xamuel

19 ms·

151.
by xamuel 6y ago
Well, if you're an evolutionary extremist, it actually becomes tautological. Imagine half of mankind flies off to colonize space and the two halves of mankind never inter-breed ever again (the prototypical example of a future with no &
152.
by xamuel 6y ago
Well, it's going a little beyond Rohde et al (and could be an interesting future paper if you're into writing papers), but I would imagine the same sort of modelling would probably show that it's unlikely for anyone to have e
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by xamuel 6y ago
I predict it wouldn't be as fun as it might initially sound. NPC dialog is part of level design just like all the rest of the level it occurs on. With few exceptions (such as roguelikes), random level generation tends to produce bland
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by xamuel 6y ago
One of my favorite papers highlighting the counter-intuitiveness of the world on a truly long term is Rohde et al, 2004, "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans". Wherein they show using computer simulations, wi
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by xamuel 6y ago
In your estimation, how far away are we from eye-tracking software being able to detect the start of a microsaccade, estimate where the gaze is moving toward, and draw new contents on the screen there before the gaze even reaches that point
156.
by xamuel 6y ago
Gosh, thanks. I never cease to be amazed at my own ignorance. So I guess that makes all the rhetoric about "the fourth branch of government" even sillier than I already thought it was. (If journalism were to be a fourth branch, th
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by xamuel 6y ago
I sometimes wonder what the authors of the U.S. constitution would think about the modern "press". I wonder whether in some alternate universe the constitution could have been interpreted in such a way that special protections for
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Intuitive Ordinal Notations(github.com)
2 points by xamuel 6y ago|0 comments
159.
by xamuel 6y ago
LOL, if Covid had an 8% death rate, do you really think politicians would still be walking around? No, they'd all be boarding submarines! The CDC's most recent estimate is more like 0.65% and that's probably still an overesti
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by xamuel 6y ago
These students should not be considering the college their longterm home anyway. They aren't supposed to be putting down roots. They are students. It's supposed to be a temporary thing where you earn the degree and then move on to
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by xamuel 6y ago
I agree, timezone disparities are hard. These are hard times, people make sacrifices. Maybe the schools could run some night classes: sounds drastic, but maybe that would finally justify how the schools continue to charge full tuition.
162.
by xamuel 6y ago
Thanks for pointing out Optional Practical Training (OPT), that's a good point. That might be a good thing for the feds to waive (once things go back to normal). On the second point, usually PhD students with that much seniority aren&#
163.
by xamuel 6y ago
I'm sure this will be super unpopular, but I think universities are on the wrong side here. First: If the classes are online anyway, then there's no reason students need to be on U.S. soil to take them. If the schools have policie
164.
by xamuel 6y ago
The whole of Psalm 137 is actually quite relevant in this whole censorship discussion. "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willows we hung our harps, for there our captors requested a song; o
165.
by xamuel 6y ago
When we tell a person to do something, we always give them some freedom in how to do it. When we tell a computer to do something, we don't. If one were to instruct a human being to go to the grocery store in absolutely full micromanage
166.
by xamuel 6y ago
How would you improve Man in the High Castle? Like many PKD books it presents a premise which seems, naively, like a veritable paper mill that you could churn out endless books from--and then barely goes anywhere with it. That's part o
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by xamuel 6y ago
TL/DR: Darwin eventually came to believe earthworms have some amount of intelligence because they drag leaves in certain specific ways, including leaves not native to their environment. I found it an interesting coincidence to read her
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by xamuel 6y ago
The Bible (technically working on my 2nd cover-to-cover readthrough, but have read individual books in it many times, especially the Gospel of Matthew). All of Kafka's novels, but especially "The Castle". Several of PKD'
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by xamuel 6y ago
What does that 287k include? Presumably just positive test cases? Probably there are far more undiagnosed infections that didn't require hospitalization. If the IFR was really 14% like your numbers suggest, we would see politicians put
170.
by xamuel 6y ago
I'd be interested in continuing this conversation by email if you were interested. You can find my address in any of my papers (such as this one: https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMSI.pdf )
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by xamuel 6y ago
That comes off as kind of dismissive of religion, but if what you say is true, then what I'd like to know is, what sort of techniques were discovered in step (3)? I mean, if ancient priests discovered esoteric methods of getting more a
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by xamuel 6y ago
Nothing better captures systemic, institutional, hidden racism than the war on drugs. Why oh why can't we end that already!
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by xamuel 6y ago
Agree LaTeX is painful here. For tables and inline code snippets, it is indeed a genuine shortcoming of LaTeX. On the other hand: * For graphs and charts, I'm not sure how it could be done much better in a text-based programming langua
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by xamuel 6y ago
You can already sue them. For example, if Fox runs a segment claiming that you (gulli1010) are a murderer, you can sue them for slander (with or without this executive order). If someone tweets that you are a murderer, you can't sue T
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by xamuel 6y ago
Without any attempt to weigh in on political sides, this debate made me think of an interesting "hack" to act as a publisher while enjoying the protections of a platform: 1. Start a website where users are able to write arbitrary
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by xamuel 6y ago
If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of tr
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by xamuel 6y ago
Good question, I had to think about it for awhile. I think it would take some elaborate mental gymnastics to try to redeem the read example. The read example is sort of like an appeal to a higher-power oracle. It isn't self-contained;
178.
by xamuel 6y ago
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I actually find eval-based quines MORE beautiful because they highlight the philosophically interesting aspects of quines, such as... * ...the blurring of the distinction between output and code. * ...t
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by xamuel 6y ago
Sure, which is why I said "way easier". If you were assigning quine as a python homework exercise, and you wanted an "exec" solution ruled out, you would need to explicitly rule it out in the text of the exercise. >If
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by xamuel 6y ago
No it's not on the same level, it's subtly different. The file could be altered during the brief instant between when you execute the file and when the program loads itself. Or the whole thing could be run from the REPL with no &q

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