t actually happen— it means the theory is wrong.

Okay! I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat, so all I can say is I don’t have an opinion on that.

What accounts for the smooth “settling” into place after the last touch around 10s?

I have no idea what I’m talking about, but in other flux pinning demonstrations the sample seems to oscillate around the fixed point. That smooth settling looks like some sort of damping, like maybe a force that increases with distance, like maybe spring tension.

(Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)

I’m not vegan so it’s none of my business, but: Sure! if you’re not eating processed foods, and you don’t want to spend hours a day cooking, everyone needs supplements.

Don’t forget that our salt and our flour and our milk and — “raw ingredients” — are supplemented by default with micros the standard diet is deficient in.

If the standard diet was vegan, there’d be taurine in the lentils and we’d be saying a meat-and-dairy diet is impossible without “supplements”.

Indeed, and to clarify, it's not a binary feeling for anyone-- IRC is better than email, FaceTime is better than the telephone. VRChat is state of the art on prosumer hardware, but it's not competitive with the boardroom. Yet.

> I can’t imagine anyone buying a $3000 headset for “videoconferencing” as the killer feature.

Believe it. "Social presence"[0], the feeling of actually being in the room with another human being, is a very real phenomenon. Its influences are things like gaze following, head movements, hand gestures-- things flatscreen video chat has not and likely will never be able to capture veridically. Its impacts are things like empathy, affinity, trust-- things you very much care about when money is at stake.

To be excessively glib, social presence is why deals are still being won by the firmer handshake, not the better term sheet.

Can Apple deliver this today? Who knows. No one's done it outside of a lab before. But if they can, this isn't competing with video chat-- it's competing with airplanes. And if they can, $3000 is an unbeatable price.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory

This is a great point, but I think it goes towards the cost-benefit analysis. The relevant comparison isn’t a sophonically-suppressed humanity which is never inspired again, but rather Maciej’s new age of exploration— a humanity very much conquering local space and reaching to the stars, just not with their own fleshy pestilent mitts.

The open question I have is does a planetary colony help per se, once the technical problems have been solved on an emergency basis, and what’s left are social problems which are far too late to cure?

Will there be a chapter on this element?

It’s always been unclear to me how much a Martian civilization would improve humanity’s odds of surviving Seveneves, what with humans being involved and all. I think it’s the article of faith I’ve seen the least substantive critique of— maybe because it’s so depressing to think critically about.

Cool! Y’all, this is obviously an RPC interface, but the point is that `import { onNewTodo } from './CreateTodo.telefunc.js'` is not, as written, an RPC. That transform, with seamless type support et cetera, is what makes this interesting. (If you think it’s interesting.)

I think it’s interesting; I experimented with a higher-magic version of this a couple of years ago. (It had continuations to support returning callbacks, could preserve object identity, and could lift inline anonymous functions to the server with some amount of intelligence.) My goal was to make the RPCs as close as possible to local async functions, which was really fun when it was working.

My experience was that for the simplest use cases, the ergonomics were unbeatable. Just drop a `@remote` tag into your TodoMVC frontend, and there’s your TodoMVC backend. But as soon as I had to look under the hood (for something as simple as caching behavior), the “just a function” interface was a distraction and I found myself wishing for a more conventional RPC interface.

(I think that might be why you tend to see this sort of magic more in the context of a full framework (such as Meteor), where all the typical use cases can be answered robustly. If you’re building your thing out of modules, cleverer abstractions usually mean more work overall to integrate everything and boring is better.)

Well, yeah, I jumped in to defend the idea that the word "the" counts as an adjective. It seems vaguely possible that my argument is not backed by much besides bluster. (And of course the downvotes are my just reward.)

To the extent I'm arguing something non-disingenuous, it's just that language is best analyzed with a bit of a fuzzy lens, and words don't fit into neat boxes.

Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike") that can be used to indicate an action ("I was hiking"), the performer or target of an action ("I don't hate hiking, hiking hates me") or as a modifier for something else ("those crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking boots").

On what basis do you say that it is a noun? Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning? "The boots aren't hiking, they're for hiking"? Clearly-- in this phrase, the word "hiking" means the boots are for hiking!

To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, since it explains things well enough and we might never have something like universal gravitation to set the record straight.

What I'm saying is, I don't think I have a problem.

Except, of course, when the "rules of grammar" are used as a proxy to cast minorities and lower-class people as unintelligent. That, I have a problem with, and it's quite a popular pastime in the English-speaking world. That's why I think it's important to think scientifically about the extent to which grammar is, and is not, a real thing. (Including, sometimes, hypothesizing things that don't make sense, just to see what happens.)

> "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns.

Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there.

Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)

Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?

Indeed! Although I'd argue that probably is what it's supposed to mean.

A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.

If "brick ancient barn" is too plausible for you to get the full effect, try something with more diverse adjectives like "beef tasty stew" or "laptop lost bag".

