gnramires

Something like spaceflight is subject to chaotic forces and unpredictable interactions, so having that many digits (more than 15 decimal) becomes negligible. (For example, a planetary force will probably vary by that much in ways models don't capture, like subtle tidal forces and subtle variations in its orbit, etc.). Navigation usually involves methods of measuring your position and adjusting course in theory needing much less precision.

Simulating physical systems to extremely high precision (e.g. more than double precision) in general seems pointless in most situations because of those effects.

Related to what GP said, I think desires are complicated. What you (and commonly you hear) referred to as desire might be something like a "first order desire" -- either what you would desire if there were no constraints or consequences from your actions, or what you desire immediately (and not taking your long term life into account)[1]. I think it's a good idea to visualize the consequences of your desires, because actions have consequences and the world is inherently full of constraints. So you might "desire" (1st order desire) drinking, but not desire hangover or even becoming an alcoholic, or miss some opportunity because of over sleeping (or even increased health as well), so maybe update your desire to 2nd-order desire where the consequences and constraints[2] are taken into account, and if you still desire it (e.g. find sleeping a lot really worth it), then it seems fine.

I believe it's Carl Jung that talked extensively about bringing your unconscious into consciousness. Or Feynman: The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool :)

(Although I think it's normal to have some amount of internal conflict or inconsistency that we can only resolve as we go along, experiment, work and live)

[1] Maybe we should call those cravings?

[2] I think a more refined approach would add philosophical implications (e.g. ethics, meaning, etc..) as well

I spent a long time thinking about this same dillema as Penrose: if solving maths is undecidable, how can humans do math? It seemed like a great paradox and maybe revealing a super ability of humans.

I think the truth is both more boring and more wondrous. We of course can't "solve math". For any given mathematical problem, humans are not guaranteed to find a solution given enough time. Indeed there are many problems that have been proven very difficult for a long time and there's no certainty they will be solved any time soon. As Conway put it (paraphrasing) "It's not because we don't have a big enough brain or something ... it's because there's no way to know [without just looking]". That is, we effectively do increasingly sophisticated forms of search, the same search you can do with an algorithm.

For example, you can simply try running the algorithm for a long time and see if it does halt. If it does, there's your proof. If it doesn't, you either declare you don't know, or declare they halt and accept it may be a mistake. As T->inf, you can cover all programs that halt, and the unknown/mistakes (depending on how you measure[1], because there are infinitely many programs) you'd make go to 0 in a particular sense ([1]).

You can also try to be more clever. You can start enumerating all proofs that (A) a given program halts, and (B) a given program does not halt, (C) it cannot be proven either way (assuming the proofs are verifiable). This allows potentially (depending on your axiomatic system) proving your program halts much faster than waiting T(p) (its halting time), in particular in the case p is part of a class of programs that has superexponential halting time as a function of size (e.g. it halts in 2^2^(N), where N is its size -- those programs should be fairly easy to construct). But you'd still be waiting a long time. Note however, it still can be the case that no proof exists in your axiomatic system either of A, B or C. So you still have to declare either you don't know, or mistakenly assume it doesn't halt/no proof exists. As your proof search time T->inf you get the same coverage property, but faster (in the sense that it eventually overcomes the previous method).

I said both boring and wondrous because there is some magic here (just not magic outside of the rules of the cosmos :) ): you can (always?) do better in some sense. You can build more and more clever methods of deciding whether programs halt; I think of them as "bags of heuristics" or "bags of tricks": from simple observations e.g. that an empty loop does not halt, to more complex properties.

Those heuristics eventually are also meta-heuristics (or just proof-heuristics): not only heuristics to tell whether P halts, but heuristics in a search for proofs that P halts (allowing a faster proof search). (Of course, there are also meta-heuristics in the sense of thinking about better ways to solve the problem in general). In the case of humans, the interesting distinction is that we are "messy extremely large minds", and we, through experience, "learn", or accumulate those various heuristics in a generalizing way -- that's what intuition is. Our learning is still limited in the same fundamental way any algorithm would be, we just turn out to be a very special (maybe you can call it magical in a sense) learning, intuitive and sentient, system (although likely the particular architecture of our brains/minds is specially relevant to how we operate and how it "feels to be a human", consciousness, etc.).

Not only is our brain special, but in a sense we're "lucky" to be initialized or to have fallen into a more or less "universalizing environment". Of course, if you put a children in an empty room, or even in a forest (even provided with unlimited food), he is unlikely to learn much, least of all the secrets of the universe. Our society, our environment is such that we teach ourselves language and we particularly put value on discovery, such that we have set in motion an environment where we can, and we do, discover asymptotically more. And this discovery has a great purpose. As we learn more, we not only learn more about the Cosmos (which we're part of), we learn about our own nature, what it means to have a good existence, and all the things we can do to have a better (more complete, more fulfilling, more full of love, more meaningful) amazing existence[2]. That's our real "magic bean"[3] that must be guarded with utmost care.

