JonathanMerklin

Straight Outta Lynwood was a great album. One of the CDs that I took out of my case the most often as a struggling nerdling who was still a year or two away from having scrounged up enough spare cash for a secondhand iPod.

I'll bite. What's your argument, or at least the comment-sized gist of it?

I agree with almost all of what you have stated, save for a minor nitpick: I frankly don't think most functional adults think about the Fields Medal, similar annual prizes, or the qualities of the innovations of their candidate pools. I also think that that's totally okay. I think among a certain learned cohort of adults it's okay to hope that, and I think it's okay to imagine an idealized world where having an opinion on this sort of matter is a baseline, but I don't think it's realistic or fair to imply that (what I believe handwavily to be a majority of) adults are nonfunctional for not sharing this understanding.

The cyclic group generated by e.g. RU has order 105 (so 210 total turns or 105 of each side, alternated). If you have some math know-how, check out [1]. If you don't, take my word for it: when I was a teenager playing around with cubes, I once had a similar experience trying to do the same thing you did - when I went relatively quickly it never returned to the solved state, but when I was very deliberate about each turn, I got the 105 result (not by counting back then, but by rough time estimate given the figure I just looked up). Both you and I probably accidentally threw in one or more double-turns (like a U2) in there, or undercounted and gave up well before the cycle had completed (I, too, had thought I'd made "hundreds" of moves).

[1] https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/4127/algebra-club/rubik-ta... - slide 41

I think it's possible that that may be an additional benefit (for Google), but to me it seems overwhelmingly more likely that the main explanation here is Conway's Law.

You've identified a potential strategy by which a computer can play like a 1300-rated player, but not one where it will "play like a 1300-rated human". Patzers can still find and make moves in your set of N (if only by blind chance).

I want to note for the HN crowd that the book is in the "just technical enough to inform yet not scare off the layman, but not technical enough for the practitioner" nonfiction subgenre. Critically, there are a number of finer details that DFW gets wrong; if you're mathematically inclined and intend to read this, I suggest pairing it with a printed copy of Prabhakar Ragde's errata document hosted by the DFW fansite The Howling Fantods ([1]).

[1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/images/enmerrata.pdf

Perhaps not the hyphenated form, but I'd had a chat with a friend a couple days ago where we meandered around some surface level philosophy and I paraphrased a section or two from Thus Spoke Zarathustra about the rabble ([1]), so I'm sure that's why it was front of mind. I only used it twice just to be clear that it was referring to the same thing, I didn't intend for any semantic satiation or emphasis through repetition. My apologies!

[1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/thusspakezarathustra-107....

Genuinely asking: is that huge in terms of their install base or revenue, or is that huge in terms of PR ramifications (like, "vocal minority" type of deal)? In my younger days I'd've had a heavily skewed pro-gamer and pro-authority-of-the-gamer-rabble viewpoint, but now at this phase of my life I can't help but feel the majority of the places I see Windows are all in business and education contexts (so just business, heyo). I'd be curious to know if the gamer-rabble still holds the kind of weight in the social media aggregate that, say, got the Kinect-as-mandatory stuff walked back.

I get what you're saying, but "rule 34 also applies to scientific research" is a bizarre way to word it; the way I'd interpret that phrase out of context is just that it logically follows because scientific research is a subset of "things that exist".

I don't claim to be in SBF's head, but the gist of the rationale for this type of thought is a hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time. Learning facts about reality is the only reason to consume text content; any purposeful reduction of signal-to-noise ratio is folly. Books should be blogposts. Blogposts should be bulleted digests. Maximize information density to minimize wasted time. Fiction is pure waste.

I feel like most people who have ever had that mental model of reading evolve past that type of thinking and settle into the "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" mode of thinking by the time they reach high school (yours truly included). Not to mention one often needs to take a moment for newly acquired information to "settle", and language that's (loosely) bridgework between facts is what grants that moment.

Worth noting for the interested reader that's disappointed upon reading your comment that there's also a Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (ISBN-13: 978-0691150390, ISBN-10: 0691150397).

A math history book about one specific area of study written more in a popsci style that I liked: one of my favorite authors (David Foster Wallace) wrote "Everything & More: A Compact History of Infinity" which I'd call a 7/10 pop math experience and a 6/10 DFW experience, which is still a pretty good deal.

If you're no Math PhD but you are mathematically inclined (e.g. I studied plenty of math as an undergraduate but left to play the software industry game thereafter) you should have the errata document handy (I'll link the parent page that has other paratext [1]) - the author is a math enthusiast but not a mathematician and gets some of the finer details incorrect.

