I know this reeks of witch-hunting, but... I have a hunch that u/Eugine_Nier is back under the guise of u/Azathoth123. Reasons:
- Same political views, with a tendency to be outspoken about them
- Karma hovering in the 70s% for both accounts, occasionally going into the 60s%, significantly lower than the LW average
- The dates match up. Kaj Sotala announced on July 03, 2014 that Eugine was to be permanently banned. The first comment from Azathoth123 was on July 12, 2014.
- The one that got my attention was the posting pattern. Particularly, Eugine_Nier had a pervasive pattern of exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread. That's actually the first thing I had noticed about the guy back when he was first active, and a few times I thought about drawing attention to the way he flouted the rules, but never got around to it/cared enough about the matter. Now, I see Azathoth123 doing the same thing. The current Rationality Quotes thread has four quotes from him already and it hasn't even been a week since the thread was posted; all of them have something to do with his political views. As do basically all of his postings so far.
- Each one of these points, separately, has a small prior probability if the two of them are not the same person. Together, they have an even smaller probability. Especially the predilection for posting one too many rationality quotes; seriously, how common an occurrence is that one in particular?
- My experience so far with the internet has been that people like Eugine never really leave an online community they have pestered for so long. It doesn't matter if they're IP banned or something. They always come back, just under a different name, and they come back shortly.
I don't have an axe to grind against the guy, I've only spoken to him a couple of times and didn't notice any particularly large karma hits afterwards, I just really dislike it when someone skirts the rules like that. Disruptive users evading permanent bans never helped any community ever.
Obviously I'm posting this here because I think a moderator should look into the matter. Usually I would be posting a disclaimer of some sort, apologizing in advance to Azathoth123 for attacking his standing with slanderous accusations if this turned out not to be the case. Well, I won't. The more I look into the matter, the more confident I get that they're the same person. Azathoth, if you're reading this and you're not Eugine_Nier, then I strongly advise you go search for your twin brother, I think you'll get along very well. Seriously, I'm saying this in good faith. You have a suspiciously great deal of things in common.
If retributive downvoting is (still) a concern (if not, then disregard this paragraph): I'd like to request, if such a thing is possible, that a mod karma-blocks me until the issue is over, so as to not incur undeserved downvotes (it would also mean I'd get no upvotes). In turn, I promise not to abuse the system by spamming the boards with garbage without consequences, but then again given my history so far on LW I don't think that such an abuse should be expected from me. For the record, I could have made a throwaway account just to say this, and not risk being karmassassinated, but 1) a zero karma account has no credibility and 2) for signalling reasons I prefer to put my money where my mouth is.
P.S. I only made this announcement its own post because the latest open thread was about to "expire".
There is no such thing as "the shortest program for which the halting property is uncomputable". That property is computable trivially for every possible program. What's uncomputable is always the halting problem for an infinity of programs using one common algorithm.
It is also easy to make up artificial languages in which Kolmogorov complexity is computable for an infinite subset of all possible strings.
You were probably thinking of something else: that there exists a constant L, which depends on the language and a proof system T, such that it's not possible to prove in T that any string has Kolmogorov complexity larger than L. That is true. In particular, this means that there's a limit to lower bounds we can establish, although we don't know what that limit is.
The halting property is semi-decidable: if a program halts, then you can always trivially prove that it halts, you just need run it. If a program does not halt, then sometimes you can prove that it doesn't halt, and sometimes you can't prove anything.
For any programming language, there exist a length such that you can compute the halting property for all programs shorter than that. At... (read more)