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ttctciyf

3,017 karma · joined July 25, 2013

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ttctciyf··on What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
> Are these two meanings of "undecidable" related

I can't claim to answer this, but you might like to look at A Relatively Small Turing Machine Whose Behavior Is Independent of Set Theory[0] which (amongst other interesting things) does discuss the proposition "ZFC is consistent", which is independent from ZFC, in terms of a Turing Machine which enumerates all possible proofs in ZFC and halts when it finds a contradiction (e.g. a proof of 0=1).

But I don't think there's a simple equivalence here, all the same.

The logician's undecidable is always relative to a set of axioms, whereas the question of whether a property of strings can be decided by some TM doesn't place any constraints on the TM, which is to say the deciding TM is not required to, nor prohibited from, implementing any particular axiom set.

(It's tempting to try and show "provable in ZFC" to be a (CS)undecidable property by having a TM enumerate ZFC proofs and halt on finding a proof or disproof of the input string, and imagine the TM running forever when given a statement of the Continuum Hypothesis. But the TM could proceed by other means - for example [1] shows a proof of CH's independence in a theorem prover, so that a TM incorporating this construction could indeed reject CH statements as unprovable in ZFC. Which is not to say "ZFC-provable" *isn't* (CS)undecidable, just that showing this isn't as simple as constructing a ZFC-proof-enumerator and giving it the CH as input.)

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04343

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02901

ttctciyf··on Psychologist Who Specializes in Narcissists: What We Need to Do to Stop Trump
Trump is rapidly shaping up as the greatest unsolved problem of the current era.

I don't think TFA has the answer though; nothing concrete is proposed.

Coping strategies like "keep the faith" and "gray rocking" may succeed (or not) at an interpersonal level, but don't transpose into anything meaningful at scale.

Politics, jurisprudence and journalism are where solutions are most needed but there's nothing on the horizon, afaics.

ttctciyf··on Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing
https://archive.ph/i6ZtJ
ttctciyf··on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students
> seriously, if a malicious saboteur was running things, what would the differences be?

Less obvious corruption.

ttctciyf··on Computational Public Spaces [video]
> So this is my presentation software. It's 25 lines of code. Microsoft Powerpoint is maybe 20 million lines of code; you don't need it.

The speaker then spontaneously decides to demonstrate programming under this paradigm:

> I'm going to tell this piece of paper what to do ... 'when you point up at an object ... that object should be highlighted in, say, green'

Moves paper around, highlighting is performed as requested.

https://youtu.be/PixPSNRDNMU?t=612

Haven't been keeping up with Bret Victor, but that bit was just as surprising and satisfying as his other demos, for me.

ttctciyf··on A library of words: Discovering Roget's Thesaurus (2023)
The author notes:

> since around 1962, publishers have abandoned the side-by-side layout of opposing categories which Roget insisted on as a visual representation of the opposing ideas

illustrated by the original's side-by-side entries for 615 Good and 616 Evil, seeing this as an unfortunate

> example of one of the many ways book design is actually getting less sophisticated over time.

It appears the Gutenberg project also see value in preserving the two columns, at least in their html edition, as can be seen in their rendition of the same passages: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10681/pg10681-images.ht.... (Link is to a 10M html file).

(Though it seems things have moved on, since Evil is now #619.)

Surely there must be more programmatic electronic editions, though, given the highly tractable organisation of the book?

ttctciyf··on Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)
hammer - keyboard = hammerhead

Makes no sense, admittedly!

- dulcimer and - zither are both in firmly in .*gun.* territory it seems..

ttctciyf··on Ask HN: What Features Would You Want in a Minimalist Browser?
Open source.

Ublock Origin & NoScript equivalence built in.

"Reader mode" like Firefox reader view but traversing links doesn't reset you back to non-reader view.

An extensibility framework of some kind.

ttctciyf··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
> it's not propagated to other browsers signed into the same account, it explicitly says that in the settings page

Yeah, you are absolutely right & I misremembered - forgot I copied over my browser profile.

