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ihm

798 karma · joined August 14, 2012

My site: https://parametricity.com/
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ihm··on Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
What part of Marx's work do you think has been disproven?
ihm··on Former US Vice-President Cheney Dies
Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.

Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.

I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

ihm··on Ortega hypothesis
> Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers probably might as well not exist.

What does this even mean? Do you think in an ant colony only the queen is needed? Or in a wolf pack only the strongest wolf?

ihm··on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
This is really impressive, especially the way they've used formal verification. Great work.
ihm··on Category Theory Illustrated – Natural Transformations
It can very much be. Here’s one example of this phenomenon (there are many others but this is the most famous): https://wiki.haskell.org/Curry-Howard-Lambek_correspondence
ihm··on WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)
In summary: the capitalist class won the class war.
ihm··on Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment
Consumers are not part of the problem. There is literally no action a consumer can take to ameliorate this situation because there are no tires produced that don't have this problem, and many consumers need to have a car to live.
ihm··on The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) [pdf]
It’s not remotely true that prices are capable of transmitting all the information required to reproduce society.

This is for the simple reason that prices more or less only communicate information about the amount of labor required to produce a thing[0].

Therefore prices on their own are, for example, incapable of transmitting information about what action needs to be taken to correct the relationship to the biosphere. Information about the state of the biosphere will only enter into prices to the extent that things start taking more labor to produce. But there’s no market mechanism that would then cause that to direct action towards stabilizing the climate.

[0]: This is because cost resolves into business owner’s cut + labor cost + cost of inputs, and the inputs can recursively be split into the same until you’re left with the amount owners take, the amount paid to workers, and the amount paid to owners of natural resources.

The business owner’s cut and the amount paid to owners of natural resources are socially determined and bear almost no relationship to the physical world or reproduction of society.

ihm··on Group actions and hashing unordered multisets (2021)
I think there are a few errors here. First there is afaict no reason the image of phi has to break up into power-of-two cyclic groups.

Second and more importantly, it seems very difficult to start with the decomposition into cyclic groups and then choose a map from the multiset group into the permutation group that corresponds to the given decomposition in a good way.

Relatedly, the isomorphism between the image of phi (i.e., the action of accumulating hashes) and the decomposition into cyclic groups may be difficult to compute, which can make finding collisions infeasible for an attacker when they could do it easily if given the explicit representation.

So overall the conclusion that “you might as well make this forced structure explicit, and just pick the block structure you want to use in advance” seems incorrect.

The blog post someone linked on multiset hashing with elliptic curves proves the foregoing points. The cyclic groups do not have power-of-two orders and the group action is very complicated even though the description in terms of elliptic curve addition is quite simple.

ihm··on A quick post on Chen's algorithm
There are a bunch of hash based signature schemes, e.g., SPHINCS https://sphincs.org/
ihm··on ProofWiki: Online compendium of mathematical proofs
The set of sequences of length n ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) and beginning with a T are in bijection with the set of sequences of length n-1 ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) by the bijection

   def f(s):
     assert(s[0] == 'T')
     return s[1:]
whose inverse is

  def f_inverse(s):
    return 'T' + s
ihm··on How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
There's huge variation in Latin American dialects, there's definitely no universal speed of speech.
ihm··on Replicator Is DoD’s Big Play to Build 1000s of Autonomous Weapons in Just 2 Yrs
Horrifying to see open and talk of war with China with no shame whatsoever. Not only is there 0 reason for such a war besides providing a market for these stupid murder gadgets, the human toll of such a war would be unthinkable.
ihm··on Superrational
The parent was saying "Superrational" is a satire of HPMOR, not that HPMOR is a satire of Harry Potter.
ihm··on The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war.

To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government.

Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government.

