sramsay

I'm having flashbacks to a number of basically interminable debates in computing : big-endian vs little-endian, thin clients vs thick, windows vs mac, framework vs no-framework, functional vs imperative, monolithic kernels vs microkernels, emacs vs vi . . .

In none of these cases is the debate resolved by asking: "What problem are we trying to solve?"

(edited for clarity)

Except not this time. RC 2 was just released.

Right now, homebrew is refusing to compile packages from source:

  Error: Your Xcode (14.0.1) is too outdated.
  Please update to Xcode 14.1 (or delete it).
  Xcode can be updated from the App Store.

Ventura and iPadOS 16 dropped (along with iOS 16.1), but not Xcode 14.1 (which is still RC). I don't recall them ever not releasing Xcode at the same time as an OS update.

The author is drawing comparisons (playfully, I admit) with Buddhism, but the Puritans were following a tradition that goes back to late antiquity in the west. Books like the ones being described, in which the "psychology of sin" (so to speak) is dissected and various remedies put forth goes back at least to Evagrius (4th century), and likely far further than that.

The Reformers sought to change many aspects of the "old religion," but a basic asceticism was not among them.

Read only Reuters for a month and then go read AP. Then go read the NYT. You’ll be amazed.

English professor here. This is the secret to becoming a terrific writer: exposing yourself to excellent writing. Nothing replaces this, and it works in every genre from technical writing to lyric poetry.

This is really, really important for any kind of fermentation (including things like sourdough starter). I believe it's possible to get rid of some kinds of chlorination from municipal water sources by boiling the water first, but it is not possible to get rid of "chloramines," which are widely used (at least in the US). The web page for your local water supplier should be able to tell you whether they use chloramines or not, but I pretty much always just use bottled water that I know has nothing in it that would inhibit the fermentation.

You move like them. Are you the chosen one?

It doesn't (in this case), and I didn't say it did. And there's nothing "blindingly obvious" about the ubiquity of the Zipf curve.

I think people (here and below) are getting hung up on definite articles, but Zipf's Law makes no such observation. It says only that a word's frequency in a natural language corpus tends to be in inverse proportion to its rank in a frequency table.

In English, the most frequent words are articles, but the general observation about word frequency holds across languages (whether those languages have articles or not).

Absolutely no way.

Can you say a bit more about this? I know I can go look at the API, but I had no idea that it was capable of generating (?) MIDI files (I don't have cause to use Lilypond, really). Do you personally use it for generative music? Or something adjacent to that?

I've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally).

I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a hard task, but an almost impossible one. Lots of people (2000 years ago, say) thought that what they were writing was of world-historical significance; today, we barely know their names. Others dashed off dictated letters to small, fragile communities of early followers and just happened to have created among the most well preserved texts of all time.

All I'm really saying here is that among the titanic forces determining which is which, the type of ink used seems not to be a matter of much importance.

> Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish . . .

I think this is actually wrong. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to "store" your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. That might enable accidental preservation. But at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them.

You mention Anglo Saxon. That's an interesting example, because the entire corpus of Anglo Saxon literature is easily anthologized in a single volume, and there is exactly one extant copy of what most scholars regard as the most important thing written in the language (Beowulf). But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it.

But psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things.

And translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Where did I put that again?

To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. But why? It was written on paper, there were thousands and thousands of copies printed, none of them have actually disintegrated into dust, and yet . . .

So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. They'll do the rest.

No, no. I did not think you are saying that (that if physics doesn't explain something it doesn't exist). That's why I put in that last line.

But now I'm actually not so sure. You seem to not admit of a category of things that physics can't explain. There are things it does not currently explain, things it has not yet explained, things it has explained wrongly, and things it may never explain as an historical matter. But not things it can't explain ("can't" in the sense of "is incapable of").

Do I have you right on that?

