Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

And it's like, yeah they're all chaotic disasters who share one braincell between them, but at least they provide an important lesson about sharing.

Namely that at a certain level of scarcity even sharing doesn't work.

 

So I've known for a while that my auditory processing issues make it difficult for me to pay attention to song lyrics. I recently realized, however, that there are some songs where I have no idea what the lyrics are, but I clearly remember the rhyme scheme. I don't even recall what the relevant phonemes being rhymed are! I just remember which syllables should rhyme with which other syllables.
I guess that this makes sense: I have no semantics, but I do have rhythm, and rhymes are just a form of rhythm. I can also usually recall meter pretty well.

 

Frank understands

 

Listening to my dad talk about how scarily good Google's facial recognition software is and trying not to say tyat's why I never take pictures of anything. I mean, that isn't the reason I don't take pictures (the real reason is I don't care enough to bother), but it might get him to stop asking.

 

It turns out that I actually really like the ending to Hit Me Baby One More Time, with the change in the rhyme scheme and how dramatic it gets. Max Martin knew how to do melodramatic pop music really well.

 

I get food-bored pretty easily. I don't know if I still can, but I used to be able to eat quite a bit of food in one go, as long as it wasn't just a lot of the same thing. Which was why I really liked buffets. But like, a really big steak sounds bad to me, not because it's really big, but because steak is boring on its own. If it were like a small steak, and a small hamburger, and a hotdog, and some fish and chips, and a small shepherd's pie, I could probably eat that.

 

If I were good at visual tricks I'd make an unboxing video where the thing I pull out of the box is, after going through a bunch of packing material, the original box. And it just loops.

 

So everything I learn about cryptocurrencies and NFTs makes me realize that I don't actually know how cryptocurrencies and NFTs work in practice. Which is not to say that they work better in practice than I think. No, they're significantly worse. In particular, while the server nodes might be able to establish among themselves leaderless consensus as to the contents of the blockchain, people who actually want to use cryptocurrencies are not.

Because of the massive size of the blockchain, clients can't interact with the blockchain. So they talk to the server nodes. Except access to those server nodes basically all goes through like four companies who offer API access but not direct access. But one might think that, uh, funneling, isn't a problem, because the blockchain is still readable, right? Well, in theory. Except the clients don't even get verifiable messages from those companies, so who knows what the blockchain actually contains.

Similarly, it turns out that NFTs for digital assets just contain the URLs for those assets, but they don't even usually contain hash commitments or anything for the assets. Whoever owns the domain name for that URL can at-will substitute anything they want for the original contents that the URL pointed to. Also the NFT marketplace can just basically destroy the NFT whenever they feel like, because all the client-side apps like MetaMask or Rainbow are just doing API calls without any real local storage.

So there's no real decentralization here. Everyone just blindly trusts OpenSea or Rarible or whatever. Really if people want to be able to trust NFTs, what should happen is a move away from cryptocurrencies and toward actual cryptography. Openly centralize and use authentication, hash commitments, SNARGs to establish trust, not pretend decentralization. The people dealing in cryptocurrencies don't care about trustless consensus and they're not getting it, so the shell-game with distributed ledgers only serves to build hype and annoy the SEC, at the cost of running a distributed blockchain.

Source: Moxie Marlinspike

 

Regardless of what it's actually called, I generally refer to any unit of game currency as "money", pluralized as "moneys". Sometimes this bothers the people I'm playing with.

 

Yeah people like to laugh about George R. R. Martin naming several characters after Muppets, but are they aware that the Silmarillion contains an elf named Elmo?

 

The sudden realization that, due to some worldbuilding decisions, your main OC probably doesn't know how to chew. Like, she knows in theory, but has never done it before.

I'm not even sure anymore if she breathes. Probably? I can imagine that artificial, nanomachine-mediated digestion could be more efficient than our current system, but breathing is pretty streamlined as-is, right?

 

I don't actually know how to do it, but it occurs to me that AO3 could probably host a randomized story. Like, imagine a Hades fanfic where the chapter order isn't fixed and Patroclus shows up only 50% of the time you read it.

 

For someone who is supposedly helping her with the project I sure do respond to a lot of her messages with "lol"

 

But how many coffeeshops in those coffeeshop AUs are really just money laundering operations?

 

He hears a snippet of Japanese lyrics and grins at me "Oh, is this like that Japanese metal band where the singers are like 12-year-old girls?"
In response I ask "You mean Babymetal?" and start blasting Rondo of Nightmare.

 

Re-reading early Bleach. I'd forgotten how hype some of it actually gets. Like, yeah the "I've been holding back my true power" thing is super cliché but somehow the bit where Ichigo reveals that he has a bankai is still really good.
I guess it's because we knew that bankai was a thing? So it's not just "I've only been using 10% of my power", but rather it was a possibility that was already established in-world but where attaining it meant something significant.

I want to compare it to "I am also not left-handed" from Princess Bride. It's a similar "the bad guy has just pulled out the special technique and proceeds to kick the good guy around for a while, but then the good guy reveals that he can also do said special technique." And it's pretty dope without being an ass-pull or a numbers game.

Eventually Kubo runs out of actual ideas and just starts throwing out new characters and new bullshit, but for a while he's set up a decent leveling system and it's just a matter of whether the good guys can reach the top of that system in time. This is why when people achieve bankai toward the end of the series it's still cool, because again it's part of the system we know about.

 

I guess we're still in the stage where we're acclimating ourselves to appreciating the tastes of chemicals that are absolutely toxic to other animals (e.g. caffeine, chocolate, capsaicin, etc.) but perhaps the ones that we're learning these days might be more on the synthetic side rather than things that plants come up with to prevent their seeds from getting eaten. But like, imagine an alternate history in which Europeans scoured the world for hemlock to season their food.

 

On the one hand I know that in the scheme of things it actually shouldn't be surprising that this kind of thing happens on occasion, but I still can't get over the fact that Megalovania was played for the Pope. Did he know what it was from? Should I want to know his opinion on it? How does Toby Fox feel about this?

 

PhDnD

 

Had an idea for a post for the math thread about Temperley-Lieb algebras but then completely forgot it.