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skolskolyon One Year in Hell (2013)

>I have seen the story below on multiple forums and posts. I have spent some time trying to verify the source of the story, but so far I have been unable to find the original source. (Though it may be an excerpt from Selco at the SHTFschool.com)

The article is quite transparently a forum post.

skolskolyon Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

Great technologies, but not very well known. I highly recommend Casey Muratori's videos if you want to learn more. (Big Zinc Oxide advocate.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HAXgM3mjSo

skolskolyon Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python

Consider one of the only objects that actually matters in this context: vocal cords. Of course it's true that many inert objects don't have audible overtones or resonate at all, but nearly all animal vocalizations do. More complex auditory processing means better ability to distinguish between kin and predators. The fact that non-living objects tend to produce sounds via the same principles is just icing on the cake.

skolskolyon Show HN: Runc – Compile and run C in one command

Quick and ugly alternative is chmod+x and add something like this to the top of your file:

  //$(which gcc) $0 -o a.out; ./a.out $@; rm a.out; exit

skolskolyon The Roots of Progress

https://rootsofprogress.org/img/our-world-in-data-two-centur...

I've been thinking about the deceptiveness of the graph on the top left lately. It's easy to look at proportions and see that things have improved, but I don't know anyone who morally weighs suffering this way. When you take the graph and adjust for population growth, we get a decrease from 94 (out of ~100) to 70 (out of ~700). In absolute terms the impoverished population has been reduced roughly 25% over the past 200 years. I suspect there's also a lot of room for error dating back this far, and it's entirely possible that things have barely changed (or even become worse) in absolute terms. I've grown tired of the use of this term; it only seems to obscure.

skolskolyon A Wave Function Collapse Overlapping Model Guide

Interesting. Well it only happened once so I guess I just got bad luck. Fun demo!

skolskolyon A Wave Function Collapse Overlapping Model Guide

I broke it in a bad way. Pattern chugged along fine and then it froze and a random white rectangle appeared. (N=3) https://imgur.com/a/IlmdkC6

skolskolyon If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?

I do this all the time. When I was young I believe a saw a ratio-n typo in a math textbook, and for many years I believed that it was a synonym. Like a fraction, but a ration. Combine this with the -tion problem that others have mentioned and it definitely rolls off the fingers quite easily.

skolskolyon What Nihilism Is Not

Yeah I was a bit taken aback when reading that part and became increasingly concerned that the author didn't know what he was talking about.

Imagine your friend asks you to count the windows on a building, so you count the rows and columns and multiply them. When he asks you how you did it so fast, you tell him, and he responds with something like: "Oh, I didn't realize you were a Nihilist." He then explains that mathematics is immaterial, and therefore non-existent. You believing in such a thing apparently makes YOU the Nihilist?

No. Nihilism is not about holding supposedly "empty" beliefs. If anything, it's the opposite; Nihilism would hold that these beliefs in the immaterial are themselves empty. Your friend might be a Nihilist, but you certainly aren't.

skolskolyon What Nihilism Is Not

Well, that is what Nihilism explores. Under Nihilism we can still have a sort of right and wrong, but only with respect to goals. The goals you pick, are of course arbitrary. However, reality sort of strong-arms us into continuing our existence as a precondition to choosing any other goal (aside from death), and in that sense all other goals become subordinate to that one. I guess there are some other ways to interpret it, but regardless, the implications of this vary from somewhat Utopian (Transhumanism) to very Dystopian (The Borg.)

I'm not a Nihilist but if I were I wouldn't be too happy about it.

skolskolyon What Nihilism Is Not

I wasn't satisfied with the essay, so I thought I'd share my understanding of Nihilism. This is coming from someone who has never read Nietzsche so take it with a grain of salt, I'm curious to know where I might be off.

First, I think we've all most commonly seen the "colloquial" form of Nihilism, which is a sort of despair over a lack of meaning in life. I'm pretty sure most people are aware that this is oversimplified, but it is partially grounded in actual Nihilism. The emphasis is put on despair, but the despair isn't the philosophy, just a product of it.

To sum up Nihilism in a sentence: reality lacks inherent meaning, and any meaning we attempt to fulfill is ultimately chosen, not given to us. Importantly, most of the sense of purpose we see as being "real" comes from our desire to continue existing, (hence Existentialism.) But, existence is a choice. You simply choose to continue to exist, or you don't. (In which case you die.) This is the main insight which makes Nihilism disturbing. Philosophically, if our existence has no purpose, then it seems that everything else we believe and value is built on a foundation of sand.

skolskolyon What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming

>Music, on the other hand, seems to be limited to the human species

I'm not sure how you're defining music, but I would consider a bird's song to count. On one hand I don't believe music can be reduced to a mating display, but I'm skeptical that music has a biological root in processing memories/emotional response. Sure, it can stimulate memory/emotional processing, but so do most other social activities. Moreover, I think conversation, games, music, dance, etc. are much more similar to each other in that regard than dreaming is to any of them.

In my experience, dreams are wild extrapolations/interpolations of various waking experiences. When I'm awake, I would call this imagination, but the unconscious mind appears to put the imagination into overdrive in a way that is not possible while awake. It's almost as if the brain is trying to generalize memories, possibly to optimize them for storage space. (or some biological equivalent)

Interestingly, /u/undershirt mentions that it might be that you don't actually experience the dream until you wake up. This would make sense, as this process would be interrupted, leaving you with some bizarre false memories. The unconscious then quickly cleans up it's mess and hands control over to the conscious mind.

On the other hand, I think music is explained fairly satisfactorily as a positive social activity, related to dancing, both of which were ubiquitous and inseparable in ancient cultures. In a world where you have to make friends and be wary of enemies, it's not hard to see how bonding activities that signal friendliness are valuable for natural selection. Even birds sing, humans just have a much more complex songs.

skolskolyon Show HN: A simple garbage collector for C

If you're willing to use macros, this can do the trick. Return and break will preempt the expression, but continue should work fine.

  #define DEFER(EXPR) for(int _tmp=1; _tmp; _tmp=0,(EXPR))

Example:

  char * data = malloc(32);
  DEFER(free(data))
  {
          // do stuff
  }

skolskolyon 'Alarming' loss of insects and spiders recorded

Just don't go to Brazil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-9KPe3nwaQ