Oh, good. I got this too. With XOR. Contrary to other repliers, it seems to me like XOR is a simpler primitive than "the presence/absence of shapes forms a rectangle". It's more easily generalizable and doesn't rely on the existence of other patterns. As a cute curiosity, by the way, the XOR-ing works both vertically and horizontally.
Has anyone else had one of those odd moments when you've accidentally confirmed reductionism (of a sort) by unknowingly responding to a situation almost identically to the last time or times you encountered it? For my part, I once gave the same condolences to an acquaintance who was living with someone we both knew to be very unpleasant, and also just attempted to add the word for "tomato" in Lojban to my list of words after seeing the Pomodoro technique mentioned.
No, empty praise is still worthless, because Said's cooking and baking not perfect, and there is with near certainty some small flaw, some awkward stylistic choice that could use improvement. Best is the gentle nitpicking of these flaws with a prepended (This is amazing, but) and with the consequent inference that the bread/food/what have you is actually already REALLY GOOD.
From field experience as a Korean-American and thus someone closer in many situations to Ask, (or even TELL!) I have found a lot of success on just pretending to be endearingly forthright: making a big show of asking all the other people whether they want the last dumpling a couple of times, asking whether they're sure, etc. The fact that my uncle, my mother, and I are similar in this and that they will often take me up on this to split/outright take the dumpling, showing clearly that I am, indeed, serious about my ask, helps too.
I don't know if this is the LW hug or something but I'm having trouble downloading the xls. Also, will update with what the crap my passphrase actually means, because it's in Lojban and mildly entertaining IIRC.
EDIT: Felt like looking at some other entertaining passphrases. Included with comment.
sruta'ulor maftitnab {mine! scarf-fox magic-cakes!(probably that kind)}
Afgani-san Azerbai-chan {there... are no words}
do mlatu {a fellow lojbanist!}
lalxu daplu {and another?}
telephone fonxa {and another! please get in contact with me. please.}
xagfu'a ...
This seems like a really good idea, except that defecting is easy and appealing, Guess people will (as you pointed out) lose their shit, and worst of all, people just seem to get weirded out by the making explicit of things like actually understanding other people, or honestly talking about the full set of preferences - especially socially awkward ones. That said, I'd like to be able to do this with people.
Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that's stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we'll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I'd believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.
That's something a little different - I think that's already talked about here. Maybe under the Hindsight Bias? At any rate, I'm not talking about looking back; I'm talking about looking from within. The march of history is almost always too slow to see, and even with a significant speedup it'd still probably seem "normal". Only right at the end would it be clear that a Singularity is occurring.
Something's brewing in my brain lately, and I don't know what. I know that it centers around:
-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.
-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their fl...
That is actually not true at all. I was actually planning on abandoning this trainwreck of an attempt at dissent. But since you're so nice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_of_Conflict_.281960.29
OK, I think I was misunderstood and also tired and phrased things poorly. Game theory itself is not a bad thing; it is somewhat like a knife, or a nuke. It has no intrinsic morality, but the things it seems to tend to be used for, for several reasons, wind up being things that eject negative externalities like crazy.
Yes, but this seems to be most egregious when you advocate letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.
Nonhuman agents use X -> X does not necessarily and pretty likely does not preserve human values -> your overuse of X will cause you not to preserve human values. Being a jerk in a style of Cthulhu I use to mean being a jerk incidentally. Eyesight is not a means of interacting with people, and maximization is not a bad thing if you maximize for the right things, which game theory does not necessarily do.
On the advice of a new friend, I think that i will be coming to this, but will need some help navigating, since I currently live in Chicago and have been to Ann Arbor exactly once in my life 5 years ago.