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s-shellfish

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“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."

-- Bertrand Russell

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It's about direction of influence.

Physics should not influence math. Math has to be a consequence of it's own axioms, or have it's properties tested against it's own constructions.

Otherwise math falls apart. Then it's useless for physics.

Practical application is wonderful for math. But the direction math is crafted and interpreted matters a lot.

Yes, there's a real reason for using the word discovered instead of invented. Depends on how webbed in you are intellectually to people around you. Which is often highly dependent on language, logic, and math.

Lambda calculus. Enlightenment. Discovered, not invented. If it already exists somewhere... Everything coming together in the same patterns. Influence.

I haven't done all the math for this (I've deeply investigated the pattern for 2x+1) but it seems like this would be an obvious and intuitive result of primes. You are still generating primes from primes. Yes, you find more primes, but the computation is still dependent on primes. I'm still of the opinion that there is no complete pattern to the primes.

I'm assuming the researchers do not have the intent of confusing a crystal lattice structure with an actual mathematical lattice, because while they possibly may share similar influences in their models, one is math, the other is physics.

#keepmathpure

Resilient systems will still break. They may break less, but it's impossible to anticipate every possible usage permutation of a system from here until eternity. There are tons of reliable methods to build resilient systems and they can still have their faults. What I'm talking about is resilient system or not - someone has to be there to fix it if it breaks. There is no silver bullet when it comes to software - sometimes the difference really only can be who puts the most time in.

Minds require rest to function optimally, so pushing yourself to an extreme comes at a cost that gets realized down the line instead. Identifying which means of functioning comes at the greatest cost is not easy to analyze or ascertain. So working together in addition to competing is important as well.

All principles of capitalism. Just, never before in history has there really been so much attention paid to the mind. Software, eesh, yep.

Pressure to compete. I don't think it's anything companies convinced people into doing, it seems more like one of those unwritten rules. Especially in tech. Your system breaks, you are responsible. Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc.

Yea, honestly it's probably not synesthesia. Information processing, the memory of a thing overlaid on top of something similar enough. Reasoning by analogy... imprecise.

This is cool, but it's not synesthesia. Synesthesia is literally a neurological phenomona. I have it, and it's very real. It's not simply an algorithmic encoding.

Crying in H Mart 8 years ago

Thanks. We have talked a few time here. Always a pleasure to exchange words with you.

Thank you, I feel the same.

I hope that you will eventually be able to feel your art in a new way- not as sadness, but as the hope it inspires for those who do benefit from it.

Me too.

Maybe some Metta Bhavana will help you feel and connect to the persons you positively inspire? like me here on hn, or the others who replied to you.

Thank you, Theravāda is something I've only studied briefly, but it is oriented similarly to my study of Mayahana Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

Crying in H Mart 8 years ago

I'm sorry for your losses.

My grandfather was an artist. Art is always sadness to me. Even my photography. The flavor of sadness, I've experienced a variety of these.

I don't know if this comes through in all of my art, but, that's me. Art, sadness. I suppose I detach from it by making art.

Crying in H Mart 8 years ago

Nostalgia hurt... It's called grief. Grieve for things we can not change, can not fix. Calling it 'just a feeling of alienation'...

This deeply oversimplifies the complexities of life, the deepest tragedies, emotional pain. To lose something so beautiful, and to know it is gone, forever. That is grief that lasts a lifetime. It is a burden oneself must make appear to lighten over time, but, some types of sadness go into one's own core, every fiber and every root of one's own being.

A broken spirit, heart, soul. Through a reminder in the present, the slightest twinge of it trickles through, in the form of a memory, a connection leading to every interwoven emotion. It can be a kind of sadness that feels as though it never mends.

This is not the sort of thing to cover up with pleasantries for the benefit of others. The memory of being completely and totally disconnected from a most defining connections in one's own life - that is a type of suffering everyone can experience, and a kind of suffering everyone should have a deep respect for. It's not just nostalgia, because nostalgia comes back in waves, the attempt to bring back what is lost. Sometimes this works. But the death of a loving, shaping parent, or loss of connection to one's essential culture - that is something that, nothing fills that void entirely. There has to be respect for this. Everyone should have respect for this type of loss.

There has to be some mechanic always in place for consent. It's mechanical by nature.

The most powerful belief you can have is owning a core understanding that you have choice. That doesn't mean ignore valid points. The needs of the many... Always important to be aware of.

how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?

This is a twisted way to view happiness. Wouldn't you be happier if you helped others succeed? Feel connected, part of something you really believe in?

Happiness is so much more than prosperity. Money helps you avoid death. Happiness exists on an entirely different foundation.

In patriarchal societies, men stay fundamentally united while women compete against one another in a divided fashion. Important to not allow our differences and "competitive" advantages to be used as proxies for creating perpetual division.

But also, depends on circumstance. Don't have to see gender as being a problem unless you want to. Anything can be used against you for anything that can be used for you. That's both sides of everything. Nothing is ever an advantage, especially when being united (especially in technology!!!) is more advantageous than all the knowledge you could have access to.

I'm a software developer, female.

That's always the problem. Minds that aren't aware of this become more predictable.

Until they are aware of this.

I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do.

If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.

Stoicism is the closest I can get away from appealing to emotional harmony blindly (choose the happy way now but potentially make a grave error by doing so).

Thinking about things that aren't presented with a face... one face or many.

Unity with concepts. Read Nichomachean ethics in college, but funnily enough now that I look at it, the professors may have found much more literal value in it than did the students.

Humor, the Greeks, educational systems. Life, sigh.

The directions things go in.

In math and logic agreement is attained by a proof.

Of course I agree with this. Just makes me think of bad ways of understanding math and logic. Having to carry it around inside myself as though I am it, because nothing else besides myself, others like myself, and actual computers can test the understanding. Proofs can be written with the utmost rigor. There's still room for error. No proof is perfect.

