wnoise

Don't forget pizza delivery.

Saying your quoted words is a request for someone to read and respond; it's still pressure and a burden.

This is significant semantic drift from the original meaning of yak shaving.

Building your own is great, but it's not yak shaving.

Yak shaving is fixing fractal brokenness that you notice while punching through layers of existing systems to finally fix the root cause of the original thing you cared about.

See, e.g. Hal replacing a lightbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0

More commonly, edit them.

General Relativity was published in 1916.

You don't want the people that run the engineering firms, no. You might want some of the people that work there.

I knew that about the feds, but does it also apply to the states?

Even though you would think that'd be a taking for public use.

Because those are far more general than what he is asking for, and what he is asking for will usually not be seen as covered by your generalization.

To be clear, "Apple" is a group, not a unified thing with one will.

That doesn't mean that the engineeers will necessarily ship something more flexible than what the PMs asked for. Often not.

But sometimes they will.

The commissioners?

That's for Charlie Kirk et al, not Jesse Singal.

They didn't. Pure lambda calculus would have been "a function that when applied to a number encoded as a function, extracts that value".

They did it essentially as a linked list, C-strings, or UTF-8 characters: "current data, and is there more (next pointer, non-null byte, continuation bit set)?" They also noted that it could have this semantics without necessarily following this implementation encoding, though that seems like a dodge to me; length-prefixed array is a perfectly fine primitive to have, and shouldn't be inferred from something that can map to it.

They are quite related, but the Fourier transform seems far more beautiful and generalizable: you can do 2-d, 3-d, etc transforms, and they automatically respect the symmetries of the problems (e.g. rotating the coordinate system rotates the Fourier transform in a corresponding way; frequencies and wave-vectors have meanings). This fully extends to any "nice" abelian group satisfying minor technical conditions, where the mapping is to it's dual group. It even mostly extends to non-abelian groups (representation theory), though some nice properties are lost.

The Laplace transform shines in having nicer convergence properties in some specific cases. While those are extremely valuable for control problems, it really is a much more specialized theory, not nearly as widely applicable. (You can come up with n-d versions. The obvious thing to do is copy the Fourier case and iteratively Laplace transform on each coordinate; the special role of one direction either directly in the unilateral case, or indirectly via growth properties in the bilateral case make it hard to argue that this can develop to something more unifying; the domain isn't preserved under rotation.)

No, humans can't inspect their own weights either -- but we're not LLMs and don't store all knowledge implicitly as probabilities to output next token. It's pretty clear that we also store some knowledge explicitly, and can include context of that knowledge.

(To be sure, there are plenty of cases where it is clear that we are only making up stories after the fact about why we said or did something. But sometimes we do actually know and that reconstruction is accurate.)

Topics? No, I don't agree with that. Almost any subject can be treated in an age-appropriate manner.

A 7-year-old doesn't need to read about nearly any topic. Excluding any mention of all of those subjects from the school library leaves a nearly empty library.

For that heavy-handed of a response to be _legally mandated_ requires not just "no need", but some strong evidence of harm. Mentions of sex, oral or otherwise, doesn't actually have much evidence of harm. Certain treatments of it might -- but that's not what the law targets, nor can effectively target. It covers mere mentions or small bits of explicit language, even where that is necessary for the effect of the book. These can and do make parents profoundly uncomfortable, though, and that is worth taking into consideration.

I would think that the usual approach of professional librarians curating based on their own judgement, subject to some oversight from the local school boards to take into account these valid discomforts, but largely baseless fears would be a far better approach.

And what dynamic libraries s it linked to? And what other data are they pulling in?

The idea of pathological RAM access patterns is as ridiculous as the idea of pathological division of floating point numbers. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug ). The spec of RAM is to be able to store anything in any order, reliably. They failed the spec.

They cannot. It requires a simple majority in the House followed by a 2/3 majority in the Senate. This is basically impossible to achieve.

They do not create binding precedent. They can create so-called persuasive precedent -- something other courts (and the same district in subsequent opinions) can and do cite when they don't disagree.

Because no one made it illegal?

I think I agree nearly 100% with this. The tricky part is always selective-enforcement:

But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.

I do believe that (a) in aggregate, Israel has far more vitriol directed towards it for any given action vs comparable actions by other nations. However I also believe (b) that there aren't actually any materially more significant penalties attached to them than other nations.