[1] Measuring the performance here is tricky, again because there are infinitely many cases. In a strict sense, the fraction of programs you prove that halts is 0 for any T. But that seems like a poor model: we're usually much more interested in small cases. If you weight them with some decaying weights, for example exponentially decaying 1/2^N, then this weighted fraction converges.

[2] I think that should be the general objective of rationality, or reason, and science/reason is the general system of conducting, refining and making this process reliable.

[3] Gold mine, Golden goose, Jewel, Delicate flower, etc.. :)

---

On quantum behavior, essentially none of those conclusions are affected at all, or even require quantum behavior. Quantum computing might accelerate some operations, but that's all. (And quantum computation has been shown so far to require extremely delicate conditions that would be hard to happen in our brains)

Yes, although I say, if you can make your play healthy as well as fun, might as well :)

It's probably not something you secretly wish when playing, and perhaps for the best (that you don't have fun and enjoy things always with an ulterior motive, except enjoying the experiences). I guess he's saying in the sense of the natural function of play, and we playing is mostly a consequence of the natural function. It's also very much true that we learn a lot, perhaps a significant chunk of what we learn is through play[1], so it's also undeniable that we do learn from play, even if humans have this great gift -- we are able to understand the nature of things (such as play) and choose to do them just for the sake of experiences, fun, joy, happiness, etc..

Which we should (finally :) ) recognize to be the source of all meaning.

We still should learn (and do practical stuff in general) because it supports our inner lives, including building technology, producing things (buildings, infrastructure) that support us and indeed enables our (inner) lives.

[1] Also of note humans, unlike LLMs, can learn all the time, we don't have a hard "training phase". It's true brain plasticity decays, and it becomes harder to learn as we age, but we can still learn more or less quickly at any age. This is why dedicating childhood to learning (as well as play) is natural.

Rectangles are straight up simpler :)

I'm glad that war is not really considered a large risk. I know some people from Taiwan, does seem like quite good quality of life! I didn't mention, but I think there are other important factors like the cultural importance given to (formal) education in those places (that might be broadly connected with strong will to develop economically?).

It's a bit of a cliche, but as I live in Brazil I'd say it's mostly true that people living happily at the beach aren't desperate for economical and technical development, and mostly to enjoy daily life and nature. When you're under threats or crisis, technical development seems like a necessity for survival. (There are however, many technical poles in scenic locations in Brazil, like Florianopolis-SC and Ceara).

That said, we should be somewhat worried about desperation-fueled endeavours.

Indeed. Another fact you can use is that in Newtonian mechanics (although not in GR due to frame dragging, only approximately), a rotating spherical body has the same gravitational field as a static one. So there would be no mechanism for the axially tilted rotating Earth to influence the Sun (different from a non-rotating Earth).

It follows from conservation of angular momentum :) If the axis direction changed (for a fixed orbit), then Earth's (or Solar system's, etc.) angular momentum would be changed, not be conserved.

It wasn't clear to me you can place colors/groups arbitrarily -- maybe add "Each group can be assigned different colors based on location." to instructions. Maybe color each group background instead of individual letters. Perhaps when you type a letter that comes from multiple possible groups, open a dialogue for choosing the group. Bhaji is a bit of an unexpected word (or, I learned a new word :) ).

Nice game :)

It's not always possible to design avoiding precision components though (although as you mentioned trim components could fit the bill). If you want to precisely measure current with a shunt resistor for example, you need high precision (although you can also calibrate it digitally). More than precision, which can sometimes be calibrated against, there are also various kinds of environmental stabilities that may be more important: temperature stability, pressure stability, etc. -- you'd need other forms of calibration, measurement and compensation.

Also, component-level precision has limits because eventually trace impedance starts to be significant (hence the use of trim components you mentioned!).

Youtuber Marco Reps goes through various high precision equipment that often have precision resistors and such, recommended if interested!

Sounds interesting. I really liked (and like) Homeworld, not only because of the really captivating setting and gameplay, but also because of the stories. They really add meaning to a game: it wasn't just a few ships skirmishing, it was (if I remember correctly?) a civilization searching for their home and fighting for survival, while facing various challenges and contact with other civilizations (or were they other species?).

Story and setting makes a ton of difference to how much I enjoy a game...

What I got from his interviews is not that he disliked the GoL, it's just he disliked the GoL overshadowing everything else he did (basically, becoming the GoL guy). He personally didn't see much more interesting mathematics that could be done after answering basic questions like universality (although it's likely he wasn't aware of everything the community was up to). Also, it's clear he seemed to come to terms with it in his final interviews (including the second one you linked) :)

I've played around with several CAs and Conway's rules stands out to me as one of the most interesting still, for many reasons (like simplicity, interesting patterns, long lived structures).

