• 4 Posts
  • 148 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.

    But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

    I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

    It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

    Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!








    1. First furious madman scribbling: I had a toy was a “quizz” machine with “A, B, C, D” buttons, that read colorful perforated cards and a speaker of a “ding-dong” sound for a correct answer, I worked out what set of holes corresponded to what answer (which to the toymaker’s credit, each card with the same answer did not have exactly the same holes) so I could always answer correctly. [The way I remember it I wanted to make custom cards, but maybe I was just a little cheater ^^]
    2. First program: One fond memory from middle-school, where our introduction to programming was writing GCM and LCM programs using TI-BASIC (or Casio, but the school really pushed the TI models forward). Also having access to a “worms” (somehow in basic and not assembly) clone copied from a friend’s calculator, I reverse engineered the more easy aspects of graphical display, and input handling make a tic-tac-toe program. Since I didn’t know about lists yet, inspired by the GCM and LCM bits, I used prime numbers to store the state of the board, and used divisibility tests to check it. (Some years later i would refactor it, to discover that lists are much much slower in non-assembly TI-BASIC, so it was accidental optimization) I also miscoded the bot, which was vulnerable to exactly one fork attack, but decided to leave it in because it was more fun that way.
    3. First hack: Discovering that the highschool’s poorly designed web portal, for sharing homework and assignments, allowed forced browsing, which the files uploaded by anyone was fun. [I reported it to the school’s sysadmin team, I swear]
    4. Cringe blog: Following in my geeky dad’s footsteps I had a very teenager cringe website, that I look fondly on, with garish colors, self-made HTML, css and animated gifs.






  • Also a subjectively bad one at that—given his america-brained position on wanting to maintain a single executive not that suprising but:

    • Why do you even need to default to winner-take-all?
    • Under winner-take-all dont you inherit most of the downside of FPTP? Sure there might be less wasted votes, but doesn’t actually make harder for 5% parties to get representation, since dominant parties have less of an incentive to negotiate and/or coallition build. (Though I guess subjective given Yud’s apparent dislike of many party working together in a coalition)
    • For a “runoff” system, the STAR system has the dubious distinction of allowing the condorcet loser—a candidate that would lose 1 vs 1 matchup against every other candidate in the field—to win, because a very enthiusastic minority can give a bunch of 5-star ratings.
    • At least FPTP has simplicity going for it, and not trying to arbitrarily compare not completely informed star ratings from voters.