mpax

11 ms·

1.
by mpax 6y ago
Get out.
2.
by mpax 6y ago
> The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences. How does "life is meaningless" imply "life is useless&qu
3.
by mpax 7y ago
You might do well reading up on the last couple of centuries of Greek history...
4.
by mpax 7y ago
Those data on poverty are a joke! Read for example: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/4/27/200-years-to-end-... It's basically the World Bank covering its ass for its own spectacular failure.
5.
by mpax 7y ago
The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature of modern econ.
6.
by mpax 8y ago
Depends on how you look at it. Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc. What is true is that regexes are typical
7.
by mpax 8y ago
It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production. Th
8.
by mpax 8y ago
What’s the proper game-theoretic equivalent of this situation?
9.
by mpax 8y ago
Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the pixel shader?
10.
by mpax 8y ago
Please keep such madness out of the EU...
11.
by mpax 8y ago
On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining. They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selecti
12.
by mpax 8y ago
They can just sit there in perpetuality, there’s no swat team going to bust in the door because one leg of government lent to the other.
13.
by mpax 8y ago
The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitude being sown.
14.
by mpax 8y ago
They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.
15.
by mpax 8y ago
Facebook has been getting increasingly slugish for me for several years now. I wonder if it’s got anything to do.
16.
by mpax 8y ago
I think historians will look back on this era and point society’s decline towards two companies, they both start with “Go”.
17.
by mpax 8y ago
I’d rather shoot the horse and get a cab.
18.
by mpax 8y ago
One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski Often gets low ratings because people mistake it for an educational book. It’s a mix of history, biographies and verbal exposition on the development of mathematical theo
19.
by mpax 8y ago
Laws of power is nice but what always bothered me about it is that there doesn’t seem to be a system to the laws, it merely sums up a bunch of them without investigating underlaying foundations.
20.
by mpax 8y ago
A Brief History of Time, by Hawking
21.
by mpax 8y ago
> 70 mph is not fast if I am leaving adequate distance between me and everything else. The problem then becomes others tailgating and driving into the space in front of you, effectively diminishing you braking room.
22.
by mpax 8y ago
I very much share this sentiment, I often think of prisons as quarantine. But that’s the descriptive dimension, not the normative. Crime victims seem to crave “revenge”. It’s a very human thing. In fact psychological studies have shown it t
23.
by mpax 8y ago
Well... sure, but it depends on how you look at it. In a monetary society (as opposed to credit or barter (intermediary like you suggest) — monetary circuitist terminology), money is created as a debt/credit tuple to facilitate an inte
24.
by mpax 8y ago
Wait, you mean privatized prisons are a moral hazard? /s
25.
by mpax 8y ago
We have research publishing requirements in academia these days, which puts quantity over quality of research. I think we should swap those with required replication studies of published results.
26.
by mpax 8y ago
"This, Jen, is the internet." https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg
27.
by mpax 8y ago
I'm starting to notice a trend whenever I engage with economics on these matters. In fact this pattern shows up every time , it's like they are trained to do this. It starts with an acknowledgement that the theory is stylized bey
28.
by mpax 8y ago
> If the word rational bothers you, replace it with equilibrium. The world is a complex adaptive system, how does micro or macro equilibrium fit that any better than homo economicus? If anything it sounds even worse to me... > They’re
29.
by mpax 8y ago
Where did I say I have a problem with it?
30.
by mpax 8y ago
> Homo economicus is a pedagogical tool and toy model. Utilitarian economics feature pretty much nowhere because defining a single utility function for real people is impossible. Then what is the point? I mean, seriously, what is the poi

More ›