Notices by timorl (timorl@qoto.org)

@freemo Aaaa, this should be CWd as "Copenhagen interpretation". D:<

Recent discussions reminded me of this experience, so I wanted to share it.

When I was a good Catholic child I remember 1-2 years of constantly hearing a message from any church-related official I encountered. It wasn't every time or every lesson, or every sermon, but it appeared consistently enough that it was a theme for those couple of years. The message was lamenting over the state of society, in which people looked for meaning in buying and owning things, constantly acquiring more useless stuff. Everyone agreed this was bad and sad and crazy that people actually did that. This message was also topical, since it happened in a country that was just starting to reap benefits from the move to a freer market, so it referred to an actual phenomenon.

Oh, and obviously because it was about people finding meaning in material things, this was called "materialism".

Imagine my surprize many years later when I learned what "materialism" actually meant. This seems to me like an act of relatively subtle propaganda, make a huge swath of people associate the word for a philosophical position you don't like with something obviously stupid. I'm not completely sure this was intentional, but the coordination and consistent choice of words makes me very suspicious.

This is why it's sometimes necessary to squabble over meanings of words. In particular when they are being used to distort reality, introduce false equivalences or "taint" words with meanings that shouldn't be associated with them. It's good to always keep discussions closer to being about reality, but for humans perception of reality is very much filtered through words, so they cannot be ignored.

@freemo Didn't the Senate Majority Leader say that he will not be impartial? It seems kind of reasonable not to let someone who claims this explicitly pass judgement. Although using legal tricks to do that is disappointing, I don't see how else they could have avoided that.

Eh, no idea, I'm very disappointed by more and more politicians all over the world ignoring the spirit and even sometimes rule of law. I feel like one "side" (broadly speaking, since I'm talking abut many parts of the world) is doing this much more, but there are obvious reasons why I might be biased.

@freemo She seems somewhat more committed to it, than if it were just the result of misunderstanding. A longer article about it: https://medium.com/@Phaylen/jk-rowling-confirms-stance-against-transgender-women-9bd83f7ca623 . The article does not present a single conclusive piece of evidence as the title suggests (and it is not of highest quality), but the small things add up. Not conclusive, but sufficient to suspect an actual ideological stance, rather than lack of understanding.

@freemo Everytime this page gets posted I have to mention the, uh, better version: https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ .

More to the point, I suspect because teeth are so simple it's easier to notice that the texture is wrong. Looking at a couple of generated faces I was able too notice weird artifacts on the skin in some cases, but they were much harder to notice than the teeth (if they were wrong).

@freemo
Tamil is really pretty, but I thing any writing using the Modi script is the most beautiful. The line that connects all the letters so that they hang of it is just so pleasing. :amaze:
Unfortunately I have never seen it "in the wild".

I should point out that the Armenian alphabet is from Georgia, so me mentioning it is not a result of that migration. ;) Although I agree the new perspectives are nice!

My friend is a very good floutist and she just uploaded some music I really liked, so here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfaH76cHvpE . Somewhat instance-appropriate, her project is called Flute Infinity: www.fluteinfinity.com . #music

@freemo

The jars with papers inside represent a permutation, every piece of paper points to the next jar in the permutation, say we number the jars from left to right. As all permutation, this one can be represented as a collection of cycles. Two key insights about these cycles:
1. Every cycle containing the jar numbered $k$ neccessarily contains the piece of paper with $k$ written on it, otherwise it wouldn't be a cycle.
2. At most one cycle has length greater than $50$.
With these insights the solution is simple. Your assistant looks at the whole permutation, and if any of the cycles has length greater than $50$ they switch the pieces of paper to break the cycle in half. They do nothing if there are no big cycles. Now you get told the number you are looking for and go for the jar numbered with it. Afterwards just trust the pieces of paper to lead you to the correct jar.

Thanks for this puzzle, solving it gave me a very needed confidence boost. *smugness incoming* Especially since I didn't even need to use paper.

Aleph released the proof-of-concept implementation: https://gitlab.com/alephledger/proof-of-concept ! I helped writing it, so this is a bit of a brag.

Transaction validation time was ~6s with 256 machines all around the world, so pretty nice. Since then, we have been working on a proper implementation in Go (this one I am even more involved in), but it'll take a while before it's published.

#cryptocurrency #alephzero

Got a pair of socks at #gogoconf, finally conference organizers noticed we don't only wear shirts. Hoping for shorts next.