prionassembly

Or having built a city on a precarious place that shouldn't have been for human dwelling by any conceivable reason, and yet it is. That people insist on living in these places is a testament to the value of human occupation as such.

(I live in a city that's mostly built on what was the ocean two hundred years ago (sometimes fifty years ago) but won by civil engineering. It's a big empty country otherwise. We're basically below the sea level and maintaining underground infrastructure (electricity, fiber optic, heating gas, what have you) is a constant source of noise -- even the cable company has to have its draining machine vans. But by golly do we want to live here whatever the costs.

Man, I miss SimCity.

There's the mythology of the heavens being held up by the titan Atlas, who rests on top of a cow, which rests on top of a turtle... the kiddy version continues on top of another turtle, on top of...

I once had a vision -- yes, a vision, something deep came to me as I laid half-awake -- that after a few dozen turtles the actual ground was made of jackstraw[1]. It rested on a firm tangle.

I've always felt since then that the world and the universe themselves are made of contradictions. That some contradictions are fundamental, and this is why since Socrates we've always been so focused on finding contradictions. Because maybe we can find the ones we can't pick apart.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_sticks

At one point in a past life I was in a PhD Applied Math program and one of the professors who was into computer graphics gave a lecture on data visualization. She encouraged us to pick artwork we like and run it through Adobe Kuler to get palettes, because there was no way we'd acquire a taste for colors and complete a PhD at the same time.

This is a kind of adverse selection.

Wait. Are you me? Did I write this in my sleep?

I've wanted to use cuelang twice already, but having to install the go language on Ubuntu is a major inconvenience. Instead I used NestedText (I tend to do all my parsing with Pydantic anyway).

The onramp from

- script without a main function

- to personal or ad hoc codebase for non-tech workplace

- to packaged code to cope with namespaces + type hints + general best practices

- to code that reads like good code from the major open source project

is long, but the slope is easy. There are no discontinuities. Basically anyone who can use Python to glue together networkx/sklearn etc. can eventually write software tools that are useful and stable enough to distribute.

Banking is older than trigonometry, or even writing. All of this has happened with clay tablets; all of this will happen again.

He's a Cylon, but he's on your side.

I started following a bunch of right-wingish accounts just because it was aired that they had been banned so I wanted to see what they were all about for a while. OTOH the Musk hysteria became annoying so I unfollowed a lot of blue checks and leftish people.

Thus money and capital are different things with different cardinalities. (More: https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/07/31/zero-chroma-infinity/ )

So many words, so little clarity.

One would hope that social progress means that people learn inclusiv[ity|eness] as an abstract ethical concept and, from that, language and other social practices follow. Instead we're down a route where we're force-fed a kind of saccharine social justice orthodoxy that can only have two outcomes: hypocrisy or backlash.

Also doesn't British English still use "the f word" for cigarettes?

(I mean, given WHO guidance maybe we'll be discouraged to write about cigarettes going forward)

What?

Postel's law etc. etc.

By all appearances Xah is such an extreme personality. It's this (and websites like this) which made the internet awesome.

The expression "virtue signaling" implies insincerity.

Email the authors.

> more expensive

There's pressing a flat circle in a factory somewhere, and there's

- printing album art, making sleeves, etc.

- storage

- distribution

- retail space

- "shrinkage" (ok, stealing a CD is easier)

- ... ?

Yet the (military) Air Force uses modafinil?

I can never understand why people leave reviews on apps they haven't downloaded.

Ayn Rand's heroes are overwrought and improbable, but her villains are nothing to emulate either.

This made me finally download TikTok and.. OW! that's REALLY NSFW!

(I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)

The source of disagreement is: his code generates floating point approximations of uniformly-distributed real values in [0,1]; not random floats greater than 0 and smaller than 1.

This distinction has little to do with the subtlety of floats. You can e.g. generate numbers up to 100 with

- 5d20 (5 dice of 20 sides),

- 20d5 or even

- 16d6+1d4.

[Edit: the point of this exercise: these are different representations of the numbers up to 100.]

But even assuming each die with D sides has equiprobable results with prob 1/D, these choices don't have the same probability distribution. To convince yourself of this, compare 1d12 (the probability of getting 1 is 1/12) with 2d6 (the probability of getting 1 is 0).

> of all time

This is a little extreme. "Teen spirit", "Come as you are", "Lithium" are great, but "On a plain" and other heavier numbers are jarringly plasticky.

It says something about the power of branding that my first eye scan parsed this as "Authorization in Microsoft Word".