mathgenius

Yikes.. If buying QQQ is counted as "transacting with microsoft stock" then you could try finding a basket that didnt have microsoft. I'm not an expert in this stuff, but for example the Russell 2000 fits. It would be better if it was a tech/internet related basket.

EDIT: here's a better idea. Just buy apple and/or half a dozen other big tech stocks that you like!

If someone really wanted to do this, you would short GOOG or FB and long the nasdaq (QQQ) by a proportional amount. This position insulates you against the market bulls, which could go on pumping the market for several more years. It's a bet that GOOG & FB will underperform the tech sector more widely.

Maintaining a short position also costs money, so this is a further complication. As a retail investor, I don't know if there are any instruments for shorting these big tech co's. I'm guessing that you can do it on interactive brokers (for example) if you post enough margin. DYOR.

After the demise of slashdot (around 2008?), I hung out on technocrat.net, which was run by Bruce Perens. It was great, but then Perens decided to kill it because it was too stressful to run. (If memory serves me correctly.) Then I found HN.

Language is too fragile & brittle to convey most of what we would like it to convey. People keep falling into this trap, and then getting irate when things go off the rails. This is a terrible confusion to have: if the meaning is not in the words, then where is it? The meaning is in the context, not in the symbols.

Agree. Another missfire (IMO) is Transcrypt, which is javascript using a python syntax. Total pain in the #$@! to use.

Also, there is a tiny python (micropython) that has been emscripted. I'm very interested to try this out sometime.

Working in theoretical physics (quantum computing) I think about this a lot: the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. I see two ways of understanding this. (1) That mathematicians are in the game of building powerful tools, and therefore these tools inherently capture a wide range of phenomena. (2) When confronted with a difficult problem we become the drunk person looking for their keys under the street light, even if we know the keys are elsewhere. In this case, the street light is whatever good calculations we have at hand, ie. mathematics.

Here's some interactive mathematical gizmos: https://www.tungsteno.io/

Amazing videos of lightning recorded at 28,500 fps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQKhIK4pvYo

It really does look a bit like this technique for generating random fractal tendrils:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation

What is "Web monetization" ?

I feel like slightly less of a fuck-up every time I watch one of these.

If you like that then you are going to love this:

"Seven Trees in One" by Andreas Blass. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9405205

Yes and this is not the only error in the article. I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean:

""" Every operation which preserves a lattice and doesn't use "incomparable" objects is equivalent to addition. """

And the statement at the end: "any lattice is equivalent to another lattice where the relationship is set inclusion." This only holds for distributive lattices.

For another take on lattice theory, and ordered structures more generally:

https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Applied+Category...

I agree with your skepticism, while also acknowledging that A.I. in all its incarnations is a powerful tool. But the argument against AI, apart from "this is obviously limited", is much more subtle than what you are claiming in your article. (IMO, it comes down to quantum physics... Hopefully one day this will become obvious to everyone when we all have quantum computers.)

From TWF #252 [1]:

""" Back in 1897, a mathematician named William Burnside wrote the first book in English on finite groups. It was called Theory of Groups of Finite Order.

In the preface, Burnside explained why he studied finite groups by letting them act as permutations of sets, but not as linear transformations of vector spaces:

'Cayley's dictum that "a group is defined by means of the laws of combination of its symbols" would imply that, in dealing with the theory of groups, no more concrete mode of representation should be used than is absolutely necessary. It may then be asked why, in a book that professes to leave all applications to one side, a considerable space is devoted to substitution groups [permutation groups], but other particular modes of representation, such as groups of linear transformations, are not even referred to. My answer to this question is that while, in the present state of our knowledge, many results in the pure theory are arrived at most readily by dealing with properties of substitution groups, it would be difficult to find a result that could most directly be obtained by the consideration of groups of linear transformations.'

In short, he didn't see the point of representing groups on vector spaces - at least as a tool in the "pure" theory of finite groups, as opposed to their applications.

However, within months after this book was published, he discovered the work of Georg Frobenius, who used linear algebra very effectively to study groups!

