rsaarelm

I got the impression that it was more about mathematical sums being one of top items in von Neumann's mathematical toolkit, and he was really well-practiced in doing those. Then when he heard the puzzle he pattern-matched it to a problem he'd already solved enough times in his work to know it offhand, he didn't brute-force in his head 100x faster than other people who were rustier on sums and needed to brute-force things in their head.

There is a variant named NetHack 4, they might want to avoid confusion with it.

It's also funny how Finland has a concept of "thermic spring", which is defined by the temperature no longer dipping below 0° C, and the term doesn't exist in English because the definition wouldn't work in the climate of most of the English-speaking world.

It's helpful to tell people that they are in uncharted territory and can't rely on running on autopilot even if you don't have a new map to give them. Whether they can make their way or not is unclear, but the first step is just making sure they understand that they're now in a place where they need to make their own way and can't fully rely on existing maps. Otherwise they might not even realize they need to start asking "am I doing the right thing right now" by themselves.

Archive.today does not seem to have worked for people connecting from Finland since mid-January, it just gives an endless captcha loop. Is this related to whatever this drama is?

There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.

Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".

> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.

The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.

> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.

I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.

But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?

> Fake it till you make it.

What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?

Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.

Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.

English has the idiom "reading the tea leaves". Elsewhere in Europe it's "reading the coffee grounds", eg. "kahvinporoista katsominen" in Finnish.

I think OP is thinking about covering the sphere of directions in 3D space, not just directions in a 2D plane. No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area, so any finite amount you draw will cover zero percent of the area of the two-dimensional sphere surface.

> They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.

They go "hey, cool, we can get a paper out of this" https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...

The Z-code images are up on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

You can click the "play online" link or download the image and play locally with an interpreter like frotz.

Static site generation and Github pages. Start with the Jekyll generator Github supports out of the box and roll your own if you need something it doesn't provide.

Someone with IQ 160 might have trouble empathizing with what IQ 100 people find convincing or compelling and not do that well with an average IQ 100 population. What if they were dealing with an average IQ 145 population that might be much closer to being on the same wavelength with them to begin with and tried to do social coordination now?

Yes, because you need to spend a lot of time doing social organization and thinking about it to get very good at it, just like you need to spend a lot of time doing math or science and thinking about it to get very good at it. And then you need to pick up patterns, respond well to unexpected situations and come up with creative solutions on top of that, which requires intelligence. If you look at the people who are the best at doing complex political organization, they'll probably all have above-average intelligence.

Why will it never be? If the adequate intelligence is what something like 0.1 % of the populace naturally has, seems like there's a pretty big difference between that level of intelligence being stuck at 0.1 % of the populace and it being available from virtual assistants that can be mass-produced and distributed to literally everyone on Earth.

So you're saying that it's naive to suppose that everybody being much smarter than they are now would transform society, because any wide-scale societal change requires ongoing social cooperation between the many average-intelligence people society currently consists of?

Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Stephen King's stuff up until the early 90s (I later found out the point where the books turned boring was when he'd stopped using drugs), short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and The Destroyer pulp novels, particularly after Will Murray started writing them.

Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning? You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero". Then everyone just goes on to do math as usual, unless there's something inconsistent in the new formalism that makes mathematical reasoning break down.

You could call it an incorrect answer if there was a correct answer to division by zero, but it's undefined instead with no correct answer. Sounds pedantic, but in math pedantic stuff matters, and apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math, https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/

It's more "nobody else is interested" than "it's not out in the open", but I've made my own structured data format implemented as a Rust serializer https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm and am using it for a growing collection of command-line tools for managing personal notes written as outline files https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm-tools and to run a static site generator https://github.com/rsaarelm/blog-engine . I'm also writing a game that uses IDM as the data serialization format.

Idea for the format was that you can write structured data with a really minimal syntax if you have an external type schema running the parsing, and the syntax emerged from the line-and-indentation based outline note files I'd started writing for myself. It took some months of work and planning and a couple rewrites to get the core IDM library working right. The tools and site generator were simple and straightforward in comparison.

I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things.

Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.

How do you think humans are doing this this if you don't think machines can ever do anything similar?

I've been using names of chemical elements. They're nice since they come with abbreviations and associated numbers. So if there's host 'gallium', you know that it can also be referenced as 'ga' and that it's local IP address is going to be something like 192.168.1.31.

People have been trying to do this for at least two hundred years, the Jefferson Bible was completed in 1820. We still can't point to any clear successes.

Here's how this could be done as a HN-side feature with zero interaction with archive.is servers:

* Compile a list of domains like nytimes.com that have soft paywalls.

* When a link like https://example.com/ is submitted and its domain is on the paywall list, insert [archive](https://archive.is/timegate/https://example.com/) after it in the title area. Just prefix the timegate part and it's a working link.

You can go in the browser URL field and type "archive.is/" in front of the URL and press enter after step 2. It'll either redirect you to an existing archive page or lets you create one if one doesn't exist.