Not to keep you up, but what's even cooler is that the degree to which you can deviate depends on the adjective's class, too. While I can sorta see "brick ancient barn" working, albeit with such heavy emphasis on "brick" that "ancient barn" turns into a bit of a compound, "grain lone silo" or "fish dry pond" don't sound grammatical to me at all. Maybe also because "grain silo" and "fish pond" are almost-notquite compounds?

Oh, I get what you're saying-- so "the" must be a superlative adjective, right? Makes sense really, as it's the "most specific" article.

> Where? Every treatment I've seen takes arithmetic as linear in the number of bits. [1] This is still consistent with O(n log n) for sorts because you can assume a bound on element size, and still only have constant factor overhead.

This is probably the only point of disagreement here. If I understand your critique of the O(1) result, it's that addressing n elements takes arithmetic (hashing) on numbers of log n bits.

ISTM that, assuming an integer RAM model, that same critique must apply to any input. A mere pointer into an array of n elements has log n bits, so just incrementing and testing the pointer can't be O(1), and even iterating that array can't be O(n).

It's still hard for me to see any reason why the one or two arithmetic operations in a for loop can be O(1), while the larger but still constant number used by a hash function can't.

I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language.

Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...

Not to sincerely defend the claim that "the" "is" an adjective, but rather to dispute the general notion that grammar is "real": Here are some adjectives that fail your tests.

> The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?

* Worstest? Most least?

> The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!

* The smallest shoe confused her. How could it be so smallest?!

> In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.

* Outside the wooden red house was a brick grey ancient barn.

The last one is especially interesting-- if you're a native English speaker, I'll wager that "brick ancient barn" sounds nearly as ungrammatical as "brick the barn", but it's a lot harder to explain why.

Edit: Some more decisive examples of that from replies, since some have rightly pointed out that "brick ancient barn" is semi-acceptable in context:

* "grain lone silo", "fish dry pond", "beef tasty stew", "laptop lost bag", "horse leather saddle" / "leather horse saddle" (both grammatical, but different meanings)

> And this results in meaningless complexity analysis which gives you things like "Insert is O(1) on Average but O(n) Worst Case or Θ(n)".

I dunno, that just sounds like a time complexity to me. Quick, what's the time complexity of quicksort?

> This analysis is using the hash table length as the parameter under consideration, but that's silly

I think you're just talking about something else, then? Sure, the analysis generally assumes a finite key size, and looks at performance as the table size increases. That's just pragmatism; people generally have a bounded key size and an unbounded amount of data.

If your complaint is that treating the key length as finite results in a complexity of O(1), then... that's the point. Treating the key length as finite results in a complexity of O(1).

Table size isn't much of a determinant. It isn't any of a determinant, on average. Only the key length matters. That conclusion is the whole point of this analysis.

> it's reasonable to say O(mn)

I'm confused if this is what you meant to write-- this is not an accurate complexity for a hash table insert because, as you have pointed out, a hash table insert doesn't depend on the table size. There should be no factor of m. Edit: Er, technically O(n) is in O(mn)? Is that your point? But O(mn) doesn't simplify to O(n) unless m is constant, which I don't think you're saying.

With respect to key size n and table size m, the average complexity should be O(n). If we let key size be finite relative to the size of the table, that gives us O(1). But if you don't like that, you can let key size grow to infinity and you're right back to O(n).

None of this is going to tell you if it's the right data structure to use, though.

> If your complexity analysis isn't measurable by real-world performance, it's likely that you aren't analyzing the correct parameters.

No, in this case you are looking at the correct parameters but using the wrong model. At least, I think; it's still not clear what you're trying to get done here where big-O is letting you down.

Edit: Ugh, the old version of this post turned out really lectury, and I'm still working on my own intuitive understanding here, so I'm just gonna start over.

Basically-- you're not wrong. It's a quirk of analysis that a hash table is allowed to take the modulo (for example) of an arbitrarily large number, producing an arbitrarily large number, in "constant time", while a trie is not allowed to descend to an arbitrary depth in constant time.

But saying that such a thing is possible is a simplifying assumption that we make, in general, for non-numeric algorithms: arithmetic is O(1).

Of course, real programs cannot do this for arbitrarily large numbers. So if you are actually concerned with arbitrarily large numbers, you must do something else. Thus, other sorts of analysis which would give you a different number for hash table complexity. Yay!

And if you're having difficulty using the reported big-O value under the canonical model to compare algorithms which have very similar amortized performance in the real world, your problem is just that big-O is not for that thing you're doing.

> As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day

Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed.

To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.

To answer your rhetorical: It can be both because depression makes boring things terrifying in a way non-depressed people find boring again. shrug

Anyway, I don't want to go too deeply into this, so I'll just say you're actually not far off from what I'm saying. What saddens me about "This is Water" is the fact that it's so close to something that might have been really helpful to him. He's talking about these daily experiences, and noticing how he's feeling. He feels bad. That's good; feeling bad helps.

And what he thinks next is... You have a choice of how to feel. Think about everyone who feels even worse. You can decide what you care about. Don't think of an elephant.

That isn't CBT, nor anything therapeutic-- that's depression, at its most pernicious and deadly.