So, Burnside started using linear algebra in his own work on finite groups, and by the time he wrote the second edition of his book in 1911, he'd changed his tune completely:

Very considerable advances in the theory of groups of finite order have been made since the appearance of the first edition of this book. In particular the theory of groups of linear substitutions has been the subject of numerous and important investigations by several writers; and the reason given in the original preface for omitting any account of it no longer holds good. In fact it is now more true to say that for further advances in the abstract theory one must look largely to the representation of a group as a group of linear transformations. It's interesting to see exactly how representing finite groups on vector spaces lets us understand them better. By now almost everyone agrees this is true. But how much of the detailed machinery of linear algebra is really needed? """

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week252.html

I wonder if you could hit this with emscripten and then run it in a browser. There are other CPython's that have been compiled to webasm, but this one might be more light-weight. Maybe?

I wonder what the space is in between the slats, or more precisely, the period. Working out what pitch this is, and a bit of $v=f\lambda$ might tell us which way the wind is blowing.

I really should read more philosophy, but I just can't cope with all the long sentences and curlicues of jargon... It's the same reason I struggle with algebra. Academia in general builds walls of language, it's not designed to be user friendly.

The thing is, science is full of things without definition. There is no definition for energy. All we have is a bunch of book-keeping. Everytime we couldn't balance the books (ie. conserve energy) we just added another column to the accounting. But what is energy?

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html

Penrose's stuff is very interesting, and I always enjoy hearing him talk about it. But for me it is a soup with too many ingredients. Better to look at the ingredients separately, for example, the idea of microtubules maintaining coherent quantum information. That already is very interesting, and would make a good meal.

Chopra annoys me too, but he is actually a good dude (IMO): the stuff he talks about is based on Vedanta, which is an old eastern tradition. And he tries to connect this with modern science. I say go for it.

I'd much rather put people like Oprah Winfrey or Tony Robbins on a woo-shitlist. But not Chopra.

> The attempts to connect wave-function collapse with consciousness are unconvincing to me. It seems basically like tying together two things we don't understand with each other based on... not a lot.

This objection seems a bit superficial to me. I think there are plenty of connections. The idea of measurement & observer is baked into quantum physics, hello? But there is a taboo in physics on discussing this stuff.

It's nice to see some brave philosophers try to promote panpsychism. I wonder if the physicists will ever become more tolerant of things like this aswell.

My favourite book by Greg Egan is "Permutation City." It is a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument for exactly this: if you can simulate brains then where is the consciousness in all of this? Egan's book takes this idea to it's logical extremes. Very cool and mind-blowing when I first read it two decades ago.

> Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness?

I've thought about this too, and my conclusion is that there's no way to know. Maybe we wake up as someone else everyday, with all the emotional/psychological baggage that entails.

> The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality.

Maybe.

> Why is our stomach not conscious?

When I am hungry it certainly seems like my stomach is conscious. Indeed, they have found neurons in the digestive tract.

"Coders: who they are, what they think and how they are changing our world" by Clive Thompson, 2019. I think this is exactly what you are looking for.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44037236-coders

People buy into a rally because they don't want to miss out, they expect it to keep on rallying. It's herding behaviour, and leads to so-called dead-cat bounces. At least in the short term, there's no reason to expect any intelligent price discovery from the markets. Come back in six to twelve months and then we will see.

If you look at the CME website using the wayback machine, you can clearly see a hi and low limit for the price. There is no high limit, but the low limit is set at "0.01". [1] This is kind of weird, because the snapshot is pulling current market prices, and still showing an incorrect hi/lo limit. It looks like they have since removed the hi/lo display: [2]. Someone should take a screenshot of this.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200117115242/https://www.cmegr...

[2] https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-swee...

ICE offers an equivalent cash settled contract, that takes it's value from CME's closing prices.

https://www.theice.com/products/213/WTI-Crude-Futures

It may have been ICE's crude contract, which is cash settled: https://www.theice.com/products/213/WTI-Crude-Futures

"The West Texas Intermediate Light Sweet Crude Oil futures contract is cash settled against the prevailing market price for US light sweet crude."

I need to see other sources for this apart from his own memoirs. Otherwise this is just "boy talk" and very likely has nothing to do with reality.

I'm a big fan of writing down micro-goals, and then crossing them out when I get it done. Even if it's badly done, that just leads to another micro-goal, which is to improve it in some specific way. Sometimes when I do something that is not on the list, maybe I was too lazy to write it down as a micro-goal, I will then make a note of it, just so I can cross it out. It makes such a big difference to my day to be able to see a bunch of things crossed out. I am just very forgetful otherwise and don't remember what I did and start to think that I didn't do anything at all.