xamuel

54 ms·

631.
by xamuel 8y ago
Of course "Are we living in a simulation" is far too vague to test. The type of simulation must be narrowed down before the question can be tested. In my paper "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests w
632.
by xamuel 8y ago
Reminds me of MUD games from the mid 1990s. A big MUD might've had three or four talented programmers, a dozen or so level designers, and dozens of administrators. All putting serious time into the MUD, and all without the faintest tho
633.
by xamuel 8y ago
Some lessons are easier learned through parables/fables/stories than through direct teaching. That's especially true for children. I can tell my little daughter the story of "the boy who cried wolf", or "the do
634.
by xamuel 8y ago
Think of it this way. Imaging you're immortal, and you're going to go to a deserted island for all eternity, and you can take one book with you. Suppose you want to maximize the probability that the one book you take with you will
635.
by xamuel 8y ago
Assuming you could concretely nail down all the vague terms you just used, I'd be willing to bet real money we won't have anything remotely like that within the next 10 years :)
636.
by xamuel 8y ago
I'm a logician and I wouldn't call those stories a "logical nightmare". I'd even go so far as to say they have a profound deep inner logic. It's a bit arrogant, given a book which alleges to reveal divine secre
637.
by xamuel 8y ago
>presumably lenders need some way to evaluate the "trustworthiness" of who they're lending to, yea? Well, that's kind of, like, their whole job description. If you can't evaluate peoples' trustworthiness, yo
638.
by xamuel 8y ago
Nontrivial regexes should be treated as their own language. I.e., either the team agrees to use them freely, in which case, team members are obligated to actually learn them. Or, if not, then team members agree not to use them. If you were
639.
by xamuel 8y ago
It's not clickbait. The article is genuinely interesting, and the title is quite relevant to why it's interesting.
640.
by xamuel 8y ago
The formula involves a parameter c=10^10 and initially seems unbelievable because one's initial inclination is to assume that the 10^10 is particularly important, like it has to be that particular value in order for the formula to work
641.
by xamuel 8y ago
Well for one thing, with triple-stores it's not uncommon to expose an unsanitized read-only query engine (usually SPARQL), usually harmless because none of the data is secret. That goes out the window if you're actually storing bu
642.
by xamuel 8y ago
Sorry, I only worked with FMA, with some tangentially related ontologies like CHEBI, and some custom in-house ontologies.
643.
by xamuel 8y ago
I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people in European academia use it as a collection of buzzwords for making grant propo
644.
by xamuel 8y ago
Your logic could be misleading if not parsed carefully. It's not that police shouldn't patrol where crime is highest--of course they should patrol there, if they know where that is. Rather, the point is that "most arrests&quo
645.
by xamuel 8y ago
There's nothing non-reproducible about it within a particular run. Of course it would be silly to write a pointer hash table to disk!
646.
by xamuel 8y ago
Say you have an array of pointers and you want to take its distinct members. For each pointer, you could look up its hash in a table. If it's not there, you can be sure the pointer hasn't been seen before: append it to your result
647.
by xamuel 8y ago
>oddly philosophical Well, I'm a logician, so maybe that's inevitable :) >I'm the rich one, not the merchant Saying "I'm the rich one" is appealing to the fallacy of money as fixed natural resource. Try t
648.
by xamuel 8y ago
Thanks, I edited my last paragraph to say "welfare" instead of "food stamps"
649.
by xamuel 8y ago
Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps. Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would st
650.
by xamuel 8y ago
You keep returning to the fundamental fallacy of thinking of money as a fixed natural resource with its own intrinsic value. That 5c you give doesn't accomplish anything by itself. If the recipient uses it to buy a slice of bread, the
651.
by xamuel 8y ago
>if an experiment is part of popular culture then it's part of us too. Sure, but so what? The point is that certain psychological experiments can, just by being known to the participants, have their results change, and this means in
652.
by xamuel 8y ago
No-one eats money. Money is just how we notate that we owe each other stuff. The surgeon can operate on the patient but decides not to, because the patient is a stranger. Bezos says "Please help that patient". The surgeon says &qu
653.
by xamuel 8y ago
If I were Bezos, I'd do a lot more for charity. That said, you're making the fallacy of thinking like money is a natural resource we dig up from the ground or something, that Bezos is hoarding. No. Money is just an abstraction of
654.
by xamuel 8y ago
Here's a fundamental problem with psychology reproducibility even in principle: experiments often depend on the subject not knowing about the experiment; therefore, the more well-known an experiment, the harder it is to perform. For ex
655.
by xamuel 8y ago
Reminds me of this project from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo If I were a billionaire, one of the projects I'd do would be to apply this sort of technology at scale, upon volunteers who were witness
656.
by xamuel 8y ago
I've heard people are doing pretty well in Silicon Valley, maybe Silicon Valley should take in a bunch of refugees?
657.
by xamuel 8y ago
Which online "windows to music, arts, culture" would you recommend?
658.
by xamuel 8y ago
>in the future, normal people will be able to code, so work backwards from that This. I'll never be able to understand certain programmers' insistence that imperative code is somehow unnatural or that "we're only used
659.
by xamuel 8y ago
>elegant solutions (a.k.a mathematical/functional) Meanwhile, if you look at pseudo-code written by actual mathematicians or logicians, it's almost always imperative, full of side-effects and global variables. Sometimes they
660.
by xamuel 8y ago
The mashup "genre" currently is full of amateurs, because copyright law won't allow you to make money off it. Sampling is used to great effect by hip hop artists, but only in very limited ways because they have to negotiate e

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