I also read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh and recall liking it, but I can't recall if it holds up under either mathematical scrutiny or the scrutiny of a more refined palate.

[1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/everything-and-more.ht...

I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!

I haven't heard the "square root of employees are critical" rule of thumb. I have previously heard of Price's Law - paraphrasing: "half of the output is created by a square root of the organization". But as I understand it, there's not a notion of criticality. What if 80% of your output is critical? What if the n-n^0.5 group is on critical output and your square root group is slinging schlock at high volume?

What fight do you recommend I take? The way I see it, if I balk at additional fees, taxes, and tips, there is a relatively high risk that I don't even receive the product or service - which is no different than my current strategy of, loosely, "spending within my means plus a 50% buffer", with the added detriment of wasted time and effort on the haggling process.

The system is bad, no doubt, but I personally have spent almost a decade living and interacting with reality with a hard fast personal rule that every numeric value I see fronted by a "$" is only 2/3 of the actual price, and adjust my purchase habits accordingly. It's not a hard conversion to make, and the amount of times it's an underestimation are greatly eclipsed by the number of times that it's spot on or even wrong enough to be a "good deal". Life's too short to be a pessimist all the time, but in certain contexts it helps to live by the adage that if you expect the worst, you'll rarely be disappointed.

FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which game the author/commenter wishes to finish.

Yeah, I've used it in Haskell for ignored variables, holes, type wildcards, etc.

Another interesting little rabbit hole that this little conversation led me to: In the Chrome (and Firefox) developer tools, the variable for the previous output is "$_", which I imagine that is the case because of how common it was to assign the main export of the Underscore.js library to "_" (and in the days before a lot of websites would mostly e.g. have their site's code in a webpack-induced closure, they would e.g. grab underscore (or lodash, in those times?) from a CDN and pollute the global scope).

Since _ is a valid identifier, it also turns out that in Node.js's REPL, it warns you when you clobber _, but (weirdly) not if the clobbering is with a block-scoped declaration.

  $ node
  Welcome to Node.js v18.12.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  'asdf'
  > var _ = 1
  Expression assignment to _ now disabled.
  undefined
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  1

  $ node
  Welcome to Node.js v18.12.1.
  Type ".help" for more information.
  > const _  = 1
  undefined
  > _
  1
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  1

I just checked and this is true for the Node.js REPL (Tried in v12, v14, v16, and v18) as well, which I'm also just learning for the first time (and I had the same workflow as you before this). Neat!

I don't think that it's a strict binary of "art is not just another product of labor" and "artist and art are separate entities". Surely you've heard some variation of the turn of phrase "separating the art from the artist" over the last handful of years, even before this most recent boom in "AI art."

I'm writing this at 5am in a weird anxiety-induced sleep-procrastination HN session so I'm having trouble pinpointing and articulating the je ne sais quoi, but maybe some examples will meander gradually towards it: I've read many novels that I thought were good and knew nothing of the authors but the name (isn't this part of the point of a nom de plume?) and I've read novels I thought were middling, sometimes by the very same names. I know nothing about the artists of street murals I occasionally walk by, and I know nothing about the artists of non-mural graffiti tags along walls and overpasses on the very same roads, and I know nothing about the artists of phallic scrawls on the walls of the bathroom stalls I use along the way, but there's a pretty clear ordering of their artistic merits based on some ethereal non-quantitative aesthetic quality despite all being ostensibly "art". I'm not an art buff, but when I first encountered the works of Caravaggio, I found them to be a master class in form and light that resonated with me on some level, and I still thought that after eventually reading about his brawls and exile due to the murder/manslaughter of Tommasoni. Sometimes it'll take more than a year between discovering a musician or band that I enjoy, listening through their oeuvre, and finally reading their Wikipedia article (or Soundcloud/Twitter bio, for the sufficiently obscure). For some, it never happens. In the hoi polloi art form of standup comedy, I can still laugh hard at Louis C.K. or John Mulaney or Bill Cosby despite knowing stories about their lives off of the stage that paint them in a bad light, and I can laugh just as hard at the tight 5 or crowdwork or even the recorded album of someone I've never heard of, if the material and delivery have that non-quantitative quality of, well, being funny.

I don't find my art consumption habits or perspective troubling or chilling. I'm willing to celebrate what humanity is capable of without celebrating a specific subset of humans, or even knowing what subset of humans are worth celebrating.

