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cykotic

124 karma · joined July 26, 2023

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cykotic··on [dead]
Zuckerberg is too long to type on an iPad. Between Elon and Musk it seems natural to me to write Musk. I perceive Elon Musk is more recognizable being called Musk over Elon. Don’t want to write the full name.
cykotic··on [dead]
There is zero chance Musk will ever fight Mark in anything other than a staged event. He can’t possibly win against Mark and he knows it. His stated desire to fight is nothing more than a narcissistic desire to stay in the news.
cykotic··on Zuck says he gave Musk an August 26 fight date but he’s ‘not holding my breath’
Musk is smart and a narcissist. He’s done more than a few things I disagree with and he’s done things that I think qualify for him to be called an asshole.

Musk is and will forever be woefully underprepared to fight against someone with Mark’s training and level of fitness. His challenge to fight was childish and idiotic. Even smart people do idiotic things from time to time.

cykotic··on Texas Power Prices to Surge 800% on Sunday Amid Searing Heat
Except it isn’t working as it is supposed to since infrastructure investment hasn’t occurred the way it should.
cykotic··on America’s Truckers, Cargo Pilots and Package Carriers Are Fed Up
…secure basic human rights for themselves.

This isn’t a claim that everyone agrees this is literally a basic human right. It’s a colloquialism to emphasize the author’s view that this is something that should have been granted to the workers long ago and that it is appalling that it wasn’t.

Please don’t get hung up on semantics. Use a different phrasing if it pleases you to do so.

cykotic··on Driving is more expensive than you think (2020)
What we have in the U.S. is highly inefficient, unhealthy, and environmentally destructive. Virtually every store must have a dedicated parking space that is unused most of the time. This causes a huge waste of land resources. What results is a landscape that is hostile to walking and congregating outside, ugly, too spread out, and overly expensive to maintain.

It is good to have well maintained roads. It is not good to have what the U.S. has.

cykotic··on Even people who bought Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses don’t want to use them
People don’t trust Facebook but still use Facebook. I believe given two equally good implementations of a product the one made by Facebook will be less popular. As it stands now Oculus is the only standalone VR device and people will use it despite being owned by Facebook.
cykotic··on Even people who bought Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses don’t want to use them
Seven years ago I got a taxi in Las Vegas to go from the airport to my hotel. The whole ride had ads blaring from the radio and the backseat area was filled with display ads. I’ve never taken a taxi since then. What you describe will be a thing in the U.S. if self driving becomes a thing. We already can’t get gas without being bombarded with ads. To me this fact is the main reason I hope to get an electric car someday.
cykotic··on Even people who bought Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses don’t want to use them
What you wrote is well written and thought out. I do agree with the sentiment that it’s worthwhile to try to make such products. I wonder though if a large part of the backlash has more to do with the who is behind the product than from a failed attempt. People don’t trust Google or Facebook. There are people like me who want them to fail when coming up with new products because ultimately those products, if they succeed, are going to be ad filled experiences.
cykotic··on Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)
One bomb may not have been enough evidenced by the fact that even junior level officers attempted to thwart the surrender. One bomb might have been enough. The decision to drop the second one was not entirely unjustified since the Japanese government was, apparently, in no hurry to end the war after the 1st one was dropped.
cykotic··on Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)
From the wikipedia article on the surrender broadcast:

As many as 1,000 officers and army soldiers raided the Imperial Palace on the evening of 14 August 1945 to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the palace and were unable to find the recordings, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The two phonographs were labelled original and copy and successfully smuggled out of the palace, the original in a lacquer box and the copy in a lunch bag. Major Kenji Hatanaka attempted to halt the broadcast at the NHK station but was ordered to desist by the Eastern District Army.[2][3]

Even after two were dropped members of the armed forces still wanted the war to continue.

cykotic··on Fitch Downgrades the US Rating to 'AA+'
It seems like you may not understand how budgets at the federal level work in the U.S. Congress passes spending bills and the President signs (or vetos) them. This has nothing to do with the debt limit as such. Eliminating the need to vote on a debt limit will not in any way lead to a situation in which runaway spending can occur that is not already present in the current system.

