IIAOPSW

The "one point" in "one point perspective" isn't drawn at all, rather it is the point where all lines going into the page perpendicular to the viewing plane eventually converge to. Eg if you were to stand on a set of straight train tracks (don't do this) you would see both rails (and any roads or whatever else is parallel to them) converge to a point somewhere on the horizon line. The artists call it the "vanishing point", the mathematicians call it "the point at infinity".

Indeed with the point at infinity you can simplify geometry by dispensing with Euclid's 5th postulate. There are no parallel lines, any two lines intersect at a single point just the same way as any two points are intersected by a single line, and the intersection points of the lines we call "parallel" simply happen to be "at infinity" (outside the set of ordinary finite coordinates).

The vanishing point in a perspective drawing is a point with a value that is literally beyond the finite coordinates of any object. And you don't need to be looking at a drawing to see it.

In a certain regard its an accounting trick. Saying parallel lines meet at infinity is literally like saying "lets schedule this meeting for never", except the mathematicians added an actual box to the calendar for a date called "never" as an accounting hack, but the hack works so well you really have to wonder if it might actually be a real date or if its just an incredibly useful fiction.

Aren't all numbers just incredibly useful fictions?

Why is a date called never / a point at infinity any different?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/7b/ae/207bae64d2488373fd4a...

I see infinity all the time. Go look at a one point perspective drawing.

People assign responsibility to "agents" in contracts to wash their hands of thins in various ways all the time, and it usually works.

Wait is this still about AI?

Kurt Godel rather famously claimed to have spotted logical contradictions in the US constitution, which of course is not too controversial on its own (and was probably right given who he is), but presenting this argument in response to questions about the constitution that were given as part of his citizenship test was an insane thing to try no matter how good his logic.

Amazingly he still passed.

There's only two ways one could have been contradicting information from the WHO which was later revised prior to them revising it. Either:

1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.

2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.

I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.

A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.

So in response.

It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.

People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.

This is so cool. So if they used twists of steel wires or similar as string for the white parts, they could have a functional circuit.

More like plurality report

In fairness, a "20% random number generator" on "mission critical code" is something they literally do at NASA

Even HN comment sections?

Adding to this, I think people naturally confuse / extrapolate a universe that appears to have discritized / computational laws with the discritized simulations and computations we use to approximate our (previously assumed continuous) reality.

As I put it, the older understanding of the universe working in mechanical ways does not imply the universe is actually a machine nor that it was built by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we build machines. Likewise, the newer understanding of the universe working in computational ways does not imply the universe is actually running on some computer nor that its code was written by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we run simulations.

There are things that are wrong and there are things that are crimes and it is up to those on the bench to appreciate the difference.

I'll just add that this has certain other interesting legal implications, because records in relation to a therapy session are a "protected confidence" (or whatever your local jurisdiction calls it). What that means is in most circumstances not even a subpoena can touch it, and even then special permissions are usually needed. So one of the open questions on my mind for a while now was if and when a conversation with an AI counts as a "protected confidence" or if that argument could successfully be used to fend off a subpoena.

At least in Illinois we now have an answer, and other jurisdictions look to what has been established elsewhere when deciding their own laws, so the implications are far reaching.

Surprisingly I can't seem to find any doors with notices from the sheriffs department or building department embarrassingly plastered on them. Am I misremembering how these are phrased verbatim or are certain things censored?

If length of ones writing is a measure of irrationality, everyone who's ever written a thesis must be absolutely unhinged.

Probably what you want is "numerical methods" and "computational physics".

"Physical simulation" is a very broad scope, so your code for simulating fluids is going to be very different from your code for simulating planetary orbits, and at times it may feel a bit ad hoc. But at its foundation physical laws are written in differential equations and linear algebra.

So whatever algorithm lets you numerically integrate several inter-related variables is going to be broadly applicable to simulating any physical phenomena. At the simplest end of the spectrum you just naively approximate integration by brute force. Eg at each step just update your physical state variables by doing velocity += acceleration, position += velocity. This is called Euler's method, and while simple, it accumulates unacceptable errors rather quickly in most circumstance. The more advanced approach is to use a method like Runge Kutta. In circumstances where you have some known property, like say energy conservation, you can implement a method which explicitly imposes the constraint. This is good for cases where the motion is highly periodic as it prevents the numerical error from accumulating exponentially in orbits that spiral out of control.

Of course at some point you'll have to grapple with the issue of if you are simulating trajectories of free particles or values of neighboring grid points in a field. This question of how best to encode physical systems and simulate them cuts to the heart of physics.