I also believe that (c) most of (a) is due to Israel having a higher salience. People get informed more about Israel's bad actions than comparable ones in other nations. When informed of comparable things, people are generally upset about those in similar amounts. Further (d) Other nations should get a lot more complaints about their bad behavior. Finally, (e) comparisons to other nations in these discussions is useless, because it's whataboutism. The bad behavior of Israel is indeed often bad, but saying someone else does it too isn't a good response unless you actually think the standard is wrong. That has to happen in another discussion.

If that standard were universally applied, even purely defensive wars could not be done.

Unless you're speaking about the high overhead rates, that's really the wrong framing. The public funds at issue are buying things like research, or hospital services.

Depends on what you mean by anti-Zionism. It's not a natural congregation point -- even those that don't think Israel should exist don't generally call themselves anti-Zionist. As a label from the outside, it's thus very flexible. A lot of mere criticisms of Israeli actions gets labeled anti-Zionist.

So not a comparable situation.

In this intra-elite competition, the previous winners might deserve to lose. The current regime and its allies absolutely cannot be allowed to be winners.

How about violating bright red line laws/norms of the society you're in?

Isn't the word for that "criminal"? You can add intensifiers like "serious", "hardened", "deadly", etc to emphasize how bright the line violation is.

Okay but surely you agree that "I want abortion but my state bans it" is not the same kind of "disagreement with societal opinions of morality" as executing a CEO because you vaguely have grievances with the healthcare system?

There certainly is a greater consensus for it; 50-50 is quite different than what I would guess is about 85%. And I'm for that consensus. This kind of violence becoming common would be disastrous. But that consensus certainly seems to be a lot less solid than it was a year ago, especially when you look at the youth. (I think there are several things contributing to that, but that consensus breaking down does not mean that 41% of 18-29 year olds are insane. That's just not what insane means.)

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/united-healthcare-ceo-killi...

Arguing that Mangione is _criminally insane_ is arguing that he shouldn't be legally punished, that a mental disease prevented him from having the necessary mens rea to actually have his act be criminal. Are you sure that's what you want to argue? (Confinement while he remains criminally insane is certainly justified, of course.)

For example, you think that the crime that you facilitate is "justice" for perceived wrongs but in reality it is only the execution of an innocent man with a family. Such a delusion is the definition of criminal psychosis.

"justice" and "innocent" are not facts about the world but societal judgements. Having different opinions about these is moral disagreement, not insanity, nor delusion. Expecting society to agree with you and maintaining that expectation even against evidence afterward would be delusion. Sometimes societies don't have fixed judgements. Is an abortion a medical treatment or an execution of an innocent child? Although I agree with one stance, and disagree with the other, neither is a delusion. It's a moral disagreement that remains one whether I live under laws that treat it one way, or the other.

Very seriously, see a skilled therapist. Tell them what you wrote. Hope that they are able to begin to help you.

Don't be a dick.

Accurately describing other's morals is no reason to see a therapist. It says nothing about my morals or my sanity that I recognize a large fraction of fairly normal people do value lots of things above others' lives. Conformity and fitting in often enough, as witnessed by Hannah Aredt's phrase "the banality of evil". To the best of my knowledge I haven't contributed to excess deaths beyond the externalities of living in a first-world country, participating in its market economy, and the actions its government takes funded by the taxes I pay. I do actually value lives, so I am unlikely to attempt to take them except under extreme circumstances (and I most likely would not have the instincts to do so effectively; never been tested, and hope to never be).

Societies in general certainly don't treat lives as infinitely valuable, nor even equally valuable. They regularly make economic tradeoffs (and incoherent ones at that) that it's okay to take actions that increase the death toll as long as enough money is made from it. Society is happy to use and endorse violence -- so long as it's done by the right people to the wrong people.

I haven't set a definition and really don't intend to, only saying the line must be quite far from where you are drawing it.

Tying it to willingness to kill for some goal cannot be it -- not every soldier, cop, and security guard is insane. There has to be some degree of break from reality, not disagreement with societal opinions of morality. (And of course all societies do endorse violence -- from the proper authorities, and against the right targets).

Osama bin Laden was a religiously-driven warlord. But not only was he not insane, he was quite effective for quite some time, and had significant support from the societies he was part.

The Unabomber absolutely could plausibly be argued to be insane -- his attorneys certainly pushed for it (though he rejected that attempt). And the psychological experiments he participated in could certainly have contributed to such a break. Throw in the standard trope of living as a hermit in the woods with limited social contact (which can both be a result of insanity and decrease mental stability), and there's enough there not to reject the label. But his bombing campaign just makes him a criminal, a problem for society, not insane.

Oh, yes, highly unusual.

So are startup founders. Many of these fail, precisely because they too did not have rational plans that would get them to their end goals.