The grand bargain you speak of has already occurred. It occurs when Congress passes a budget that is signed by the President.

cykotic··on Uber posts first quarterly net profit
The logic employed was:

Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings.

I wrote a comment using similar logic. Every child I've met working in mines was happy to be able to provide money for their family.

The logic is bad. It's poor reasoning to say, "Every person I've met doing X is happy. Therefore letting people do X is a good thing." I was pointing that out.

cykotic··on Uber posts first quarterly net profit
Perhaps some day we will live in a society that does not allow exploitation because we can’t think of what those who are exploited would do if not for the exploitation.
cykotic··on Functions are vectors
If set up that way then yes it meets the definition of a function. I’m not a complex analyst but I imagine they think of a function from C to C on a given branch rather than multi-function being a function from C to the countable product of C (or however one wants to formally define the set value). I think this because they tend to care about analytic properties and saying function from C to countable product of C includes far too many functions. Saying multifunction will immediately make one think of branch cuts.

They don’t think of Log(z) as a set of values. At least I don’t. I assume one means the principal branch when writing Log(z) unless specifically stated otherwise. Maybe in their mind they do think of an infinite set when seeing Log(z). I’m skeptical of this possibility though.

cykotic··on Functions are vectors
There is no high principle other than the agreed upon definition of what a function is.

Of course the function that gives you inverse images is nothing more than an inverse function that is allowed to give multiple values.

You can’t use the word function for something that isn’t a function. It makes no sense to say inverse function that is allowed to give multiple values. Hence the need for terms like pre-image of a set.

In all contexts it is important that a function yield a single value for a given input because that is the definition of the word.

cykotic··on Functions are vectors
A multivalued function is not a function. Hence the need to call it something else. In complex analysis you have branch cuts and things like that. We don’t call something a function that doesn’t have a unique output for a given input.

EDIT: Complex analysis was developed well before the formal definition of functions, relations, set theory. As such there are legacy terms in use. Mathematics has a lot of abuse of notation. For instance x=2 can mean assignment or an equation to solve. It depends on context.

In each branch of a multi-function the mapping is a function and, as a convenience, a single term “multi-function” is used to encapsulate all this. It cuts out the verbosity. A multi-function is not a function though.

My pedantry in this comes from the blog post. It was poorly written and left out some, from a mathematical point of view, important details. For instance the author uses a Schauder basis and has an uncountable sum at one point whilst ignoring the need distinguish between a Hamel basis and Schauder basis or the need to use a linear ordering in the reals to properly make sense of the uncountable sum.

cykotic··on Functions are vectors
We don’t allow multiple values for a given input of a function. Ever. This is never done. f(x) = x^2 is not invertible as a real valued function of a real variable. On the restricted domain of [0, infinity) it is invertible and that inverse is sqrt(x). If you want to talk about negative roots you use the function -1*sqrt(x). You can construct a new function as you did to encapsulate this fact but one never has a function with multiple values for a given input. I don’t know of any mathematician that thinks of functions as allowing them to have multiple values for a given input. You will not find this in the literature.
cykotic··on Functions are vectors
Functions can’t be used to handle undefined values either. A function is a mapping, f, from one set to another such that each element of the originating set gets mapped to one and only one element of the target set. This, by definition, requires that all values in the originating set get mapped to something in the target set. So there are no undefined values as such.

Function spaces can’t always be viewed as vector spaces because there may be no concept of addition of functions or a concept of scalar multiplication on the functions that behaves well with whatever notion of addition the functions satisfy.

cykotic··on Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town
And from a typically American perspective one doesn’t have to walk. They’ll even provide motorized carts to use when you are buying gallons of cola.
cykotic··on Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town
That is one of the problems with Walmart. It facilitates overconsumption. The world can’t sustain such a lifestyle for everyone. We end up paying for the negative externalities partially by living in a world we have poisoned. Whilst we drink water containing micro plastics we will be able to relish the fact that we were able to buy many more socks than we needed.
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