mudita

While some problems are actually solvable with just pencil and paper, this is not a requirement and the intention of the project is that problems will be solved with a combination of insight and coding.

From the Project Euler website:

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

The game is a bit weird. It often offers very bad deals, without an option not to invest. For example for the Gibraltar strait, the game gives the information that the probablity of success is between 90% and 100% and that it’s been traversed 31 times with a 90 % success rate. Then it offers me the choice between an investment of different sizes, where I cannot win back more than my investment, so I have to risk money for no possible gain (invest 167 ducats in shipment worth 167 ducats).

I wouldn’t say that movies per se are parasocial, but if you behave and feel like you have a relationship with somebody in a movie, then it’s probably parasocial.

To a degree it’s also quite normal to have parasocial reactions to personaes from media, it only becomes problematic once people substitute actual social relationships with extreme parasocial relationships.

It not only doesn’t require interaction, the lack of interaction is what makes is parasocial.

I didn’t know the term sinosphere until now, thanks for making me aware of it.

As far as I know, it is possible to have the entry "ohne festen Wohnsitz"(without a permanent residence) instead of a mailing address in a German passport and he's legally not allowed to use his parents address, if he's not there for at least 183 days a year.

But I don't really understand how this small legal detail would change the whole character of his life experience, in any case. No matter what is written in his passport, he spends the whole year in a train.

I just wanted to say, I stumbled upon your website a few years ago through the Tromp-Taylor rules of Go and found the things you do impressive and inspiring. It’s a nice surprise to see you commenting here.

I’m not talking about the AfD here, but trying to quickly answer the question how banning political parties can seen as justified in principle:

Banning a political party is an important instrument in a wider philosophy known in Germany as “wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy). This philosophy states that democratic states should have legal tools with which they can defend themselves against people, who want to attack the democratic order itself.

Wehrhafte Demokratie is a very well established and accepted concept, here, partially because of a wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Weimarer Republik. It’s also justified by the belief that democracy is not just a dictatorship of the majority, but that even a majority of voters is limited in what they can do and that democracy also includes for example the protection of minorities.

> biased actors who should already be constrained by the rule of law

Banning a political party works by the rules of law.

The legal barriers for banning a political party are quite high in Germany. Basically for a ban it must be proven that the party as a whole, not just single member, have the goal to attack key elements of the democratic order itself and that there is a real danger that they could succeed.

The last condition can also be a legal reason to only ban a party once it actually gets popular: As long as it is unpopular, judges don’t see the condition fulfilled, that the party presents a real danger, so they won’t ban the party. This happened with Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which was ruled to be verfassungsfeindlich (an enemy of the constitution), but not banned because it was so ineffective und unpopular.

That sounds more like the BahnCard 100, which costs 4.339 Euro per year. The Deutschlandticket is only valid for slow, regional trains, not faster long distance trains.

The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation. This was surprising to me. Before I tried it, I thought of meditation as a purely mental thing, I didn’t expect that the first really noticeable effect of regular meditation would be a changed relationship to my body,

Much later I discovered contemporary dance, quit my phd in machine learning and became a professional dancer, which really deepened my body awareness and transformed my relationship to being a body even more.

I remember, in the beginning of my dance career, after a three month dance intensive I applied to a (Haskell) programming job again to finance my dance education and went to a computer science conference. It was a bit of surreal experience. The people at the conference were very nice and intellectually curious people and I liked them, but the contrast to the environment in dance communities was very strong. I felt like almost everybody there thought of them-self as a brain, piloting a body like a big mecha. In the dance environments, even during lunch breaks etc., it always felt like there was a lot of subtle awareness in everybody about their own body, the other bodies in the space, the distances and empty space between bodies, a non-verbal channel full of quiet energy and information. In the computer science conference this channel was just dead.

Are you familiar with the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?

“What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

The German theatre world developed the opposite convention, “Bühne links” (literally "stage left”) means left from the perspective of the audience.

I don’t know so much about the theatre world, I’m a professional dancer, but at least the dance scene is increasingly international, switching fluently between English or German depending on the people present; some people learned the English/international convention, some - especially older - directors know mainly the German convention, some people are not aware that there are different conventions in English and German and the result is complete chaos.

A very imperfect analogy:

Imagine alien scientists had studied humans, but only in prison, and then created a model of social behaviour around their observations of prison gangs with a lot of fights to establish hierarchies and who has preferential access to resources.

Only later they study humans outside prison and discover that actually humans - in this hypothetical scenario - are most often organised in farm households/families with a husband and wife leading the household, their children and in richer/bigger households maybe a few farmhands, maids and grandparents around.

They discover that the social patterns in extended families are very different from the patterns in prison gangs, children usually don’t fight their parents for the leadership role, sometimes the head of the household gets the nicest piece of meat, but sometimes in times when food is rare the youngest children are also fed first….

So the models and terminology these alien scientists developed to describe human social behaviour and roles are only fitting for a very specific artificial scenario - prisons - and they try to discourage the old terminology like “gang leader” and start to use new terminology like “head of household” in their work.

The English word "police" actually comes from the Ancient Greek "polis".

