pdonis

8 ms·

91.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> If you try to label one side as up, and then you move continuously around the Möbius strip, you'll end up labelling that same side as down!" This statement is true (though it is using a different definition of "up&quot
92.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> Spin the strip as you would a wheel. Meaning, about an axis perpendicular to the strip (or at least it's like that at one point--see below) and running through the center of the "hole" in the middle? You can do this, s
93.
by pdonis 2mo ago
What are you saying should spin? The particle moving along the Mobius strip, or the Mobius strip itself?
94.
by pdonis 2mo ago
As the saying goes, the optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that this is true.
95.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database. As I understood it, the attraction of blockchain was more that the money could get moved around without B
96.
by pdonis 2mo ago
What exactly is the difference between a financial derivatives exchange and a gambling platform? Both involve placing bets on uncertain future outcomes.
97.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to
98.
by pdonis 2mo ago
It's unfortunate that the Greek word eudamonia , which is the one Aristotle used, gets translated into English as "happiness", which is open to so many misunderstandings, particularly in our current culture. There isn't
99.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> Aristotle, being an endless questioning guy he was I dunno--as far as I can tell Aristotle never asked the slaves who supported his philosophical lifestyle what they thought about it.
100.
by pdonis 2mo ago
LLMs don't have the connection to reality that humans have. LLMs only have text. That's the difference.
101.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> what does that mean for Maxwell equations? Nothing. They're still just as valid as they were before. > For electromagnetism? In practical terms, nothing significant. It's not going to change how anyone builds devices t
102.
by pdonis 2mo ago
> most of the proofs I've looked at appear super messy and chaotic to me (while still being correct of course, so it doesn't matter) How do you know they're correct if they're super messy and chaotic?
103.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". I just mean that your brain can do lots of other things besides Bayesian reasoning, and most of them can't be reduced to Bayesian reasoning.
104.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in replacement for your brain. "Rationalists" o
105.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism. We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of
106.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> Dawkins never had much of a research career. Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative. Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional
107.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theore
108.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in. Twain wasn't a poet. The article specifies right at the start that it's looking for a great American poet.
109.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> n any system of mathematics with enough complexity to be interesting, there are statements that cannot be proven true or false. Note that the article itself is not as careful as you are here about correctly stating what Godel's
110.
by pdonis 3mo ago
Lewis Black once said that swearing has a point--it is how we express a sufficient level of rage and anger against something extremely dysfunctional. What should we say, he asked: Oh, pussyfeathers?
111.
by pdonis 3mo ago
I'm no fan of the government trying to regulate such things, but I won't shed any tears if infinite scroll is forced to go away. It's one of the things I hate the most about the so-called "modern" web.
112.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> there is global historical temperature data Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long time periods.
113.
by pdonis 3mo ago
"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed." Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does
114.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> I thought neutron stars generally had a shell or crust of iron, which generates a magnetic field (as metals do) if the neutron star is spinning. They do, but the neutrons themselves also have magnetic properties. (The simplest heuris
115.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours Ok so far. > and you can divide that by 60 twice I'm not so sure. The concept of 24 hours in a day originates in civil timekeeping, yes, but not minutes and seconds. Those ori
116.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours and you can divide that by 60 twice. And that's exactly why the SI second has the length that it has--to be as close as possible in terms of how atomic clocks work to 1/86400
117.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> we nailed down the second to make the technical side easier at the expense of relatability. Would you also say that getting rid of leap seconds and allowing UTC to gradually drift away from the sun is making the technical side easier
118.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history. In terms of what physical process we use to set the standard, yes. But those very changes were made to try to preserve the same time periods t
119.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydrodynamic model of how a magnetar's field gets gener
120.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon. Yes, but averaged over an entire year, it still comes out to zero. The difference between mean solar and atomic time does not. It accumulates over the years. > w

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