This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.

ihm··on Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
For what it's worth, I tried Spain Spanish afterwards and had no issues at all. My accent is pretty good (not native but grew up hearing and speaking Spanish as a kid, can sometimes pass for native if we don't talk enough that they hear my poor vocabulary).
ihm··on Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
Mexican Spanish didn't work at all. It asked me "Como te llamas" and I replied, "Me llamo Isaac", which got speech-recognized into some French sentence. I tried again saying "Si, me llamo Isaac" and it got recognized as some gibberish like "C. Mi anno E Sack" or something.
ihm··on UCLA computer grad constructs “crown jewel of cryptography”
As mentioned on page 9 of the thesis, IO as constructed in the thesis implies IO for RAM machines, so yes you can do programs with iteration.
ihm··on The World Atlas of Languages
Hebrew is a much broader linguistic phenomenon than just modern Hebrew. Hebrew existed as a spoken language thousands of years ago and has existed continuously since then in many different forms in different Jewish communities primarily as a liturgical language.

Modern Hebrew (or probably “Israeli Hebrew” would be more accurate) was then constituted as a vernacular fairly recently as part of the Zionist project of creating a new national identity, distinct from the existing identities of the Jewish populations would emigrated to Israel.

ihm··on A New Theory for the Assembly of Life in the Universe
Sounds interesting. It‘s cool they found an OK way to approximate the assembly index given that it sounds like something uncomputable (will have to read the paper but it sounds like computing something like Kolmogorov complexity in some model of computation).
ihm··on Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant
That’s just a story told by employers. The reality is the very nature of being an employee in most cases is to be exploited and expendable, last in line and first on the chopping block.
ihm··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
I would say this is unfair to communism. State ownership of all land is actually totally compatible with capitalism.
ihm··on Why Poverty Persists in America
This article gets very close, but ultimately fails to get to the root of things. It’s like a liberal facsimile of a radical analysis. This can be seen clearly with logic like

> Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism

Actually, it is. Market competition in the search for a steady profit pressures capitalists to reduce wages as much as possible, and eliminate any human aspects from work that are not strictly necessary for production. So, definitionally lousy, poorly paid work[^0].

Workers can fight back against this pressure, but it’s a Sisyphean task. As this article explains, it’s difficult and any gains will be eroded over time and a new generation of workers will have to fight again.

The real solution is to construct systems (technologies and institutions) that can perform the functions of capital (coordination of production and distribution, giving people something to do with their day), and then eliminate capital as a social process. Generating poverty (not to mention war, ecological destruction, etc.) is just an intrinsic consequence of the dynamics of capital and will be with us until we do away with it.

[^0]: I didn’t say underpaid because on average all jobs in capitalism are underpaid: profit comes from paying people less than they produce…

ihm··on Apartment rents fall as new supply hits market
Nope, could be a lot of people are just leaving or apartments are being kept vacant at high asking rents.
ihm··on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
This could be straight out of American Psycho:

> Saturday morning Hannah texted me she couldn’t make it, so I slept in and skipped the gym. When I woke up, I put the finishing touches on a blog post I had started earlier in the week and published it. It hit the #1 spot on Hacker News; I couldn’t stop myself from constantly refreshing the post as it got more upvotes while chuckling at the classic Hacker News hate comments.

ihm··on Idris: A language for type-driven development
The most famous ones off the top of my head: Coq, Agda, Lean, Idris, ATS. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dependently_typed_lan...
ihm··on Idris: A language for type-driven development
These types are statically checked (i.e., can be checked before runtime).
ihm··on Ask HN: How do you give back?
From my perspective, the pressures of capitalism are responsible a lot of the suffering that people help with (in heroic ways) at the margins by volunteering.

It makes more sense to me to address the problem at the root, so I’m a member of several socialist organizations that are trying in various ways to build towards an alternative mode of organizing society.

ihm··on ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving
As a native (American) English speaker, the original paragraph looks fine to me except for “IA”.
ihm··on The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts (2001) [pdf]
That theorem is not valid constructively, so no way to make a computer program out of it. I.e., there is no program that given types A, B and injections (f : A -> B) and (g : B -> A) produces a bijection A -> B.
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