For reference, I believe relatively rudimentary chatbots have been able to pass forms of the Turing Test for a while, while also being unable to do almost all the things humans can do. It turns out you can make a chatbot quite convincing for a very short conversation with someone you've never met over the internet[1]. I think there's a trend that fooling perception is significantly easier than having the right capabilities. Maybe with sufficiently advanced testing you can judge, but I don't think this is the case in general: in general, our thoughts may be significantly different than we can converse. One obvious example is simply people with disabilities (say a paraplegic) who can't talk at all (while having thoughts of their own): output capability need not necessarily reflect internal capability.

Also, take this more advanced example: if you built a sufficiently large lookup table (of course, you need (possibly human) intelligence to build it, and it would be of impractical size), you can build a chatbot completely indistinguishable from a human that nonetheless doesn't seem like it really is intelligent (or conscious for that matter). The only operations it would perform would be some sort of decoding of the input into an astronomically large number to retrieve from the lookup table, and then using some (possibly rudimentary) seeking apparatus to retrieve the content that corresponds to the input. Your input size can be arbitrarily large enabling arbitrarily long conversations. It seems that to judge intelligence we really need to examine the internals and look at their structure.

I have a hunch that our particular 'feeling of consciousness' stems from the massive interconnectivity of the brain. All sorts of neurons from around the brain have some activity all the time (I believe the brain's energy consumption doesn't vary greatly with activity, so we use it), and whatever we perceive goes through an enormous number of interconnected neurons (representing concepts, impressions, ideas, etc.); unlike typical CPU-based algorithms that process a somewhat large number (potentially 100s of millions) of steps sequentially. My intuition does seem to pair with modern neural architectures (i.e. they could have some consciousness?), but I really don't know how we could do this sort of judgement before understanding better the details of the brain and other properties of cognition. I think this is a very important research area, and I'm not sure we have enough people working on it or using the correct tools (it relies heavily on logic, philosophy and metaphysical arguments; as well as require personal insight from being conscious :) ).

[1] From sources I can't remember, and from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Loebner_Prize

It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes (it should be obvious); it's not conclusive (in establishing causation), it does show a correlation. I really think it's almost obvious this is true, but it's important reinforcing with data nonetheless.

So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.

I think the core message is that a child's life is strongly determined by his family life/environment, it's not just a personal choice to succeed or to fail.

So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.

I think something like a touch-based display would be cool.

Like an array of low cost transducers (maybe there's a way to multiplex the output mechanically like we do with electronics (so only 2*sqrt(N) motors are needed), but in mechanics inertia and speed should be a more significant problem)

I 6x6 matrix of solenoids for example doesn't cost much, and you could reasonably control them individually I think?

I find equally valid (and perhaps more useful) to say that the notion of truth is the basis of all that exists, and this debate is far from simple. If we don't allow anything to be true at all, then even this discussion, any discussion, or anything at all seems rather pointless. If we're just exchanging gobbledygook, what's the point of even talking? I think there's a general presumption in talking that we're approaching something. That something is essentially truth (i.e. some accurate and/or useful model of some part of reality) or some kind of improvement or even enjoyment, which are both connected to ethics.

Sure, truth is in some senses unknowable (in particular in the 'The Map is not the Territory' sense), but we can have increasingly accurate and useful enough models that improve our lives. It's also the case that most human matters need specific answers, potentially extremely specific to their situation (and hard or impossible to know things, like what's going on in their minds), as well as some ethical and aesthetic frameworks that allows one thing to be good while other thing is bad. It's not obvious at first that ethics could be based on truth and science (and hence have somewhat-universal rights and wrongs), but I've come to believe that's the case indeed. Ethics really derives from fundamental truths about existence, like the reality and nature of suffering (and the nature of the workings of our minds), the nature of existence (for example, work is ethical insofar as it supports us existing at all), and so on.

If you think about it, the notion that anything goes, is really absurd: surely there are things you wouldn't accept essentially no matter what. It's much more absurd than the counterpart that there are true things, even about the nature of existence, that we can approach. The human mind (and minds in general!) can be studied using similar methods to the study of nature (with some necessary generalizations), and I believe that's what the 21st century is going to be all about :)

Edit: That's not to say 'vibes' are not important as well! From Goethe[1]:

"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master."

[1] Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) Book VII Chapter IX

Edit: Now before commenting, I see there's an overarching theme of: sure, there is a bunch of unhealthy stuff about social media, but meanwhile there are some things you can do to make your interaction with it better.

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.

Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.

I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.

I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.

I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)

Good points, I would say that defense in depth is useful when the layers of defense need to all be broken (more or less) independently for a successful attack (this fails only if you add layers that expose vulnerabities compromising your system). E.g. usually a sandbox satisfies this criterion.

