arketyp

I love these counterfactual creations on old hardware. It highlights the magical freedom of creativity of software.

There is a way to frame category theory such that it's all just arrows -- by associating the identity arrow (which all objects have by definition) with the object itself. In a sense, the object is syntactic sugar.

I understand the sentiment that the Trump administration is draconian, especially for people traveling from abroad considering the new border policy. But, pardon me, how is that executive order about sex a "threat"? Listed as the top issue undermines the credibility of this petition I think.

Different Cleopatra

I may be old school but to me calling your own work beautiful comes across as pompous. Or "beautiful" is somehow a style now which irritates me as well. Sorry. They do look nice though.

I just put my running-out items on the entryway table.

I agree. Although I wonder sometimes how much "about" is involved in my own abstract reasoning.

Makes you wonder what is meant by learning...

This is true but I think it's iterative, cyclic. It applies to any art and craft, really. You alternate between perceiving and projecting, receiving and creating.

Honest question, why is the study of microplastics and its causes a recent thing? Are better instruments involved somehow? Plastics with their special properties have always been known to be "unnatural", even used as a synonym for that word, so one would think we would have kept an eye on them from the start.

Yes, I had that one in mind, though I'm always a bit skeptic about the cinematics of BBC productions. Sprint or not, the point I should have made clearer is precisely that walking is compatible with the endurance method. Personally I don't believe we evolved to run much. Pretty much anyone even in our sedentary society can walk very long distances; the body seems much more strongly adapted to that type of locomotion.

There are some accounts of still existing tribes in southern Africa doing this. As the article also suggests, the sprints, as far as I can tell, are intermittent. The hunters occasionally slow down when they need to pay attention to the tracks, and they run when they are certain of the path, not necessarily to catch up with the animal but to keep pushing it when it has taken shelter resting. This process is repeated until the game is just too exhausted to move and becomes an easy prey. They're not running marathons.

I don't know, it's a mirror, right? It's up to us to change really. Besides, failures like the one you point out make subtle stereotypes and biases more conspicuous, which could be a good thing.

Thanks. Together with GP's point about the possibility of weird wines, it seems reasonable that one could go along quite far on a false premise.

I've heard this, and I would have been inclined to believe it. But then I watched the documentary Somm about the journey of a couple of friends reaching for the highest rankings of sommeliers. They could identify grapes, regions and year with striking accuracy. I just don't see how you could do that and then not be able to tell white and red wine apart.

Yes, I agree. But I talked about an idea development and said variation, not necessarily addressing the same thing. The headline would be algorithmically random sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequenc...

Thanks, I had to dig. I read about it in [1]. Mises was concerned about the formalization of probability theory. It seems the idea appears at least as early as in his 1919 paper [2].

[1] An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, M. Li & P. Vitnányi

[2] Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, R. von Mises

Not sure what kinds of selection pressures there has been for shorter DNA strings, but presumably you could compress it a great deal putting it in a .zip file. Now imagine the havoc caused by random mutations on that format though.

Richard von Mises (brother of the economist) formulated a definition of randomness as a sequence of data that, were you a gambler, you cannot by any strategy make money on betting on the outcomes. This was before computational calculus and was later developed by Kolmogorov and others in algorithmic complexity. The modern variation would be (Wiki) "considering a finite sequence random (with respect to a class of computing systems) if any program that can generate the sequence is at least as long as the sequence itself".

I very predictably have nightmares whenever I fall asleep flat on my back, sleep paralysis kind of things. In Germanic mythology the mare is a demon who sits on your chest, so my conclusion is that I'm not alone in this.

Sci-fi, Russian lit, biographies, classics. I was never caught, but it’s bizarre to think back that I was reading Crime and Punishment while the rest of the class was learning fake American history propaganda.

Sounds possible your teachers figured as much and let it slide.

Why the downvotes? This is a real point of view. I eventually got so fed up hearing about Game of Thrones and trite opinions about Trump's stupidity that I developed a habit of completely skipping lunch, telling my colleagues I was into keto. They respected it, God bless them.

With books, I tend to not bother with the notes if they are bundled up at the end of the book or chapter. I prefer to have them on the bottom of the page. A web page doesn't even have the benefit of easy page turning to a bookmark, so I think some medium adapted solution like mouse hover would be appropriate.

Good comment. It surprised me that a definition of essay wasn't sought before asking questions about the supposed best. But that tentative approach actually struck the essence in an interestingly performative manner.

It's easy to ridicule the Amish for their lifestyle and their roundabout solutions to the restrictions ordained by their faith, similar to some orthodox Jewish traditions. But I think there is also something honest about it. No one can lead a 100% rational life; indeed it is not obvious that would even be desirable, that it makes sense or is even possible. Effective altruism is a good example on how mislead such a notion can become. Of course one can argue about what constitutes rationality, adopt a more balanced consequentialism and avoid some of the more absurd conclusions. Anyway, I find something sympathetic about just facing some impracticalities head on.

I think it can be phrased in terms of the famous explore/exploit dichotomy from cybernetics. An agent with ADHD is more likely to exploit/dig deeply once it gets the "scent", but that threshold is higher. A weak signal of ambient reward will lead to impatient exploring. Conversely, a non-ADHD agent will sooner find something good enough to fixate on but will also sooner give up on that region of interest and go on to the next scent. This would explain the paradox of hyper focus of ADHD and the corresponding moderation/saturation in non-ADHD as well.

As a man, I'm happy to even get a foot in the door. I doubt I'm the only one who feels that way.

One can expect minimal generative content for reasons already mentioned in the article. It wouldn't be too surprising if in practice they only have the one reel playing at these festivals. I don't think experiencing the generative or the stochastic in a concrete comparative sense is necessarily the point. It's there to keep you cognizant of and become immersed in a creative process in line with Eno's philosophy. Kind of gimmicky, but passable as a conceptual art move.

I've seen Markov models mentioned a lot in these context, and my generous take has always been that something like stacked Markov models is meant. At each abstraction layer, the state is conditioned only by the previous abstract concept. At the lowest level the states would be the sequence of tokens; higher up it's concepts like turn of events in a plot. I don't think this often proposed idea of hierarchy is sufficient to describe LLMs or human cognition, but it strikes at some essence about parsimony, efficient representation, and local computation.

I take your point about feelings of communion being a kind of self-preservation, but I think it is taking it too far to extrapolate competition into that realm. That's per definition not self-transcendence according to how it is described in the article.