It is definitely a permanent setting for me though, on both laptop & desktop profiles, haven't had to re-set it since I discovered it. (Firefox/linux).

Maybe the difference is in handling multiple google accounts differently. My approach: I tend to create browser profiles for specifiec tasks; the youtube viewing profile (used daily) is permanently signed in to my (non-Premium) youtube account, but when I check my actual gmail mail (for example) which is a different google account, I do it on a different browser profile.

Apologies for confusion over propagation, anyhow & thanks for the correction!

ttctciyf··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
It's been permanent for me the last couple of years or so.

Is it because I'm signed in to youtube, maybe?

The setting propagates to other browsers signed in to the same account, I think.

ttctciyf··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
Does this not work for you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854588
ttctciyf··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
> I find the autoplay so annoying

Me too! So I turned them all off:

    Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)
Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.
ttctciyf··on Mercury: Commercial-scale diffusion language model
> in the second case we both know the only likely completion.

You two may, but I don't. 'Decades'? 'Months'? 'Wives'? 'Jobs'? 'Conservative PMs'?

ttctciyf··on Turing-Drawings
As with randomly generated CA, I think the most interesting are the ones that exhibit some large scale characteristic which persists while micro states continue to evolve unpredictably, as for example:

https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,4,1,3,2,3,2,0,...

I wonder if Stephen Wolfram has opined on the applicability of his 4 classes of CA behaviour (fixed, periodic, random, complexly structured) to this type of automaton?

ttctciyf··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
If I was habitually asking some llm for nuggets of information I'd have to use web search to verify it in any case.

But in fact I overwhelmingly use search over llm because it's an order of magnitude quicker (I also have google search's ai bobbins turned off by auto-using "web" instead of "all".)

I've used llm "for real" about 3 times in the last two months, twice to get a grounding in an area where I lacked any knowledge, so I could make better informed web searches, and once in a (failed) attempt to locate a piece of music where web search was unsuccessful.

ttctciyf··on DeepSeek focuses on research over revenue
"Focuses on" does not mean "exclusively undertakes".

Hence "I focus on enjoying life more than chasing money" does not imply "I don't do anything for money". It does not preclude me from engaging in paid activities. It simply means they are not the main priority.

So pointing out that I have earned money is not a contradiction of my claim.

The comment seems to be entirely ignorant of the basic semantics of "focus".

ttctciyf··on An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent an entropic state and is likely because available information channels are saturated with noise.
ttctciyf··on Leave It to Manus
Maybe something to stop it succeeding at requests like "hack into some power stations and blackout city X" ?
ttctciyf··on Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
Might want to add a disclaimer in view of https://corporatewatch.org/ ("Corporate-critical news and research since 1996")
ttctciyf··on Show HN: Fuckingsearch.com, search Google without AI Overviews
Though I fully approve the posted link, I do something similar in a different way; maybe it will work for you:

0. use firefox and ublock origin to take care of the ads

1. (re)enable custom search urls[0]

2. add https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s as such a custom search url

Steps 1 & 2 avoid the AI spam on default google by telling it to use the "web" search context ("udm=14").

You have to name your search url, so I call mine Plain Old Google, or POG for short.

0: https://gist.github.com/brootware/b72d3639d00d1cb9c3b138cf0e...

ttctciyf··on The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School
> It's completely oxymoronic. Post modernism is about rejecting grand narratives, and marxism is _all_ grand narrative

For some straight talk and level-headed mythbusting on this and other common misconceptions, A Postmodernism FAQ[1] is a great listen.

1:

    part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYegIGhwtc
    part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hS5NSzPxw
    part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsfKrNLIwhM
ttctciyf··on Why Sabine Hossenfelder Is Just Wrong
From the comments:

> Sabine says:

> November 12, 2024 at 12:35 am

> Well played, Peter, certainly got me to click.

> [...]