It's like how I try hard to write clean yet robust code at work, but am not bothered that even when I hit the mark, it will only be appreciated by those within my corporate walls, and fade when I or the organization am gone. You can run the "git blame", sure, but "it's just code" - today's "big wins" are tomorrow's "legacy garbage". Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But hey, I've struggled with lifelong chronic solipsism, so maybe this perspective is chilling to you nevertheless. I'm a real human, there's a "me" in here. I don't like to think that what makes me smile - and why/how - is any more a canary for our march towards oblivion than anyone else's smile-inducers.

"Having your identity be singular and directly rooted in providing entertainment for others" is true of professional athletes. Comedians. Magicians. Writers.

s/entertainment/value/ , it's true of software engineers. Plumbers. Construction workers. Homemakers. Traders.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

We're getting a little off-topic here, but this is actually the first I'm learning that MtG can't explicitly mention the stack (I follow set releases and read cards casually sometimes, cube once in a blue moon, played standard one summer ever). That's a bit of a shame - one of the other card games I've played (Yu-Gi-Oh) works its equivalent (a "Chain") into card effects and it doesn't have to be complicated. One very good card ("Chain Strike") does damage multiplied by its stack position (chain link) so the later in the stack (chain) it appears, the more damage it does. That's not too crazy. Would've loved that either to attempt the inevitable degenerate combos or just splash it into RDW. There is also a balancing mechanism where certain effects can only be activated once per stack (chain) which is not as draconian as "per turn" but could otherwise when omitted potentially make cards ingredients in degenerate combos (e.g. "Accumulated Fortune").

Final aside: I used the phrase twice, so it should be clear that the history of said game (again, Yu-Gi-Oh) is plagued with degenerate combos.

EDIT: Editing in this edit to acknowledge that there is a sibling comment with a valid nit that invalidates the reason I responded. In my defense, my slow phone-based composition took me so long I did not see it until this edit. I'm leaving it for the sake of hopefully any nascent game designer getting any insight, I suppose. Or hey, card game players getting their kicks thinking about card game mechanics.

I'd love to hear some of your recommendations for books you've read or skim-evaluated that yield a large magnitude vector on your <1, 2, 3, 4>-space.

The endnotes are fundamental to the experience. There are some key plot points divulged or hinted at there first (and sometimes there exclusively, IIRC). Pemulis' funniest moments are back there. I still find my mind drifting to the description of Cage III: Free Show from J.O.I.'s filmography from time to time.

If nothing else, I once read a comment somewhere online that noted that the constant back-and-forth from text to endnotes and back is physically analogous to a back-and-forth in a tennis match. If thematic consistency in the third dimension was actually something DFW was going for, it's a shame you're only seeing half of the court.

Devil's advocate: this would be a horrible office for a teetotaler with a pet allergy, an alcoholic who wants to quit (possibly - from a productivity standpoint - also one who doesn't), or someone with dog-related trauma. None of that describes me, but just saying. For me, frankly, that seems like a distracting work environment that values camaraderie more than productivity; there's nothing wrong with the former but it shouldn't come at expense of the latter (and the converse feels like a weaker assumption).

Some people have a genuine preference for a brutalist cube farm and it's not because their aesthetics barometer is malfunctioning.

It's usually seen as immoral to bring up in this context, but if you can't increase the denominator, you can try to decrease the numerator.

(I love the "sneed" lampshading.) This isn't Reddit indeed but if you want that to change on your browser and to turn your "probably" into an "undoubtedly", this post titled "The more things change, the more they stay the same: A collection of complaints about the youth throughout history" is one of the top posts of all-time on /r/history :

https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7btv14/the_more_th...

Used to play a fair bit of MUGEN growing up. I remember waiting years and years to see "the next part" of Kung Fu Man's story...

Also, I want to use this comment to shout out a creator I looked up to in those days: the late, great Reuben Kee. That guy had creative output that I still don't think anything I've done possibly ever holds a candle to. Not sure what the average character looks like these days but words can't describe how...different - polished - just plain old awesome Dragon Claw was. Even his Evil Ken/Evil Ryu made almost every other character you could download feel like an unfinished rough draft in comparison (save for those made by a few other people who really knew their stuff - Phantom.of.the.Server/PotS comes to front of mind as the premier example).

Someone else in this thread mentioned that 99% of web developers probably wanted to be game developers. Messing with MUGEN files to make the game "what I wanted" was one of the earlier experiences I had that taught me that software was not an impenetrable wall and I didn't have to be afraid to "touch anything" - just cautious where relevant.

Haven't thought about this game in years (probably since the height of SaltyBet's popularity). Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Give "Lyft color scheme" a quick search :)

EDIT: Okay, I see you added an edit where you say you've never used it - so to remove any semblance of snark I'll clarify that you will in fact find pink if you do that.