I'm not sure if that's more so, an artistic interpretation of mathematics and logic, or, just the other side to it. Even if my memory was eidetic and I knew all there was to know about all existing mathematics and logic, I'm still not sure I'd be certain I know what I know. What's the difference between seeing a connection between two pieces of data, and identifying an inferential rule? Direction, intentional direction. Backwards chaining.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining

and not by some social pressure to force a predetermined outcome

This is what I always find, I dunno, bizarre. It really seems like, overriding thinking in favor of something, some way of forcing an outcome.

I agree, but this is the root of my dilemma from which my own understanding has grown.

If I agree with you right here and now, have we not technically formed our own 'echo chamber'?

Echo chambers from the outside look like inside out fishbowls because they are. But every set of agreeable statements, whether shared between individuals or distributed through time, same system - pieces are just labeled differently.

However, I do understand the emotional feeling that occurs when conforming is heavily pressured, from nearly every side. That's disharmonous emotionally to the people it is disharmonous to. The ones who get silenced.

I understand both sides. Can't say I know more than that. Can't say I have an opinion on the matter because it goes beyond the facts.

Another way to look at the problem: are math and logic an echo chamber?

One has to grow to not react to it. If explanations don't make sense, you need to be able to find the right questions to ask, to be able to know what is meaningful from what is nonsense.

That's just tech in general. Or business. Anything that deals in hard facts. Hand waving bullshit without evidence or at least, validity in reasoning - that's just bad long term.

Of course the real truth though is no one can know everything. To me, that implies there's a limit where people say 'this is the line we stop thinking at, when we hit this line'. I'm curious to know whether the belief that the line exists there to begin with is there because it retains some tolerable amount of bullshit, or because some people just really aren't used to actually being aware of their own occasional idiocy.

I dunno. I don't think it's a positive long term to make people feel dumb. Probably something that gets retained because it just works, an evolutionary heuristic, not necessarily one planned for, designed, selected.

Which.. (the universe truly does have a divine sense of humor) - intelligence can literally be stupidity. Therefore, it doesn't mean whatever intelligence designates most intelligent is actually the most effective way of getting to the truth, or defining the best way to do things. Just means, it's the way things get done, until a better way is revealed or found.

I could have said something about harming children and would have been less reviled.

Yes, but that's literally because people see their technologies as being more human than most humans. It's something that goes down to an individuals core and is intrinsically defining of how they understand and express.

Not saying it makes sense to average Joe. Just a different breed of person.

For example, the soundness property of a language. Think about why that might be what creates the echo chamber, rather than thinking about how the echo chamber reacts when whatever contributes to verifying soundness is modified. The reaction might be a side effect, rather than an outright planned action.

Yea, it seems to occasionally bubble up, unfortunately I've noticed that happens in real life to people as well, I suppose that is what gets called passive aggressive - deep internalized, unresolved issues. Always makes my heart hurts to watch.

At the end of the day, a lot of us here are developers, engineers, programmers, still. A knack for pedantry, precision, and clarity leads to coming to, and accepting an awareness. Otherwise, bugs, bugs, bugs. Bugs everywhere. Clear thinking. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and so on.

On HN, I really try to ignore the points. I personally know for me, if I simply read a point of view that is valid, that is enough to stick with me such that it continues to be part of my personality, or allows me to draw from my own self in slightly stronger way - the world is accepting of me, tolerant. I don't need to encourage it to be that with points. All I need to do is see 'Is it? Or is it not?'.

People are affected and influenced because they accept it as a rule of functioning. They want to influence things in such and such a way therefore they are subject to the same tactics of manipulation. Always depends on the rules you choose to believe in about the mind. Nerves that fire together wire together, and so on.

I think the big thing is with the internet, it makes a lot of these things much more discrete, as in, parsing information and evaluating it in chunks, rather than have a sense of continuity. Everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white. Encourages a frame of mind that selectively gathers and redistributes information. It may make sense with present 'state' but it might not make sense with respect to the humanities, respect to art, respect to many of the other sciences, history, etc. Picking up on lots of patterns and applying the data of today to fit the model. Then upvote, downvote, change the world.

Totally agreed. It's just chaos, because the mind that constantly requires a reflection of itself to prove it is healthy is not a healthy mind to begin with.

Behaving in that pattern in a conditioned sense opens oneself up for all sorts of manipulation, which long term, that's quite a bit of suffering (if there's no genuine connection between members of a social group, hence, the group is prone to rapid shifts in likes/dislikes'. It becomes hard to determine intent - which makes the social environment untrustworthy, which in my opinion, is the basis of what is required for sanity. Trust. You can have that as something established over a long time, or you can have instant connection, just really 'get' someone and where they are coming from.

Facebook is an addiction. There's plenty of places on the internet that encourage healthy dialogue and it's obvious / quite plain to see what is effective and what is ultimately destructive.

I like HN a lot. So many other places on the internet, it seems like a popularity contest. Here I can get 0 or 1 upvotes but not feel ignored, not feel worse off for it.

Healing, in many regards.

That always depends on whether whatever is contained within the abstraction is something that might change. Sigh, humor.

Leaving it as a primitive basically says 'you may have to hack the programming language or framework in order to modify code that depends on this piece of the logic'. Global state is something you can manage in terms of modular components. Allows for dynamic orchestration of components.

It's more the long term issue that keeps repeating (more humor) than it is just replacing an integer. Being able to decide 'is this component something that needs to be reasoned about in it's own independent logical layer from the rest of the system or is it not' or 'does this component relate to other components in a well defined way'.

Connect is an action, an observable action has occurred. An abstraction can trigger a behavior to other abstractions through that predefined relation. That's the point.