For Turing, the criteria for intelligence was a matter of observers (if it walks like a duck . . .); what is "actually happening" inside is irrelevant. Searle's objection was that what is happening "inside" is surely not irrelevant. So while some answered that in the Chinese Room argument the "whole system is conscious," others argued that Turing's point still stands. Someone observing the system would have to conclude that the system was intelligent, regardless of what was happening inside.

The two answers are roughly on the same side of the argument, but subtly different in important ways.

Would you accept the statement "If physicalism is true, then there is nothing here to explain."

I'm not setting a trap. I'm just trying to clarify your position.

I understand what you mean when you say "pseudoscientific bullshit," but it might be better to simply say "non-scientific" in the sense of "beyond the ambit of what science is designed to explain."

The problem of "being" (why there is something rather than nothing) is similar. It's not just that we don't have a physics explanation for why anything exists in the first place; it's that physics may not be able to answer that kind of question at all.

None of that is necessarily "pseudoscience" or necessarily bullshit (though it's easy enough to find examples of both).

I am skeptical of the circularity of the argument, though. There must be a "physics explanation" because physics explains everything. And we know that, because if physics can't explain it, it doesn't exist. And we know that, because physics explains everything.

(Not accusing you in particular of making that argument . . .)

You may be right about where the burden lies, but your explanation renders the thermostat conscious.

Edit: I should put that differently. Your sense of the criteria by which the problem may be considered solved does not preclude thermostat consciousness. And if that is allowed, then yes: the problem is solved. But I sense, again, the assumption of physicalism (or ontological naturalism), and I don't know why that premise admits of no dissent or argument.

That's one answer. Another is that you would be within your rights to draw the inference that the system you are observing is conscious (which is slightly different, and deeply unsatisfying to many).

I think you only regard that theory as "airtight" because you accept the premises of ontological naturalism. What you're basically saying is that it must be this way, because there is no other way to for it to be.

But it remains the case that there is exactly no evidence at all for the belief that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. Not some evidence -- no evidence.

Or Diogenes’ On Farting.

The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (who has translated the New Testament) has suggested "bread adequate for the day's needs:"

"'Daily bread,' admittedly, is almost accurate enough, though the phrase would better be rendered 'bread adequate for the day's needs'; but I doubt most of us quite hear the note of desperation in that phrase 'τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον'—the very real uncertainty, suffered every day, concerning whether today one will have enough food to survive."

But this in the context of a larger argument, in which the Lord's Prayer is presented quite specifically as a prayer intended to be uttered by the destitute.

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-p...

You know, I had sort of forgotten all about this edition. I notice that the public-domain Robinson edition I mentioned was one of the source texts.

And the XML is pretty amazing. Every token is tagged!

This speaks of "multiple translations." What I would really like are APIs to critical editions of the Greek New Testament, Septuagint, Hebrew Bible, Peshitta, Vulgate, etc. I'm not holding my breath; those are all under copyright, as I understand it, and they aren't cheap when added onto the major bible software packages.

I know of at least one public domain edition of the Byzantine majority text of the Greek NT:

https://newchristianbiblestudy.org/bible/greek-byzantine-200...

(not sure if that's the official page)

Edit: I suppose I could create my own API for that one!

I would suggest getting through your first cup of coffee before you hit this article. It speaks of "ROM-based Ph.D. students" and "giant swimming heads."

Really, really cool!

I'm a huge fan of Bash, and am always interested in upping my skills. My only question is this: Is it better than the (free) Bash Guide?

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/FullBashGuide

Because that is a pretty amazing resource.

> He does not entertain the derision he receives for his erratic cycles of hype and retreat, because they are part of his hyper self-conscious creative rhythm, part of his prayer ritual.

Right. He has also publicly admitted that he has bipolar disorder -- a devastating illness that causes behaviors remarkably like the ones so relentlessly romanticized in this article.

I think Kanye West is a genius. But I also think it doesn't help him or anyone else struggling with mental illness to perpetuate the myth that his symptoms are an essential part of his "process."