Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Coming across yet some more blather about people being too old for fandom, I'm not sure if mentioning that the person who came up with the idea of AO3 was in their mid 30s at the time is a helpful fact or not, given the opinions that exist about AO3.

 

I've developed a weird compunction to put chili powder into everything I drink. The hot chocolate made sense, the fruit smoothies and the green tea a bit less so.

[EDIT] The tea isn't awful.

 

Reading about a category which is actually just a monoid and my brain immediately moving to the "there's only one bed" scenario. "There's only one object"

Yeah, no wonder my brain's predictive text generation for math papers is garbage.

 

How do people who believe that a friendly AGI will solve our ethical and coordination problems by computing a "coherent extrapolated volition" of the people not immediately think of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem?
Which is not to say that I actually want to ask any such people this question, because even just seeing what they say to other people is tiresome.

 

There are a number of animals that aren't naturally social or tactile on their own and yet like getting pet. For mammals you might think "oh, it reminds them of their mothers" or whatever, but then we get to like fish, creatures that don't necessarily ever meet their parents, so it isn't learned. It's just, getting pet seems to be generally enjoyed.

 

Either I used to wear these shorts really loose, or I've lost volume. I would say that I've lost weight, but given the way I seem to operate I'd probably end up increasing in density, both losing volume and gaining weight. I don't think I'm eating less or healthier than I was last year.

 

You can tell they did this deliberately since three of the authors are named Daniel, while the fourth only has Daniel as a middle name.

 

I'm not entirely sure how the scoring works, exactly, because it isn't just the total on the board, but rather something to do with the merging process. But anyway.

 

The gentle tap, tap, tapping of bugs smacking themselves into my window.

 

I've spent basically the entire day trying to figure out how to describe what I did with 2048; I'm not going to call that "beating 2048", since that only requires getting to 2048, and here I've done that essentially 128 times in a row, and I might not have gotten the high score, since I'm not entirely sure how the score is calculated but it isn't just a function of what's on the board at any given moment.
I think I've settled on "100%ing 2048". I've gotten as many tiles with as high values as possible on the board; I think that counts as "doing everything" as far as a game like 2048 is concerned.

 

I really do envy Estonia for somehow managing to do electronic voting without it being a complete shitshow every single time. I mean, it probably helps that they're not a backwater overrun by howling barbarians, but still. It would be nice to live in a place where technical solutions actually worked.

 

Okay, the fact that Camden, NJ of all places managed to have a peaceful protest with the police actually standing with the protesters is fucking mindblowing. Camden! I mean, good for Camden, definitely.
It goes to show that you don't need a rich white neighborhood to have baseline decency from your police force, even if the police chief is white! Apparently all it requires is to sack the entire department, destroy the police union, and put firm control in the hands of non-police officials at the county level.

 

Back when I was young and naive, this is what I thought music theory would be, rather than what it is.

 

Been drinking too much tea when I need to remind myself that cocoa powder isn't "loose-leaf chocolate"

 

Nothing makes me appreciate tendons more than James Bruton realizing that by putting the elbow motors in the shoulders and using belts to transfer the torque to the elbow joints he can significantly reduce the load on the shoulder motors.
I have no idea if that's an actual consideration for animal musculature.

 

A straitjacket with a hood and pockets

 

I was already planning to make a post about how entertaining nostalgebraist's autoresponder tumblr bot is, but now apparently the bot is trying to steal argumate's identity and it's fucking hilarious. Of all the sci-fi tropes to play out, and it's happening to argumate of all people.

 

My favorite professor in undergrad was a math professor who would have us do particular computations as examples and then mention how those computations have physical significance without any real warning.
So like, during the functional analysis class we're learning about bounded operators and the spectral theorem and he has us do some particular computations and then offhandedly mentions "and that's why covalent bonds exist" and then moves on without any further elaboration. Or during differential geometry we do some examples of computing curvature by hand and we get a bunch of 0s and he tells us that that's why the Schwarzchild black hole solution is a vacuum.
And each time it's only one computation out of several example computation, so it's always a little out of the blue.

It was cool.

 

Another addition to the list of things on which I am essentially neutral but will gleefully claim whichever position causes the most argument: pineapple on pizza.

 

So much of the whole music sampling discourse is garbage, not because sampling is right or wrong, but because sampling isn't new, and so any argument that treats any modern artist differently from Mozart is garbage, regardless of what side it comes down on. The only difference is that when Mozart was lifting melodies from Handel, the copyright system didn't exist, and so the argument is really about copyright rather than art, and any attempt to frame it as being about originality or artistry is almost certainly either misinformed or straight-up bullshit and is probably both.