mrmyers

While his puzzle books obviously deserve a lot of praise, Smullyan's textbooks and papers definitely shouldn't be overlooked. There's a lot of wonderful gems to be found there.

Diagonalization and Self-Reference is the single book I would recommend the most to the HN crowd. There are a few sections on quotation and Quines that I've found endlessly useful, his 'Elementary Formal Systems' is my favorite presentation of computability, and there's a lot of really deep stuff in there about the interaction between incompleteness, uncomputability, and fixed-points.

Also, Logical Labyrinths is a pretty great textbook on formal logic. The first half is in the form of one of his puzzle books, introducing notions and building intuitions, while the second half builds off of them to provide a more formal perspective, while incidentally giving a kind of eye opening look at how he comes up with his puzzles and how they map to certain deeper properties of logic.

I don't think copying is bad. Copying is what's beautiful about Capitalism, it reduces everything to competition around the margins in cut-throat markets, with tons of choice.

Personally, I feel like if we want to foster research and innovation, subsidizing them directly is easier than creating eminently abusable rights and monopolies.

Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills.

I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig.

Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.

As long as we're discussing video games...

It has been my private head canon for a number of years that the Gerudo race in the Legend of Zelda are the result of an attempted gene drive to exterminate Hylians. The fact that their offspring are (almost) exclusively female suggests it, and attaching the modification to a (literal) fitness increase would be a reasonable way to try to help it achieve fixation sooner.

Well, looks like I'm going to have the Gerudo Desert theme stuck in my head for the rest of the night.

Eh, I think generally if you want to set up linux for a non-technical person, regardless you're going to need to personally spend a couple hours configuring and setting everything up for them initially, so the difference of editing sources.list and adding "main contrib non-free" to a couple lines is pretty minimal.

I think your wording was a bit too hostile, but I basically agree. If you yourself are comfortable with Debian, you can just install stable and ignore it for years in a way you just can't with Mint or Ubuntu. Every time I've tried it I've always just ended up switching them after the n-th time of finding out the automatic updates broke at some random point a year or so ago and now there are weird problems with the sources and things not parsing correctly when I try to manually update.

Debian stable with xfce is a good enough XP-ish interface that no one really gets confused by it, and is stable enough that you can just forget about it for like forever and everything is still fine.

Talk your grandmother through anything GUI related over the phone and compare. Spend half an hour trying to help her figure out which button she should press only to find out at step 3 she opened facebook instead of the start menu, and that she actually has been pressing buttons randomly for 15 minutes while producing assorted nonspecific vocalizations of agreement while doing literally none of the things you've asked.

Or even get the legendary confusion of them never having turned the machine on in the first place.

Generally, after years of experience doing exactly this, I've found it is a lot easier to dictate a literal sequence of characters over the phone than coordinate a complex visual action with only confused verbal feedback.

Of course, with terminal stuff, you have even further options in, say, sending an email with an attached bash file for them to download and click, or if this continues, set up a script for them (and ad an icon for it in their start menu) that ssh's them into a handy aws or digital ocean instance so you can then ssh into their machine from the comfort of your own home and do it yourself.

This has been my experience as well.

So, background: I've maintained computers for various people close to me for maybe 6-7 years or so. A couple computers for my mom (laptop and desktop, with both replaced once or twice), two laptops for some younger cousins going through middle/highschool, a desktop for an aunt, and 2 of my girlfriend's laptops over the same period.

At first, I was very pessimistic about how well it would turn out. For my cousins, the thing that drove me to it was observing how overrun their computers were with viruses, adware, and spyware from all the .exe files they randomly downloaded which claimed to be games, to the point where their computers were more or less unusable (their fans would be blowing full speed and the whole thing overheating from the moment they started, it was kind of surreal). My mom had similar issues, though not quite as bad, mostly from email stuff. Over time, I grew a bit more confident in being able to manage this sort of thing, and now it's my default for this sort of situation.

So, some of the benefits I've noticed:

1. It's a lot easier to dictate terminal commands over the phone or through email than to walk someone through gui operations. If the person struggles enough with computer stuff that they can't even manage with the help of 'user friendly' interfaces, optimizing for the ease with which you can trouble-shoot and fix things over the phone is a lot more practical than chasing after the lost cause of finding a friendly enough interface for them to manage on their own. You can write an important terminal command on a post-it-note next to their compute. You can attach a shell script to an email. Or, with a little bit of setup, you can just ssh into their machine remotely whenever they're having troubles to fix it from the comfort of your own home.

2. It's very easy to set up a minimal, XP-ish interface where all of their needed programs are just right there in the start menu, and such that it's very hard for them to mess up their system such that that base level of functionality is impared.

3. Runs well on fairly limited hardware.

Some general advice if you're considering doing the same:

1. Keep a text-file with all the stuff you installed/changed on the persons computer so you can reproduce it easily in the future.

