All of insufferablejake's Comments + Replies

There seems to be a general variance in what pulse oximeters display when measuring healthy individuals with readings from 94% - 100%. I also seem to remember reading that they are sensitive to altitude, whether hands are cold etc (n.b typing on phone, can't verify at the mo)

Talking to a doctor friend -- in clinical settings if an oximeter shows a reading < 90%, it's considered serious, but different people respond differently, but closely enough for the purposes of this discussion to fall into two groups. Either you develop a shortness of bre... (read more)

Very cool, fun idea. For the time travelling and debugging purposes, one could conceivably run a POSIX path system on top of an in-memory object store such as RocksDB and get fast, persistent snapshots as well!

Then, unfortunately, you must compartmentalise, wear a mask, whatever that makes shurikens endlessly fascinating for you until you (make money to) get your ship fixed. Then set sail, and cast away the mask.

V'z fbeel V cbfgrq zber naq gura qryrgrq vg, V ernyvmrq gung guvf jnf n choyvp sbehz naq V nz cnenabvq nobhg cevinpl. Cyrnfr rznvy zr ng zl yj unaqyr ng tznvy, V'yy or unccl gb nafjre nal dhrfgvbaf lbh unir.

Vs V nz ubarfg, gura, V zhfg nqzvg gung gur cenpgvpr vf pbzzba va fbhgu Vaqvn, va gur fznyy gbja naq ivyyntrf. Pbzr penpx bs qnja lbh'yy svaq jbzra fjrrcvat naq jngrevat gur ragenaprf gb gur gurve ubzrf :) Ner lbh jevgvat na rffnl nobhg fbhgu Vaqvn? Gur fnaqrq sybbef naq gur juvgrjnfurq jnyyf ner nyfb erzvaqref bs gur fnzr guvat.

For #2 Fcevaxyvat jngre ba gur tebhaq gb xrrc vg sebz envfvat qhfg?

Similarly, and this should be scary to anyone who cares about epistemic rationality, suppose you have various false beliefs and you decide that those beliefs are so important to your identity that people who don't also believe them can't possibly love you the way you are, so you only surround yourself with people who agree with them..

Sure, in such a case, I've optimized for my own 'social harmony'. We all do this to varying degrees anyway. Signalling, sub-cultures and all that blah. Note that the quote simply speaks of a process (selection) to maximiz... (read more)

I think I parsed that quote less along the lines of 'dude, you hardly know any math and so I won't love you' and more along the lines of 'dude, you seem to have the same taste for movies and music and we can have a conversation -- I love (hanging out with) you'.

The former has an objective measure and thus one can speak of definite growth while the latter is subjective.

I suppose it does, in as objective a measure something like 'harmony' is.

I enjoy your posts, and I have been a consumer of your G+ posts and your blog for sometime now, even though I don't much comment and just lurk about. While I would want some sort of syndication of your stuff, I am wondering if an external expectation of having to meet the monthly compilation target or the fact that you know for sure that there is a definite large audience for your posts now, will affect the quality of your posts? I realize that there is likely not any answer possible for this beforehand, but I'd like to know if you've considered this.

Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don't see any around, quest for them.

Bryan Caplan

Most of the comments on this thread are about people who seem to find this useful or think that this will make a difference positively. While I think the idea interesting, and would like to try it out, I am one of those who don't seem to like really bright lighting. In fact, at work, I've had some of the overhead lights removed to make it generally less bright ambiently. I tend to suffer from eyestrain or seem to get a headache, though now that I think about it, I am not sure if this was because the over head lights were reflecting badly off of my computer... (read more)

Makes sense, thank you for the elaboration.

At this point I would like to make the comparison to flow charts and their interpreters (us), but even in this case, when we look at a flowchart (with the purpose of implementing something) we mentally substitute the boxes and flows with the code/libraries/interfaces for them. Then following this thought, if we had a compiler that could do the same when fed a diagram ie. parse it to generate the appropriate code, we'd be getting somewhere, I suppose. But as it stands I see why a diagram might not be enough to formally encapsulate all the data and state needed for execution.

OrphanWilde's assertion was mostly meaningless and given without substantiation/clarification

I agree.

your reply engaged it on object level instead of pointing that out (or silently downvoting), sustaining a flawed mode of discussion.

