abstractbill

That, as well as how long we've been doing it (thousands of years!) and so how much of the more accessible parts we've explored very thoroughly.

There are many ways to get it done. What worked best for us was choosing java over bedrock, renting a cheap linux vps, and writing some very simple shell scripts for starting, stopping, changing worlds, etc. Happy to talk you through anything you get stuck on!

Should be the pelican bounced off.

For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.

Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.

As intended by whom?

Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation.

My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.

In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."

What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.

(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).

Can you clarify which link is broken and how? What browser and OS?

> In my experience, LLMs are terrible at clues.

That hasn't been my experience. Without good prompting they give you clues that are too bland and literal, but it is quite possible to get them to give you clues with interesting and creative wordplay. I wish it was easier to get clues like that more consistently, but it's certainly doable. I still believe within a year it'll be easy.

That's a wonderfully hard problem, I'd love to see it get solved.

In some of my crosswords I get clues that are specific in clever ways (e.g. one of these has "Extreme, not camping" which I thought was really strange until I found the answer "intense" and was very impressed by that level of wordplay from an LLM!)