Also, whenever some layers may allow compromising everything, the supply chains of the layers should be minimal or correlated (same supplier), to avoid increasing such supply chain risks.

Defense in depth has value I agree, but I think it can also be counterproductive in some cases. Every layer can also be buggy and have vulnerabilities, which can often leak (e.g. into code execution) and compromise the whole system (bypassing layers). What happened in this case seems to be a case of maintained hijacking and introducing vulnerabilities. Adding an additional dependency (of say a port-knocking library) doesn't look great in that regard, if the dependency can be hijacked to add remote code execution capabilities. And that library is likely a lot less scrutinized than OpenSSH!

Also underrated I think is security by simplicity. OpenSSH should be extremely simple and easy to understand, such that every proposal and change could be easily scrutinized. Cryptographic constructions themselves are almost mathematically proven invulnerable, then a small codebase can go most of the way to mathematically provable security (bonus points for formal verification).

But for this kind of system there's usually some kind of human vulnerability (e.g. system updates for your distro) in the loop such that the community needs to remain watchful. (It's fun to consider an application that's proven correct and doesn't need updating every again, but usually that's not practical)

Related, a friend likes to say instruments that produce too pure sounds (too much like a sine wave) sound somewhat boring, because of their lack of timbre characteristics. I think this is a somewhat general property; although in general art is more of a language. I think a pure sine can sound right in the right context (e.g. perhaps how we remember fondly, and still enjoy, chiptunes and retro music), and it can have a particular meaning within that context that makes sense.

Another advantage of hobby anything is that you can just do, and reinvent whatever you want. Sure, fast CPUs/MCUs exist now and can do whatever you want. But if you feel like reinventing the wheel just for the sake of it, no one will stop you![1]

I do think some people that remember fondly the user experience of those old machines might be better served by using modern machines (like a raspberry pi or even a standard pc) in a different way instead of trying to use old hardware. That's from the good old Turing machine universality (you can simulate practically any machine you like using newer hardware, if what you're interested in is software). You can even add artificial limitations like PICO-8 or TIC-80 does.

See also uxn:

https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

and (WIP) picotron:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

I think there's a general concept here of making 'Operating environments' that are pleasant to work within (or have fun limitations), which I think are more practical than a dedicated Operating System optionally with a dedicated machine. Plus (unless you particularly want to!) you don't need to worry about all the complex parts of operating systems like network stacks, drivers and such.

[1] Maybe we should call that Hobby universality (or immortality?) :P If it's already been made/discovered, you can always make it again just for fun.

Interesting. I ask because I have a suspicion that Quantum theories seem more fundamental than General relativity, because treating geometry within a quantum framework seems very hard and "non-natural", or implausible (e.g. when considering superposition of spacetimes!). While if somehow gravity is a quantum effect (within a simpler space-time framework), that seems much more plausible... but Kaluza-Klein captured my interest in the other direction. Although I'm still thinking the quantum framework is appears to be the correct one, even though the assumptions of GR are very strong (so something like the equivalence principle or some other notable principle needs to break).

I've recently learned about Kaluza–Klein theories (just curious wiki browsing), do they unify electromagnetism and gravity in the sense that electromagnetism also "works by changing the geometry of spacetime" ? How does this relate to QFT?

> How do you reconcile this with the frame-dragging effect? Namely, in that it shows that the distribution and movement of mass (not just the presence of mass/entropy) can influence the curvature of spacetime and thereby gravitational effects.

If gravity is somehow caused by something like information flow, then a rotating body has an associated rotating flow of information related to the rotating atoms/microscopic degrees of freedom observable at distance. This might have an effect making it distinct from a non-rotating body.

I believe the gradient of a flow field is a tensor, giving gravity tensorial effects as expected.

Correction: I've got the integral wrong, of course :)

I've got an expression (after correcting my rusty maths) of

i = k*(n-1+k) / ( (1-r)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) + r*k^(p-1) ) ^ (1/(p-1)) - k

I think there could be precision problems (with p<2 specially)

No worries :P It's just a way to try to avoid showing the most popular, instead you'd choose randomly from a curve from most popular to least popular, with the chosen index given by i. An easier idea to understand is to pick randomly from the top say 50 websites instead of just showing the most popular ones, avoiding "winner takes all" effects.

This is pretty cool! If I may suggest something, on the explore view, avoid showing most popular (I think it can lead to rote behavior!)

If I may suggest another algorithm, something like picking from most popular to least with probability ~1/(rank+k)^p, where p is any number >1, for example set p=1.5, k=10.

It can be implemented the following way (by computing the integral of the probability distribution):

(1) Have sorted index by popularity with n items

(2) Pick a random (double) r between 0 and 1

(3) The chosen index is (if I did my integrals right;round to nearest integer):

i = ( k^(p-1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) / ( (r+1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) - r*k^(p-1) ) ) ^ 1/(p-1) - k