2. This is more general advice, but have separate / and /home partitions, so you don't need to move their data back and forth if something happens to the OS.

3. Look up issues with their machine and linux ahead of time before trying. It's not always a simple "you can't", sometimes you'll find out there's some firmware you need to install for their wifi to work properly etc.

4. Figure out how much autonomy they should have over their machine. If you're sort of hoping for them to be able to choose and download software on their own, and be able to try to figure out menus to configure stuff, Ubuntu or Linux Mint might be a good choice. Otherwise, surprisingly, Debian might actually be easier for both of you. I've generally found Debian stable just has fewer surprises once it's set up, and you can for the most part just ignore it for years in a way that always seems to go badly when I try it with Ubuntu or Mint, thus lowering the burden on you in maintaining it quite a bit (versus figuring out wtf happened with some random Ubuntu update, or troubleshoot for the umpteenth time how Mint screwed up apt). Decide whether they should actually have sudo privileges or not.

5. Only do it if you're prepared to be their first contact when something happens, and conversely, make absolutely sure they know to contact you first whenever there's a problem. There's nothing more frustrating than a neighbor who thinks they're tech-savy poking in, only to 'fix' things by reinstalling windows, or convincing them they must have a 'virus' because they don't understand what they're looking at.

6. MAKE SURE THE DEFAULT SAVE FORMAT FOR LIBREOFFICE IS doc NOT odf!

7. It'll feel kind of icky, but make sure you have their root password written down on a piece of paper somewhere safe. They will never remember it, and if you give them a piece of paper with it on it and tell them "absolutely do not lose this", they will lose it. Also, more general, but pwqgen is a pretty great program for generating random passwords that are fairly easy to remember.

8. Configure it to work with any home printers they need, and just set their expectations that they will not be able to figure out how to make other people's printers work with their computer. Configuring printers is a discount hell run by a counterfeit Satan.

9. Make sure they have adblock on their browser.

The Frege/Russell definition of numbers is pretty cool from that sort of perspective. The general style of their definitions is to temporarily sidestep the question of what X type of number is, and first ask to what sort of thing it applies to, and what is the relation of having the "same number" among such things. Then that sort of "number" is just defined as the equivalence classes of whatever the identified "same number" relation is.

There are two different definitions of the Naturals provided, that of finite Cardinal and Ordinal numbers. The first applies to sets, grouping them by "same cardinality" or same size. Thus, the cardinal number n is identified with the set of all sets with cardinality n. The second applies to well-ordered binary relations, and groups them by what we would call order-isomorphism. This might sound complicated, but the end result is that the ordinal number n becomes the set of all well-orders of length n (you can soft of think of this as the set of sequences of length n, at least for the finite case). Amusingly, both of these notions are too general to correspond to just the natural numbers, since they don't discriminate between finite and infinite numbers. Thus, the 'natural number' portion of each is actually defined as the smallest initial subset for which mathematical induction is valid.

Anyhow, the Principia Mathematica is pretty fun if you're into that sort of thing. It builds up a lot of neat and weird representation of all sorts of different numbers, up from the naturals, integers, ratios, and reals. It even provides its own weird definition of vectors, and gives a kind of analysis of "signed magnitudes" (like weight, height, temperature etc) and how their definition of real numbers as pure mathematical objects relate to them, providing a kind of abstract interpretation of what we mean when we measure something in the real world.

Eh, I do still wish super/subscript characters in unicode were a bit more thorough. Several times a day I randomly remember the fact that every lowercase letter in the English alphabet except q has a unicode superscript character, and every single time it ruins my day.

Emacs already has you covered. Good old C-x RET C-\ TeX will switch your input method to TeX, converting \alpha etc to unicode alpha, etc for most math symbols. Additionally, ^[char] or _[char] will become superscript/subscript unicode chars.

Once you've done that once in the session, you can just hit C-\ to toggle it on and off (C-x RET C-\ [input method] actually lets you select from a wide variety of input methods, and C-\ toggles on and off the most recently selected input method).

tl;dr: "One day the author got stuck in traffic and developed an intense burning hatred for the state of Delaware. Here before you is a literary record of his subsequent descent into madness and paranoia."

Also from Delaware here. I'm a big fan of this article for its prose alone. This is one of the most entertaining things I've read in quite some time.

> Indeed, Delaware’s image as small and inoffensive is not merely a misconception but a purposeful guise. It presents itself as a plucky underdog peopled by a benevolent, public spirited, entrepreneurial citizenry. In truth, it is a rapacious parasite state with a long history of disloyalty and avarice.

I wish the Delaware History Museum could sell that on a mug.

#emacs would be my recommendation. It's a pretty great channel for random discussion/chatter, and every now and then people even discuss emacs.