near-median Sevarist ~ravsur-balteb
Tel Aviv, Israel
Joined March 2009
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๐ค๐ค๐ค retweeted
A Babylonian trial proceeding shows that when ล upik-zeri was presented with a debt note showing he was trying to sell a field which he already mortgaged, he tried eating the note.
This was quite difficult (and apparently unsuccessful) as debt notes at the time were on baked clay rather than paper.
The most annoying counterfactual moral argument. Far worse than Baby Hitler, even.
In general, unrealizable counterfactuals cannot be used to determine anything about someone's morality. (The reverse is fine and is one of my favourite genres of fiction.)
I read Inga Clendinnen's Aztecs some years ago on the strength of a different review, abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.โฆ
I agree with the reviewer that the Mexica are a hard people to love. To their credit, our love is not something they ever would have asked for.
"To really grapple with the Aztecs is to experience a sort of vertigo every bit as disorienting and nauseating as cosmic horror itself. โฆ The nine most frightening words in the English language might be 'the distribution of possible human societies is very wide.'โ thepsmiths.com/p/review-azteโฆ
๐ค๐ค๐ค retweeted
>be donald knuth
>conway invents surreal numbers
>explains them to you over lunch on a napkin
>lose the napkin
>go on sabbatical in norway
>decide to reconstruct the theory from memory
>rent a hotel room away from your wife for a week to write
>hotel is run by norwegian church volunteers
>wife periodically sneaks over so the hotel staff think you're having an affair
>write a novella about two characters discovering surreal numbers
>their discoveries and mistakes are your actual discoveries and mistakes as you reconstruct conway's theory
>finish the entire manuscript in six days
>on the seventh day, rest
Surreal!
Cowork @moxspace and you may stumble upon a gem like Knuth's mathematical novella
I last encountered this ode to JHWH Conway in school
It's obvious in retrospect that GRPO, which trains to do better than the group one is in, will encourage defection in the PD, as, head-to-head, defection is the only way one can possibly do better than one's peers.
But I didn't see this beforehand!
๐ค๐ค๐ค retweeted
In 408 BC the actor Hegelochus mispronounced แผฮบ ฮบฯ
ฮผฮฌฯฯฮฝ ฮณแฝฐฯ ฮฑแฝฮธฮนฯ ฮฑแฝ ฮณฮฑฮปฮฎฮฝ' แฝฯแฟถ โfor out of the waves again I see calmโ with ฮณฮฑฮปแฟฮฝ โweaselโ for ฮณฮฑฮปฮฎฮฝ(ฮฑ) โcalmโ, different only by pitch. He was mocked for years by Aristophanes, Strattis, Plato, etc and quit acting
Imagine Ron Graham Knuth and Patashnik had written Concrete Mathematics while knowing as much as Grothendieck, Deligne and Serre combined. Then I think frontier models are noticeably superhuman in the sort of maths that book would have contained.
hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final
((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)
๐ค๐ค๐ค retweeted
hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final
((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)
Yeah ok. So the first thing to say about this is that unlike AI 2027 it is trying to predict politics far more than technology. In the main timeline everything purposely lags the efficient frontier so they can pick whatever economic figures they like.
ai-2040.com/
They're not really doing any Chinese perspective-taking which is pretty close to making this projection an outright failure given how it checks out in a hyper-libertarian homesteading future universe that will _not happen_ in the Chinese 4-Volume.
Do you want to eat your cake (Y69 - N31)
Do you want to have it (Y50 - N50)
Two-thirds of the public (69 per cent) say they are in favour of a law requiring social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban children under the age of 16 from social media, according to a poll by Ipsos.
However, support for the Australian-style social media ban falls to just half of the public if it means everyone in the UK is required to upload either an ID or credit card to the tech firms to verify their age โคต๏ธ
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07โฆ
