knuthsat

I found that opening a company in one of the most bureaucratic countries in EU (Austria) was very easy. I did everything online, from my personal immigration to founding an LLC. The only in person meeting was for establishing a permanent residence.

Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.

Best return on investment is most definitely finding new ways to produce energy and new ways to sequester greenhouse gases.

Anything else is a minor dampener to an exponential process.

Getting rid of Bitcoin is absolutely nothing compared to our exponentially increasing energy needs.

Lowering greenhouse emissions to 0 today would still result in dire consequences when the temperature increase comes, just from the massive n-th order effects.

I have no idea how the opinion of Bitcoin being so detrimental to climate came to fruition and how it's considered plausible at all.

Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year.

Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen.

Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to be the thing we optimize.

There's Las Vegas, having AC 24/7, cooling the streets from open casino doors. There's individuals feasting on steaks every single day, every single meal.

Looking through the eyes of a frugal optimizer, should we ban that too?

It's interesting that mainstream religions of this world never deal with collective guilt on an individual level. It's always a catalyst that cleanses everyone from individual sin.

We just don't have societal mechanisms that would do this. Look at veganism or similar movements (like the collective movement around quarantine, masks and vaccines). People just do not want to change, they do not want to think rationally or can't and they will mock everything that challenges their status quo.

But at this point, human emissions are irrelevant. The n-th order effects that will happen from an already predicted temperature increase will obliterate any savings.

The tundra in Siberia holds methane equivalent to 100 years of 2020 emissions. When that stuff starts melting (and it's already exploding) the bitcoin experiment will be a drop in the ocean.

Facts related to the atrocities committed during his rule. The current sentiment does not really tell how the future will look at the events.

Russians have monuments that praise the rulers that were ruthless and brutally destructive towards the human spirit and it's been less than 100 years ago since these events happened.

Just because current rule in Europe/Germany finds him horrible it does not mean that in 200 years these events will be looked at with the same eyes.

I'm pretty sure that you needed ideology to convince people to go to these incredibly long wars. It just gets washed away by other explanations given by the historians.

I mean, does Russia have memorials of their leaders? Germany also has a bunch of memorials even going back to Prussian days. Yet many of these individuals caused massive suffering.

This is the current sentiment yes, but time will shed a bunch of facts.

I personally find Napoleon and Julius Caesar as completely uninspiring figures. Their accomplishments are worthless but for some reason praised from the perspective of history.

A big reason for this is that history finds explanations after things happened. They attribute to these "leaders" way too much.

I think it’s the way history works. Napoleon was pretty horrible, yet even the enslaved Dalmatians forgot what he did and praise him for building roads.

I’m pretty sure Hitler will have a similar public image to Napoleon in a few hundred years. We do similar things with Roman emperors and praise their accomplishments forgetting the massive amounts of suffering they caused.

The comment you link just describes the plot through the eyes of someone who didn't like the film. There's no refutation of anything that film states.

Yeah. I'm always amazed by individuals that seem to accomplish so much and it looks so effortless. Like, let's say Donald Knuth.

I just feel that I do not have his direction, purpose and motivation and I have no idea how to get there.

He has concrete goals (like revisiting TeX every 7 years to fix bugs, writing a book during a sabbatical, reading mail X times per year) and just fulfills them.

I have a weird feeling that I'll probably reach this kind of state when I'm very old and will wonder why I wasn't able to see and live the life that way before.

My life feels directionless, I'm accomplishing things but I just don't know how to reach these zen levels of direction, purpose and motivation.

At the same time I wonder why would it be necessary for my life to go in that direction? Why am I just not content with the way things are and start focusing on that, instead of always looking for something "greater"?

Investigative tactics are pretty brutal. They talk with you so that you incriminate yourself but are very affirmative during most of the conversation but then start confronting you.

The mental fatigue makes a lot of people just admit the crime they committed.

One other way to prove these algorithms is by writing them in z3 prover. You write a simple one that is 100% correct and then you prove equality for your optimized one or find an example that will show inequality.

Check Austria. Without any expenses a dev with a US salary will pay more than 40% in taxes and social benefits. Let's say you have 250k EUR, 12% of it you can take without any taxes (given no expenses, which is ~25k EUR), but then on 225k you pay 112.5k to the government. That's it. Then you take into account VAT and you realize they are really sucking you dry but all of the giants in collusion with Austrian banks avoid taxes easily.

Of course, you can game the system with fictitious useful expenses (travelling but saying you went to a dev conference etc.) but it's hard to really accumulate much if you live a somewhat normal life.