I'll leave it at the old cliche "information is physical"

The 3 minute minimum is based on the premise that there needs to be enough space for the front of the train behind to stop before reaching the rear of the train ahead. But if the stations are split into two boarding areas like I've proposed then the front of the train behind was already scheduled to come to a stop before reaching the rear of the train ahead of it. Thus there's no need to create even more separation than they already have by spacing out the schedule.

Put another way, the 3 min normally starts ticking from the moment the train ahead completely clears the station (as in the rear of it passes the end of the platform), but in the dual-boarding setup the 3 min starts ticking from the moment the train ahead comes to a halt (as the rear of it has already passed the end of the first boarding area).

It can work on a subway system because there are skip-stop service patterns on J/Z line in New York.

In terms of needing extra track, that's the brilliant part of it. Even though the different services all make different stops in my proposal, so long as they depart in a certain order they will never need to pass each other.

In the 2-in-3 stops example I gave, suppose that at the present moment there's an (AB) train at station [A], a (BC) train at station [B], and a (AC) train at station [C].

If they all depart at the same time then (AB) goes one stop to the next [B] at the same time as (BC) goes one stop to the next [C] and (AC) goes one stop to the next [A].

Then they should all depart again at roughly the same time (since they all presumably took the same amount of time to go one stop).

So (AB) goes two stops from [B] to the next [A] station at the same time as (BC) goes two stops from [C] to the next [B] station and (AC) goes two stops from [A] to the next [C] station.

Then the cycle repeats.

All three service run at the same time without ever catching up or passing each other.

If you use my two-boarding-area trick then the constraint can be loosened to allow different services to catch up (but not pass) each other, which then makes it possible to run 2-in-5 stops without adding a passing track.

To elaborate a bit, on the face of it the 2-in-5 system has 10 different services running on the line at the same time, because there's 10 possible unique combinations of 2 out of 5 things.

However, just like in the 2-in-3 example, many of these services can be run at the same time without passing or catching up because they are scheduled to move and stop in the same pattern (just offset from a different starting station.

Every single train in the 2-in-5 system can be categorized as either moving 1 stop then 4 stops, or moving 2 stops then 3 stops. Two services in the same category never catch up or pass each other. If you have two subsequent services in a different category then they simply take turns catching up and falling back behind (but ultimately never passing each other).

Here's a (rough) line diagram I calculated showing where each train is at every 3-min interval in the 2-in-5 system. Notice how they meet but never pass.

https://ibb.co/4R9nQsQd

In terms of confusing people and knowing which train to get on, this is what I've come up with as a signage convention. All that's necessary to know what train to get on is the symbol on the map of your destination. If a train has the same symbol on it then it goes there.

https://ibb.co/tpjzJdyR

Simplifying a bit, its because the train behind can be scheduled 3 min after the train ahead has pulled in rather than 3 min after the train ahead pulled out. Put another way, the safe stopping distance to maintain (while at speed) would be measured from the half way point of the platform rather than the start of the platform.

This lets you schedule them much closer together than the conventional 3 min while still being safe.

Admittedly my calculations did not take walking-on-platform time into account, but what I have been assuming (based on figures I've looked up) is that each stop adds about 60 seconds to the journey time (30 seconds for dwell + 15 on either end for getting up to / down from cruise speed). I've also been assuming that the inter-station no-slowing-down time is 2 min.

So in a 2-of-5 stopping pattern you'd save 3 min every 5 stops, but depending on when arrive at the station you will sometimes get unlucky and just miss your train, in which case you'll have to wait an additional interval than you normally would for the next one (costing you 3 min). So for very short trips (under 3 stops) it actually makes travel time a bit worse since there's very few stops you can skip over in such cases. But for more median trips there is a saving, and for the longer trips it saves well into 2-digit minutes.

In your example I think in the case with the entrance at the middle of the platform there wouldn't be any real effect, because splitting the platform also in the middle doesn't marginally change how quickly you can get to the nearest open door on the train you want. There's no real need to get to the center of either boarding area. In the case of platform at the end of the station, I can accept that adds about 40 m of walking distance that wasn't there before (at least for some people), and that translates into an extra 20ish seconds. Less than that if you do the rational thing of walking briskly when you see you're about to miss your train.

So you're right that the platform split adds some time which isn't completely negligible, and depending on what fraction of the next n stops you want to skip it comes at a penalty of longer wait times for the correct train, but both of these are fixed upfront costs whereas the dividend accrues linearly the longer your on the train.

yeah, what I have in mind is a variation / generalization of skip-stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip-stop

Something I've been thinking about lately is short trains but long platforms. Basically, you split the length of the trains in half and then split the platform into two boarding areas. In this way trains can be scheduled even closer together than the the 3-min physical limit of of signalling because the one coming in behind doesn't need to wait for the one ahead to leave the station first. Its therefore possible to schedule several different services on the same two-track system such that they all skip a large fraction of stops (and thus run faster), but every station is still reachable from every other without transferring.

