Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

You can tell that I've ended up at least somewhat culturally Christian when I tell someone to cite specific "chapter and verse" from a document when they want to refer to bits of it but don't want people reading the entire thing because it's out of date.

 

Perhaps the most impressive part of the nostalgebraist-autoresponder project is that Rob actually manages to get a specific tumblr developer to publicly discuss and then fix the bugs that Rob finds. I can't imagine that kind of tech-support even for sites that do care about how dysfunctional they are!

[EDIT]: Not to imply that Rob is managing to get tumblr's underlying structure to be any better. It's still a mess of garbage spaghetti code. But he's at least getting them to make it have consistent, if awful, behavior.

 

It turns out that months of reading absolutely godawful papers has given me strong opinions about how papers should be written. One would almost think that the papers in this field are bad because the subject matter encourages it or because of an unfortunate mix of conventions inherited from the predecessors of this field, but it could also because there are approximately seven authors total in this field and at least three of them are just bad at writing.

 

Back in like 2007 or so I came up with two potential names for industrial/noise bands: "Shit Prism" and "Ass Fragments". Free to good home, since I don't make industrial music.
The first one also works as an insult.

 

I think my problem with a lot of Americanized Chinese food is that it's super sugary. Not to say that it's bad, but there's definitely a lot of sugar in the sauces used, and I've lost my taste for sugary meat.
I'm not familiar enough with Chinese regional cuisine variations to say if it's due to America or if it's because of the home provinces of the immigrants who originally brought forth these dishes.

 

Disabling the borrow-checker to own the libs.rs

 

Had some pretty strong deja vu today. Actually a little disturbing.
On the other hand, my office does have a habit of rehashing old discussions so maybe that was it.

 

So uh what does it mean to get like the Four of Wands but the card's been mirrored somehow? Not inverted, but actually reflected left-to-right? The text is backwards and everything. Asking for a friend.

 

Matt Levine's breakdowns over meme stocks and NFTs is absolutely hilarious. Like, his analyses of supply-side finance shenanigans are cute and all, but then he has to contend with a single-store deli with a $2,000,000,000 market valuation.

 

That’s a really interesting question, especially with a card about family, stability, and home. What is the mirror of that? I don’t know. Nostalgia for roots that never existed? Establishing yourself in a different but equally good way? Bringing a sense of observer’s perspective into something that usually doesn’t have it?

 

I know that they're talking about applications of category theory, but wouldn't it be cool if the Workshop on Compositional Robotics was about building Devastator?

 

When WebMD diagnoses you with impostor syndrome

 

My parents have apparently discovered the Fancy instant noodles sometime in the past week. Which, I guess, okay, they don't spend much time in the instant food aisle when they go shopping, but still.

 

Jointly writing a paper with too many other people; we all keep trying to edit one another's sections and we're not using proper version control so we have to carefully negotiate who gets to touch what when. Also there's a broad spectrum of pedantry levels and some of the authors aren't really in close contact with the rest of us.
It's been a bit of a mess.

 

It's not so much that they're trapped by the summoning circle, rather it's because they're like cats: if there's a circle on the ground, they're going to sit in it. If they fits, they sits.

 

Every once in a while I think "I should read the Elephant", and then I remember that I don't actually care enough about mathematical logic to get through it.

 

Is this why fairy circles are dangerous? Don't step in them, you might accidentally shove a demon out, and they'll get mad b/c you took over their spot?

 

A bakery/furniture shop named Dulce et Decor

 

First and last against the wall when the involution comes.

 

The drama and agony of (fictional) good people doing bad things for good reasons is, to me, bland. Maybe because it's overdone, in the sense of occurs too much and also in the sense of done poorly. "Morally grey" ends up being "morally beige" too often.
More interesting, in my opinion, is people doing good things for bad reasons. Especially in those cases where the bad reasons continue to compel them to do good things, rather than being a short term or accidental phenomenon. And I don't mean publicity stunts or ostentatious charity or the like, I mean actual, functional, positive-net-gain-for-others type good, but done out of selfish motives. Extremely long-term ambition, enlightened self-interest, greed on scales that requires reducing suffering. Building housing for the poor because you know that they'll eagerly slaughter the nobility otherwise and you have kingly ambitions.
There's a tension there, when the audience knows that the reasons are bad, and is thus forced to wonder when the switch will flip and the calculus changes from doing good being to the character's benefit to doing bad being to the character's benefit; when the strategy changes from cooperate to defect. And even if the switch never happens, and is clearly far enough away that it won't ever happen, the tension is still there: we can easily believe that people can do bad things for good reasons, out of ignorance or desperation or being forced by circumstance, and sometimes we can forgive them, but good things done for bad reasons are almost always considered bad things.