normac2

I think what you described is what they already have with the "including results for [similar wording]" version of the results page. They also have a link to see the exact results.

However, as of right now they only offer it for actual typos/spelling mistakes (like your example with the missing space) as opposed to semantically similar wordings.

As described in this other thread [1], there are already people doing it freelance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32324723

This sounds 1) very cool, but 2) also a monster risk for spreading COVID and other diseases (literally pairing people up for close contact in as many combinations as possible).

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/767/

I think it's because you are going to cross through New Mexico or Utah first (unless we represent "you" as a point, line, or other zero-width object, and have it traverse a 45° line through the infinitely small point of intersection of the four states—which I'd say would be a kind of generous model for any path that happens in real life).

I've heard the exact opposite, that the online community is toxic and one of the main downsides.

I assume both are true in different cases, and you just have to be careful what part of the community you get involved in.

At first I thought this was going to be fantasy or some kind of conceptual piece and the front page photo was faked with Photoshop or something like DALL-E 2 with a prompt like sad minotaur girl lies in street in Italy while tourists watch, photorealistic. Looks like it's actually from some kind of (very well-done) street performance art piece.

Starting to feel what it's like to be living in the era where thinking a photo is real isn't a pretty safe default assumption.

It sounds like they're raking in a lot from this, so you'd kinda think they'd be best off actually giving away a car like, once every 5 years. To literally never give out the thing they're advertising seems like playing with fire. (The actual supposed big prize—after you jump through a lot of other hoops—is $100k, but same deal.)

How much fine-tuning and repeated-running did you do to get these? Some of them are just ridiculously awesome.

This might be a case where people genetically taste things differently, because pistachio ice cream wasn't an acquired taste for me at all. Just seems delicious, though maybe a hair off the map of the kind of taste you usually get in ice cream.

Seems like this could create a group of kids who were formerly driven to school and live out of schoolbus range, but their parents go to work too early to be able to drive them now.

I wonder if there are provisions for this in the new plan (e.g., the school opens early for kids to just hang around if they still need to be dropped off early).

> In case you were interested, there's a section devoted to that in RFC 3548: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3548#section-4 with the tl;dr of `s/[+]/-/; s/[/]/_/` and then omitting the trailing "=" characters and just padding the incoming b64 since (AFAIK) one can add as many "=" as they'd like and it'll just ignore extra ones

Just to add one thing: in case Justin isn't familiar, "s/original_thing/replacement_thing" is a figure of speech often used in the hacker subculture to mean "replace original_thing with replacement_thing." It comes from some languages and editors like Perl and Vim/vi, where that syntax (and variations) are used for search and replace.

I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.

One of the definitive examples has to be Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely [1]. 2 or 3 great frisson moments in there. The big one is toward the end, when the strings decay and smudge into atonal textures (very very heavily influenced by the 20th-century composer Penderecki) and then suddenly come back into focus as the song climaxes.

It's just so incredibly well-done that I feel like even people who only listen to classical and jazz, or whatever, would have to acknowledge they really landed something there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W6HhdqA95w (4:25 would be a good place to start, but it's not nearly as good if you don't listen to the whole thing)

Just FYI, John Lennon actually was a popular poet! [1] Mostly nonsense verse, influenced by Lewis Carroll.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Own_Write

A lot of this is way over my head both mathematically and philosophically, but could we get away with saying that the reals exist in some slightly weaker sense, more like how a function exists?

I.e., reals are number-like entities that are actually described via a mathematical expressions, but can successfully be used in expressions as if they were numbers.

In this account, while a real can be used in the place of numbers in mathematical expressions, it's really more of a placeholder for a function that provides the operation (or for an expression nested inside the larger one; take your pick).

As a loose programming analogy, think of how in some languages you can use a generator in the exact same way as an array (at least for iteration), even though the array is a static value and the generator is actually backed by a function with dynamic behavior. Also think of Haskell with its lazy data structures that are represented the same as "actual" values (e.g., infinite arrays)

The author sort of covers this here:

> In particular, it seems intuitive that there are countably many descriptions of numbers (assuming that descriptions are finite-length strings of some finite language). And the real numbers are uncountable, so accepting the existence of the reals means that there are numbers that exist but can never be described. And this feels deeply unsettling to me: if we can never interact with these numbers even conceptually, it would be impossible to distinguish between two universes where in one they exist and in the other they don’t. Which to me makes their existence feel tenuous at best.

So that's a good objection. But what if we weaken the claim and say that only the "describable" reals actually exist, and for the rest, we can talk about them in principle but they actually don't have corresponding objects? This would divide reals into two categories: function-esque ones that we can describe, and "hypothetical" reals that can't be successfully represented using any formal syntax. Just as how in a programming language with generators, you have a countably infinite number of valid generators and an uncountably infinite number of generators you could dream up that fail to produce values in some way (e.g. bad syntax, perform illegal operations like div-by-0, or even just a generator someone came up with in a fever dream that isn't representable in symbols at all).

I think what they're saying is that by making devs use a less familiar language, you're going to end up with at least as many security bugs, just ones not related to memory safety. (Not weighing in either way, just clarifying.)