A simple example would be 3 services on the same line that follow a repeating pattern every 3 stations. ==[A]==[B]==[C]==[A]==[B]==[C]==. The service (AB) stops on the stations labelled [A] and [B] (skipping C). The service (AC) stops on the stations labelled [A] and [C] (skipping B). The service labelled (BC) stops on the stations labelled [B] and [C] (skipping A). In this manner, all three services skip over 33% of the stops on the line, but no matter what your origin and destination, it is always possible to travel from an [A] station to a [B] or [C] station (or another [A] station), and likewise from a [B] or [C] station.

To the extent I've worked out the logistics of this, if you allow for trains to catch up but not pass each other at the platforms, you can push this idea as far as only stopping at 2-in-5 stations without sacrificing headways or capacity.

Just a weird thing thats been taking my attention lately.

Oh sure there's actus rea, but good luck proving mechanica rea.

But, you're not really rejecting my example, you're proving it. The human ability to generalize the concept of a 2d platformer is limited to a very narrow range of "intuitive" generalizations that have deeply baked assumptions in them like "locality of action". So when we try to replicate the ability to "generalize", at some point we have to recognize that we can't "generalize in general" but rather we have to deeply bake in certain assumptions about what sorts of variations on the learned theme are possible. Mario with some sort of gimmick that still respects locality of action is doable, the fourier transform of Mario isn't.

This is a problem because we are approaching AI from an angle of no a priori assumptions about the variations on the pattern that it should be able to generalize to. We just imagine that there's some magic way to recognize any isomorphic representation and transfer our knowledge to the new variables, when the reality is we can only recognize when the domain being transferred to is only different in a narrow set of ways like being upside down or on a bent surface. The set of possible variations on a 2d platformer we can generalize well enough to just pick up and play is a tiny subset of all the ways you could map the pixels on the screen to something else without technically losing information.

We could probably make an AI that bakes in the sort of assumptions where it can easily generalize what it learns to fourier space representations of the same data, but then it probably wouldn't be good at generalizing the same sorts of things we are good at generalizing.

My point (hypothesis really) is that the ability to "generalize in general" is a fiction. We can't do it either. But the sort of things we can generalize are exactly the sort that tend to occur in nature anyway so we don't notice the blind spot in what we can't do because it never comes up.

There's something fascinating about this, because the human ability to "transfer knowledge" (eg pick up some other never before seen video game and quickly understand it) isn't really that general. There's a very particular "overtone window" of the sort of degrees of difference where it is possible.

If I were to hand you a version of a 2d platformer (lets say Mario) where the gimmick is that you're actually playing the fourier transform of the normal game, it would be hopeless. You might not ever catch on that the images on screen are completely isomorphic to a game you're quite familiar with and possibly even good at.

But some range of spatial transform gimmicks are cleanly intuitive. We've seen this with games like vvvvvv and braid.

So the general rule seems to be that intelligence is transferable to situations that are isomorphic up to certain "natural" transforms, but not to "matching any possible embedding of the same game in a different representation".

Our failure to produce anything more than hyper-specialists forces us to question exactly is meant by the ability to generalize other than just "mimicking an ability humans seem to have".

well, normal stupid doesn't get duped into funding AK47s for a coup. It takes brilliance to be this stupid.

It is "doubly so" because the border guard was wrong to judge the content as "lese majeste" on account of JD himself sharing it, and was wrong that "lese majeste" is applicable in America. The guard was wrong, and even if one doesn't agree with one of the reasons they were wrong because they don't share those values, the guard would still be wrong for the other reason. Therefore they were doubly wrong.

You know, I find myself thinking the same thing sometimes. And the closest I can think of would be some mapping of force transmitted through linkages on to current transmitted through wires and from there its the same formalism as electronic circuits. Though the usefulness of the abstracted form really depends on what you're trying to compute.

When you're identical twin gets back from their extended space travels with their clock you're going to be in for some hard truths about the nature of precision and time.

There seems to be a recency bias, as the odds of our present day politicians all being as historically important as the rest of the list is unlikely. Makes sense that things of recent media attention are higher priority for translation, irrespective of how "important" they are in the grand scheme of history.

For the sake of null hypothesis, how far and wide has the second most translated article reached? Is it also an (apparently) random stub?