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

Knuth has a nice book on Surreal numbers.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html

This interview is excellent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPn2AdMH7UQ

He wrote the book in less than a week, the book was just flowing for days and after that he couldn't write a thing. Then he realized he missed a detail and had to rewrite the whole book.

Reasonable as in highly unlikely.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594046/

More than 95% of successful animal studies fail to progress further from human trials.

There's obviously a great need for doing these tests in a different fashion.

withouthotair.com goes through this scenario of future being fully powered with renewables and it's just not possible.

China cannot meet it's energy demand increase even with building nuclear plants at a massive rate.

I'm not sure if I just can't find this information or if people exploiting government aid are just silent about it.

These things happen because there are people who are trained to exploit these situations.

But there are definitely levels to it.

One way to do it is to just start a bunch of projects that will fail in countries that cannot meet their EU funds quota.

https://cohesiondata.ec.europa.eu/overview

You look at the data here. Figure out which EU countries can't find enough validly looking projects to get the funds. Go to that country with some initial funding and start legitimate looking business that will be funded by EU (mostly). Create legitimate expenses, even though the business will never be profitable and leech the EU funds through your personal accounts at some non-suspicious rate.

Involving more players makes everything look more legitimate and when things fail, it's just how capitalism works. You can spend decades leeching on the money.

On several occasions I met some fairly competent looking aliens and eventually realized this was the pattern that they wanted to exploit.

These things are also done on a personal level (for example, a psychologist wants to open a practice that will work with groups of children and the project is well-written, costs are well defined and EU gives most of the money and the person just does what they described at a lower cost - spending the money on services that will indirectly make the individual richer).

Another example is non-profits in EU. Small and large, they just suck out so much money, do the things they say will do, but the costs trickle down to the executives through various channels (for example, you can hire individuals to educate your employees but they charge you for fictional stuff and you collect the spent funds through some other way).

I think Bitstamp exchange offered a payout in gold bars for some time (there's no taxation on acquired gold in some countries).

The exchanges are definitely in on it. From trading bots, to price volatility. Pretty sure there's inside trading being done on most successful exchanges.

Nothing better than knowing the behavior of a bunch of traders and figuring out the best massive bot trading strategies.

If this is true, what might the reason for it be?

Maybe there would be too few boys in schools if requirements for girls reduce?

It's estimated there's 1300G tons of methane stored in tundra.

1300 * 10^9 is about 100 years of 2020 CO2 activity.

13 * 10^6 is 100/1000 years of 2020 CO2 activity, I guess.

yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.

Another interesting exercise is generating a uniformly random string of length N of a given regular expression (that has no limits on number of characters).

I did record it with qd...q and repeated it with @d @@

Yeah, just recently I had to edit text like this

  'name1',
  'name2',
  'name3',

to:

  'name1': Enum.Name1,
  'name2': Enum.Name2,
  'name3': Enum.Name3,

by the time I figured out a sequence of keyboard commands I'm pretty sure I could have multicursored it pretty easily, go to name1, create 2 cursors, select word & copy, start typing : Enum., paste selected word, select word, capitalize, type ,

In vim it was something like qdyi'f,i: Enum.<Esc>pbvlUq and then repeat macro.

I found it very slow to even recall.

For some reason the multicursor solution feels faster to me most times.

Gumroad does something similar for years.

Interesting, whenever I failed it was between 320kbps and uncompressed wav. I know that I did a blind test about 10 years ago and could distinguish between ~192kbps variable bitrate and lossless audio with my left ear, mostly influenced by percussion (left ear for some reason can hear 21kHz frequencies).

I live on the 5th floor and have 160kg of weights + barbell on my balcony. Got that during corona when all the gyms closed. I do squats, deadlifts and overhead presses.

I mean, I wouldn't do it if the building (and the balcony) isn't a modern overbuilt masterpiece.

The only drawback is that I really need to put the weights gently otherwise I'm pretty sure neighbors would complain.

It's interesting that Penrose tilings are also using several copies of hypercubes that, when projected to 2D, tile the space, aperiodically. [0]

I always wondered if one could do something to tile cones aperiodically.

[0]: https://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/12/12.html

Pain is systemic. There are lot of studies collecting data and showing that people with the same physical abnormalities experience varying degrees of pain.

For example, my spine has lost its natural lordosis and is completely flattened yet I experience no pain. My mother has several disc hernias and disc protrusions along with degenerative changes due to age, no pain. She had shoulder pain and the physical issue was calcification of tendon. There are people with calcified tendons, no pain.

My father had massive back pain issues with degenerative changes of spine that don’t cause any pain to some. The moment he started fixing a systemic issue of the back being weak and sensitizing the tissue he started experiencing less pain.