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Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

> looking at your code and asking yourself "what has to be true for this to work?"

Wait a moment: are there people who write and ship code without continually asking this question, at least to handwaving precision?

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They internalize it with tacit assumptions and let runtime exceptions deal with it when the assumptions are violated. We all do this to some extent, and not just in programming, but many people are a lot more YOLO about it when the language allows it (see “duck typing”)

It takes effort for me to compute whether grandfather is de gauche or de droite.. the better question to ask yourself continuously is whether: does this noise (spaghetti/imprecision in this context)

improve or remove performance ((0-1) though the 2 questions are related; it's enough to point out that if necessity is the mother of invention, then paradox is the father of discovery)?

(0-1)

https://quillette.com/2022/04/05/noise-a-flaw-in-human-judgm...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2431131-buildings-that-...

thanks for these and the other (sps)! atm I'm busy altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter, so it may be a week or two before I'm back to the more intellectual exercise of altering the truthiness of symbols in strings or graphs relative to other symbols...

Ah what shall we do if our beloved HN weren't an obligate asynchrotroph :) Passive consumption recommendation (fit for travel plausibly even) is: to «Das Glasperlenspiel» the postpostmodern (but merely pre-eschatological) riposte could only be «Anathem» --- had to complete the commutative diagram.

(0)https://ironichles.livejournal.com/56695.html

Ah, but the kernel between Hesse and Stephenson is fairly large; I'd say Hesse has a large idea (Berlin's "hedgehog") towards which his characters and plots and settings all work, while Stephenson has a cornucopia of small ideas (Berlin's "fox") and his characters and plots and settings are largely excuses to get them all out of his head and down in print.

My diagram would be: (Exercise: who is the contemporary hedgehog X?)

    Hesse ---------> Pynchon
      |                 |
      |                 |
      V                 V
      X ----------> Stephenson

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_M._Kornbluth#Personality... (and some of YT's more discursive HN commentary).

[to what degree are foxes cohedgehogs, or hedgehogs cofoxes? can we get the plurality of ideas of a fox by reversing arrows such that each of the fox's multiple ideas maps back, in the image, to a shared thematic point?]

Will have to woolgather/think about this, but I wonder if it might not be easier (for now, for me) to frame your question(s) in terms of a short exact sequence, with Hesse squarely in the middle, of course.

I agree that Pynchon was more or less an aloof observer of the von Neumann denouement.. maybe you can have Lem in your corner depending on how optimistic you think he is, but I would put Kim Stanley Robinson in that corner (been thinking about the Mondragon Accord). The median HN'er, I don't know, Iain Banks/Gibson. Feel free to take it to another level with some cryptic pointers (/arrows) :) H https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Mondrago...

And checkout KSR's influences.

I admit to not having read <<DGPS>> in its entirety (or any majority,really) -- reason being that I read Demian E2E and surmised that the apple hedgehog didn't land too far from the tree fox. Trying to reconsider now :)

Also, Platonov.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/reading-and...

Re: Mondragon, compare https://www.igalia.com (how many of these are there?); the CNT may have lost at the barricades (and half-star forts), but there are still sparks among their embers?

I hear Portugal (not, specifically, the Man) is trying to host a Cambrian.

Sorry, you have to find citations for that, should be an interesting exercise

The (mafic?) object of 18 May brings us right back to JvN and prediction vs control. Depending upon how isotropic a skipping stone one picks, the resulting trajectory may be predictable or chaotic: in a world of too cheap-to-meter compute and effectors, one might imagine a "skipping stone" with LEDs and some kind of mechanical effectors that could be used to write Peristence-of-Vision messages by "skipping" it across a lake surface?

Just going by publication date alone, I think Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) will be concretely different from Demian (1919). Like Zweig's Schachnovelle (1942), the question of how should/could intellectuals share a world with power-seeking anti-intellectuals* was, in the early 1940s, far from an abstraction.

(if you have a personality suitable to attempt inner emigration, you can claim the State, as an object with little intellectual content, is maya, mere illusion, but like Berkeley's [well, Johnson's] rock it usually sullenly refuses to wither away even if you don't believe in it. cf PKD)

* on that theme: "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." is another change rung.

Just an aside on Henderson:

Everyone, even the atheist furry and the cis-Baptist, professes belief in equal outcomes for equal situations; the problems arise both because we all have differing discretion functions to determine situations given facts and law, and because we all have different equivalence* relations on outcomes.

    All   a n i m a l s   are   e q u a l 
    (but some are more equal than others)

* consider reflexive vs irreflexive symmetric transitive rel'ns, or the US doctrine of "separate but equal" (1896-1954)

Not me :) unequal outcomes is either plain observation, or fantasy --- only, the latter only, I might deign to call "beliefs".. Given, some may put observation and fantasy in the same equivalence class, I should like to encounter them. (Talented SWEs?/intermediate reppers(aka designers)?)

EDIT: in case you missed it, follow-up on ANK (not KANs) https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762

just skimming a poorly translated and poorly formatted english version of K,AN as viewed by his students...

> Perhaps Andrey Nikolaevich's approach to teaching was also influenced by the free postgraduate existence, which he later recalled as his happiest time. At that time, a graduate student was supposed to pass 14 exams in 14 different mathematical sciences. But the exam could be replaced by an independent result in the relevant field. Andrey Nikolaevich said that he never passed a single exam, but instead wrote 14 articles on various topics with new results. "One of the results, concluded Andrey Nikolaevich, "turned out to be incorrect, but I realized this after the exam was completed."

Now, that is the good stuff: Нужны Парижу деньги се ля ви / А рыцари ему нужны тем паче!

Unable to produce Parisian courtesy, but hey here's patrician legacy:

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

while I'm thinking about it: Kuznets waves remind me of buffering behaviour in chemistry — or bufferbloat across routers. (end of random synaptic activation)

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