turing-complete-eukaryote

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

Loving buffy the vampire slayer season 6 so far, but it's really funny how quick they went from 'magic is a metaphor for lesbian sex' to 'magic is a temptation that must be resisted because it goes against the natural order of things'...

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

The problem with "rationally extrapolated preferences" is that I do not have rationally extrapolatable preferences. My preferences are both underdetermined and contradictory. And the only being who I consider a valid representative of myself in the domain of meaning-making, the only one I want to allow to determine the underdetermined parts and to resolve the contradictory parts, is me. No human, no AI, no god, no matter how smart or capable, can be logically able to rationally extrapolate my preferences and make decisions for me unilaterally in my own interest without my own input. It categorically cannot occur.

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

Given how much people hype up Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin, it's wild how little they talk about Emmy Noether

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

Since rememberance day is coming up I think we should all resolve to share this poem instead of In Flanders Fields.

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

respectfully disagree that faith and spike would be kismeses. even if we’re saying spike is of a gender that’s not incompatible with faith’s sexual orientation, i just don’t think she would have enough of a hate boner for him. faith feels hatelust for girls like buffy and willow, who act like they’re so much better than her but who she knows have exactly the same dark desires and capacity for senseless destruction as her. she’s compelled by their hypocrisy. she wants to turn them inside out and show them what they’re really made of. but spike is already upfront about what he is. and he’s too much like her. there’s just nothing there to keep her interest. and spike wouldn’t be all that drawn to her in that way either. he likes women he can put on a pedestal and be consumed by, and faith isn’t that at all. she’s firmly on his level and she’s too much like him. he can’t lose himself in her because she’s just like him. the most that would happen is they would fuck while both thinking about buffy and it would be really pathetic and embarrassing and afterward they would both pretend like it never happened

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

I believe in mathematical formalism platonism. Mathematical statements only describe the consequences of manipulating strings, with no greater inherent meaning. but all strings and rules for manipulating them Actually Exist in the platonic realm

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

TIL that Robert Mulliken (of molecular orbital fame) and Robert Millikan (of oil drop expirement fame) are two different people, but that Mulliken studied under Millikan during his PhD. What a whimsical world we live in

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

one of the papers im using says they proved something, and mentioned someone else proved it as well, but doesnt actually write out the proof, or cite either of these proofs. so i emailed the author, and he responded which is nice given he's long-retired, but he says he doesn't remember how he proved it (but it "wasn't difficult"). but i cant figure out how to prove it. so like. cmon man. am i just supposed to take your word for it. fermat behavior

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

The thing about Cbat is that I can hear what that reddit sex guy hears in it. I can hear that. I don't agree, I mean, I hear more strongly what everyone else hears in it, the silliness, but I can hear what the reddit sex guy hears. He's not wrong, just, he's missing something, he's missing something that the rest of us can see that he can't, which makes him look silly. But his reading, you know, his aesthetic experience isn't wrong, I can find it in there if I try. I think this is a good exercise in really internalizing the great breadth of human subjective experience.

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

You're either antifascist or you're antefascist

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

The thing where people are like "I just love the smell of books, and wandering through the stacks, and books, books, books, academia, learning" and so on is a kind of fetishism, yeah? like a sort of obsession with the symbols of some purported social good, intelligence, rather than anything about the intellectual tasks themselves. And I think people misunderstand themselves through this and rather similar kinds of fetishism all the time

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

To some extent I'm inclined to feel that, basically, of all the things that speech does, the one it's least good at is conveying truth. It's ok for simple truths like, you know, "the ball is under the tree" or whatever, but for the really significant stuff it's hopelessly insufficient. Which is why most attempts at conveying, uh, complex truths rely to some extent on conveying the arrangement of objects (which language is ok at) and letting you internalize the complex truth on your own. Right, like, how do you get someone to understand what a certain situation felt like? You don't actually try to tell them what it felt like, except in fairly crude terms; you tell them the events that happened and trust that from these events they can produce an approximation of what it felt like.

So language struggles with emotional truths, but it also struggles with technical truths! That's why physicists use so many equations; they're much better than natural language at the task at hand.

So what is language really good at? Language is good at social stuff: forming and maintaining bonds, making agreements, telling jokes, that kind of thing. Language is good at facilitating the social world.

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

any serious thought reveals that music is the least art

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

The integers should be called the quantum numbers, and number theory should be called quantum math

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

If I were writing a novel, I would certainly not have any long (a page or more) passages be in italics, and I especially would not do that as a recurring thing. Even if those parts are flashbacks or dreams or a mysterious different narrator or something, I would find some other way to convey that those passages are A Different Kind Of Deal. Stop having them be in italics I don't like that cut it out

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

I'm very glad that I live in a three dimensional universe. Pretty clearly the best number of dimensions to have.

[turing-complete-eukaryote]

what do you mean in context the famous quote about staring into the abyss is in the middle of one of Nietzsche's really sexist diatribes about women?