Can you elaborate what you mean by 'object level'?

Also, I am kind of perplexed here -- you don't approve of my deciding to react to a seemingly vague statement, which was made with the intent of getting OrphanWilde to perhaps clarify himself? I realize that I phrased my reply badly, starting with a negation was counter ... (read more)

Fair enough.

Really? I think, after staring at it for some time, that the comic is making fun of the thinking that maths is a young man's game.

I know, and I've read too, that Hardy was apparently not in the pink when he said this. And in all honesty the comic seems to be making fun of the conception that maths was for the young.

Does a link to a comic have a place in this forum? I don't know the answer to that, perhaps it is not. That said, my comment was more a reaction to other down votes, this just happened to be the straw I was commenting on.

Why was this down voted? The comic is a take on a fairly prevalent belief, heck, Hardy said it!

I wish more people on this forum would explain why they were down voting something, that on the face of it, seems reasonable.

I'm up voting this.

EDIT: When I posted this, I was of the opinion that the comic was just giving a funny take on the maths is a young man's game thing. Now, after looking it several times, I am of the opinion that it was trying to poke fun of this said misconception. And, giving the benefit of doubt to the original poster, I still stand by my upvote.

good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.

Awesome line. Up goes the vote.

In case of a down vote on something that seems reasonable and/or is non-inflammatory, it'd be informative if someone left a note as to why it was being down voted.

I agree with you in that text is a visual representation of 'units' of ideas, if I were to be not very precise about this, that we string together to convey more complex ideas. And I agree with you that in the kind of complex scaffolding of little ideas into big ones ad. infinitum, that happens in computer science, that the kind of 'coding' medium I was suggesting, would be inefficient. But still the idea has a novelty for us humans who are more at home with spatially manipulating objects and stringing them together as opposed to doing all of this in abstract space.

There is this aspect of coding (and I write code for a living), the very act of it, that I do find sensual, (I don't know if others perceive this in the same way or my calling it sensual is just a convenient metaphor for my experience) but as my fingers dance across the keyboard and I see my thoughts take shape on screen, there is a certain poetry there in the form of the combined sounds of my typing, the tactile feedback of the keys themselves and a well executed subroutine staring back at you. Writing that routine was not just a purely mental activity, i... (read more)

3) Can strongly intellectual jobs be reformatted in a more physical way? For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man? This would at least activate significantly more visual cortex than symbols on a screen.

I was going to make just such a point about programming. If one were to look at coding as a means of controlling data flow, or controlling state machines or decision paths, then 'coding' by means of drawing up an active flow chart and manipulating this spatially, much... (read more)

There is a base level scaffolding here called A. A is based on shaky assumptions and essentially a choice to 'believe' in something, and nothing else. People standing on A refuse to look below it, or question why/how it came about, but instead they build these fabulous castles and really intricate structures, the supports and beams for which they easily carve out of A -- since nobody is going to think about how A came to be, or what supports it, we can just have it give us more pillars and beams for the next floor of the castle. Let's build as many floors, as we want.

I do not see this as rigour, or worthy of any merit.

As a continuation of what I have said in my previous comment, I'd like to suggest, that what google and the internet in general seem to be doing is aggressively providing candidates for inclusion into the local set. And so, by repetition and easy access they, possibly, help enlarge the local set. If technology gets better, then we can imagine a day where the local set more or less overlaps with the super set, and there really is no difference between the two; a fetch from local set and a fetch from the super set take about the same time and so qualitativel... (read more)

There is an earlier comment by Kaj Sotala, that I just read, that states, better and more succintly, what I was trying to say with 'our great brains have always been outside'. Let me quote

One central idea is that social communities are cognitive architectures the same way that individual minds are [4]. The argument is as follows. Cognitive processes involve trajectories of information (transmission and transformation), so the patterns of these information trajectories, if stable, reflect some underlying cognitive architecture. Since social organization

But if you were an illiterate random peasant farmer in some historical venue, and you needed to know the growing season of taro or barley or insert-your-favorite-staple-crop-here, Wikipedia would have been superfluous: you would already know it. It would be unlikely that you would find a song lyrics website of any use, because all of the songs you'd care about would be ones you really knew, in the sense of having heard them sung by real people who could clarify the words on request, as opposed to the "I think I heard half of this on the radio at the