E.g. from the etymology section of the Wikipedia article on police:

"First attested in English in the early 15th century, originally in a range of senses encompassing '(public) policy; state; public order', the word police comes from Middle French police ('public order, administration, government'), in turn from Latin politia, which is the romanization of the Ancient Greek πολιτεία (politeia) 'citizenship, administration, civil polity'. This is derived from πόλις (polis) 'city'."

Is this true? The author Charles Stross wrote "Your typical book publisher is not like the music or movie industry; they run on thin margins, and they're staffed by underpaid, overworked folk who do it because they love books, not because they're trying to make themselves rich on the back of a thousand ruthlessly exploited artists. I think their effort deserves to be rewarded appropriately." (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder...)

IMO Worth the Candle (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/25137/worth-the-candle) is the one exception.

There is a note on Aaronson’s blog post:

"[Note for people who might be visiting this blog for the first time: I’m a CS professor at UT Austin, on leave for one year to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety. I accepted OpenAI’s offer in part because I already held the views here, or something close to them; and given that I could see how large language models were poised to change the world for good and ill, I wanted to be part of the effort to help prevent their misuse. No one at OpenAI asked me to write this or saw it beforehand, and I don’t even know to what extent they agree with it.]"

As far as I know, Scott Aaronson has been on leave from UT Austin to work on theoretical foundations of AI safety at OpenAI since June 2022: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6484

Yeah, a lot of historical swords like the Roman gladius or the longsword actually had two edges. It's just effective weapon design (mainly it makes it better at thrusting), not a danger to the user.

This blog by a classicist claims that the word salary is indeed coming from the latin words salarium and sal, but that it is not clear what the connection is, that there is neither evidence for the explanation that Roman soldiers were paid in salt nor that it was an allowance for the specific purpose of buying salt:

http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht...

Regarding the latter he writes:

"As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’."

Yeah, but maybe you shouldn't model your conversations on Churchill: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3109#comic

The author has a degree in computer science and worked as a programmer and technical writer before becoming a full-time science fiction author, so yes.

You slightly misremembered the invisible gorilla test, a classical study about inattentional blindness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invi...

Somewhat fittingly "the basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists."

Here’s an old slatestarcodex post with a collection of more “sentimental maps”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/19/sentimental-cartograph...

The linked article explicitly claims that <article> does not correspond to our first intuition from plain language and that it's more like an "article of clothing" than a written article.

I find it interesting how much Cthaeh, the Simurgh from the web serial “Worm” and Prometheus - the god of foresight - from Scott Alexander’s short story “A Modern Myth” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/) are basically incarnations of the same concept.

On the same blog there’s an article criticising exactly this argument in detail: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-p...

"Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."

I did mandatory military service in Germany and from my own - much milder, of course - personal experience I can emphasise with Wittgenstein.

Military service can really force you out of your bubble: All my friends chose to do civil service instead or were unfit for duty. The other conscripts were very different from me and I never before or after in my life felt so alienated from the people around me.

Just one example: From the environment I grew up in, I though that it was natural that women could be leaders, until then I thought that sexism would be a subtle thing, mostly of implicit, hidden biases. I was shocked to hear how my fellow soldiers talked about the one female sergeant. They made fun of her behind her back (even though she was a hypercompetent badass, for example sneaking through the forest mock killing all the guards during a training exercise), talked about how they could never respect her, because she was a woman, fantasised together about going up to her room to have rough sex with her….

I really did not like them as persons, I did not want to be friends with any of them and I generally hated spending time with them (playing football together was still fun though). Maybe I was arrogant, too?

I don’t know, it’s kinda fun to accuse Wittgenstein of arrogance from the comfort of ones chair, surrounded by ones bubble of similar-minded people, while imagining how one would be friends with the proletariat one never meets - but I kinda believe Wittgenstein, when he called his fellow soldiers bigoted. I can feel with him, trying to do his best in a horrible, scary situation, praying to be brave, while being surrounded by people he really does not like and there are worse things than complaining a bit in your diary in a situation like this.

Yes, I found this related answer to a question on r/askhistorians about letters from prisoners of wars: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55p22q/how_w...

"letters from and to POWs were usually sent through non-belligerent countries and humanitarian organizations such as Switzerland or the International Red Cross"

Yes, thank you for this explanation. I didn’t know that they were not fully ordained, I learned something from you today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilashin (although one could argue whether to call them nuns or not in English. The wikipedia article still calls them “Burmese Theravada Buddhist nun” and they were called nuns in English where I practiced - I’d say their culture’s concept of “nun” does not map perfect to the Western concept, so details get lost in translation, but your explanation is fundamentally correct and very helpful. )

This definitely makes clear again my lack of deeper understanding of their culture and the hubris of me judging their culture after having been in Burma for only a month.

That being said, there definitely were signs of sexism, women did not have the same standing and we should not close our eyes to this part of Buddhism. I don’t mean “and therefore Buddhism is bad”, but “as a Buddhist I think we can and should strive to do better”.

When Buddhism supports and reinforces misogyny, racism or jingoism from the surrounding culture, this is also a failing of Buddhism.

There are many Buddhist teachers (including Jack Kornfield) who absolutely do emphasise more virtuous and emphatic living as a core teaching and result of Buddhist practice. As a simple example, metta meditation is often advertised as actually helping you be more compassionate in “real life”.