Is the idea that the product (once it's caught up) will be as good or better (and/or at least reach more people) than the original? Or is he OK with people being worse off than if your company never existed and the better product got to take the lead?

The author of this blog, Scott Alexander, has an online novel called Unsong [1] based on this idea. In the book's universe, Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew characters to find names of God that give various powers.

[1] https://unsongbook.com/

> Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all?

It's a matter of the tone, and also the fact that when I do read carefully and figure out what they're saying, I often think "wow, I could have put that in much simpler terms with no loss of information."

I don't feel this way about literally any other topic besides modern literary criticism (and stuff in that family like modern continental philosophy). Even analytic philosophy looking at similar topics doesn't normally feel willfully opaque in the same way, and I'm happy to dig in and learn the more difficult aspects of what they're saying.

Do you think this is due to being prejudiced about this exact area and nothing else?

To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going out of their way to be hard to understand.

I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.)

STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.

> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts.

Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one?

I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style.

It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure.

[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/

gwern is an amazing resource and has great articles on a range of topics, including productivity stuff; his posts on nicotine [1], modafinil [2], and melatonin [3] would be 3 highlights.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

[2] https://www.gwern.net/Modafinil

[3] https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

This. There's also Mnemosyne, SuperMemo, and others. More here: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

Some of this highlights an issue that I think about a lot (and it's obviously not just me): the duty of corporations to maximize profit of shareholders (as represented by the majority vote of the board, as I understand it) over all other concerns.

Zuckerberg writes this:

> At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true.

Last I heard, he owned the voting shares of the company by a razor thin margin (~ 53%). If he owned even 0.1% less than half of the company, wouldn't this sentence be confessing to unlawful activity?

Unless, of course, we take a legalistic reading that he really means they maximize profit in the short term, but make it up in the long term by good publicity and such. But that's hardly the natural reading of what he wrote. It seems to me like he's ~ 3% of an ownership stake away from a situation where he'd be confessing to violating shareholder rights even by writing that--let alone being responsible to run the company in a way that actually does prioritize profit over safety and well-being. All of this to me seems like a flaw in the American system of financial law.

Well, I can agree with all that, probably more so than 80%+ of other naturalists. Although naturalists tend to actually be pretty open to the powerful psychological effects that can happen via natural means, as you need that to explain things like alien abduction experiences, near-death experiences, etc. in natural terms, unless those people are literally all lying.

> But if you must, start with something like Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Don't just pull out the Goetia and start summoning demons. Reality may or may not be mutable, but our perception of it certainly is. Would you really pick that as a first experiment?

Maybe so, because my mind is so bull-headedly resistant to being modified (at least in the ways associated with occult stuff, like visions, extreme emotion, etc.) that maybe I need a dose of the hard stuff to even notice it ;)

As a naturalist I don't think I can sign on to the first half, even as a realistic possibility. But for psychological effects, sure, I could buy it. The ability of the mind to do get into pretty extreme psychological states, via ritual and otherwise, is easily underestimated.

In fact I would say many naturalists hold onto that argument harder than just about anyone, because it's critical to help explain the weird stuff people experience (e.g. alien abductions are often hypnagogic hallucinations or sleep paralysis, near-death experiences are due to various impaired brain states, etc.)

Interesting take. It's analogous to religious arguments defending the idea of miracles. I don't say that in principle the world must be causally closed and bound by natural laws; only that it seems very likely, as it enough to explain an insanely huge ratio of what we already witness, and the quality of the evidence for other stuff is very low.

I just finished with a quick edit to my post to be more specific, but I suspect your answer would be similar either way.

Yeah, to be honest, parts of this message I'm having trouble even parsing as information. If you've had/seen interactions like this where the other person just seemed too literal-minded, I'd ask you to think about whether your ability to explain it is also contributing. Maybe it's a bit of both. Certainly, I don't pretend this stuff is easy to explain to an outsider. But I think of people like the clearest defenders of Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta--Swami Sarvapriyananda has both Eastern and Western education and is an extraordinarily good popularizer of Advaita Vedanta, for example. I actually understand what they're saying and for the areas that simply can't be described in words, I understand the general bounding box of where the nonverbal insight needs to happen. (E.g., I don't know what it's like to be in a state of pure consciousness without thoughts, if that exists, so I can't understand that specific part of their argument.)

I don't think of myself as very literal-minded. I've spent hundreds of hours doing things like meditation and lucid dreaming and have experienced a range of states of consciousness. I'm even interested in very wild (but naturalist and law-bound) accounts of why subjective experience exists, like mind/body dualism and Russellian monism.

In this sense I appreciate people like psi researchers who at least overtly say "yes there are supernatural phenomena that go against the current laws of physics, we understand them very little if at all, but we're trying to get some initial data." I don't think they've ever succeeded, but at least I know how to have a conversation with them. But in other cases the answers just get bogged down in elliptical wording that I can't even understand, and I think that's what happened here.

Fair enough. Then would you say the spiritual plane that can be accessed or interacted with via these rituals, couldn't be fully described under the laws of physics as we currently know them?

(Obviously almost any phenomenon can't be fully described by the laws of physics in the sense that it's too complex to account for the location and state of every elementary particle involved. But I mean in the sense of introducing entirely new laws, or instances where the existing ones are overridden.)