Pretty sure I've seen her comment on there before in friendly fashion when she is referenced. (Yes, I have, for example: [1], [2].)

Woit's second paragraph is pretty explicit about the title, you don't need to dive into the comment to get the picture:

> Actually, the title and first paragraph above are basically just clickbait. Inspired by the class I’m teaching, I wanted to write something to advertise a certain point of view about quantum mechanics, but I figured no one would read it. Picking a fight with her and her 1.5 million subscribers seems like a promising way to deal with that problem. After a while, I’ll change the title to something more appropriate like “Representations of Lie algebras and Quantization”.

1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13907

2: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864&cpage...

ttctciyf··on Letters by Oliver Sacks review
Oops! Make that "though you wouldn't know it from hastily skimming TFA and a quick ctl-F on the wrong term in a misguided attempt to confirm your existing bias" then. Mea culpa!

Hallucinations has quite a bit of info on Sacks' career as a psychonaut which progressed over several decades (iirc).

ttctciyf··on Letters by Oliver Sacks review
> The contrast in Sacks's hobbies

Though you wouldn't know if from TFA, Sacks was also a life-long enthusiast of mind-altering substances[0]. His 2012 Hallucinations[1] inquires into the etiology and social and phenomenal aspects of its subject by examining cases from his patients and from his own recreational episodes and is a completely fascinating read!

0: See, for example, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915224016/neurologist-oliver-...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinations_(book)

ttctciyf··on Cheating alleged after men's world conker champion found with steel chestnut
Right on.

Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):

> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."

In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr75xyn1rd8o

ttctciyf··on On the Nature of Time
It's sort of funny that where the title alludes to the arrow of time, opening with a quote asserting "all measurements are in principle reversible", it pretty quickly gets to a different arrow of time - that of comprehension:

> "If you haven't read the previous post ... this won't make any sense"

Could you have demonstrated, perhaps accidentally, an alternative organising principle allowing temporal ordering to emerge in a computationally oriented ontology? Can the future only "make sense" if it temporally follows the past?

Only half kidding!

ttctciyf··on What P vs. NP is about
> The word "literally" can no longer be trusted to mean "in a literal sense". It's frequently used as an intensifier.

It was ever thus.

See, for example, https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439

ttctciyf··on The war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity
> It’s some kind of influence effort. Maybe even Russian.

Russians are amateurs compared to proper "influence efforts" like, for example https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/r/rk-ro/ross-clark/ :

> Why are the BBC weather maps on fire? Is it none too subtle climate propaganda?

> Electric cars are a Trojan horse for the destruction of driving

> Net zero now threatens our national security

> The heat pump fantasy is dead – only our blinkered elites haven’t noticed

> The Brexit revolt is spreading across Europe – and the Brussels elites are terrified

Oh, yes, and:

> Lazy Britain now needs to be paid to get back to the office - Slashing Friday travel fares is the wrong way to fix our entitled, WFH, unproductive workforce

All these are real "thought pieces" in a real British broadsheet, if you can believe it...

ttctciyf··on GraphicsMagick – a Swiss army knife of image processing
Somewhat distressing to see that the following notice first appeared in a December 2021 update note[0] and has been repeated and updated regularly ever since!

> GraphicsMagick really does need some additional productive volunteers. For several years now, the burden has entirely been on me. I have been sheparding the project for 19 years already (and contributed to ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick combined for 25 years already). It is not reasonable to expect someone with a full time job (and expecting to retire in a couple of years) to do all of the work.

0: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/NEWS.html

ttctciyf··on I wag, therefore I am: the philosophy of dogs
Somehow this piece manages to avoid mention of both Diogenes, famed admirer of dogs for whom his philosphical school, Cynicism[0], is named, and Kafka, whose Investigations of a Dog is an essential short fiction about a genius dog philosopher[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes#Philosophy :

> asked why he was called a dog [Diogenes] replied, "I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals."

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_of_a_Dog

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