xamuel

Joined 14 years ago

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Member since

Mar 30

samuelallenalexander gmaildotcom

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Comment · 5 days ago

>can run on anything now: (link to turbo fieldfare)

Except the build process there requires a specific recent version of swift. Hardly a good definition of "anything"

Comment · 18 days ago

>alimony

Why on earth should you be on the hook for alimony given your circumstances and situation? That makes zero sense.

Comment · 2 months ago

I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said.

I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.

The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf

Comment · 2 months ago

I don't know if it's OSX itself or one of the common GUI engines implementations on OSX, but I notice a lot of apps (including Firefox when you try to save a file which would overwrite another file) will have popup modals with multiple buttons and there's no way to click the non-default button with just keyboard.

For example, in Firefox, trying to save a file when a file by that name already exists, you get a "Cancel" or "Replace" prompt and you can "Cancel" by pressing return, but if you want to "Replace", you apparently HAVE to use mouse or trackpad!?!

Comment · 3 months ago

The Beatles absolutely still exist! They published a new single in 2023 ("Now and Then") and they surgically injected slices from archive footage into new footage for the music video to make it look like young Lennon and Harrison perform alongside elder McCartney and Ringo.

Comment · 3 months ago

And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.

Comment · 5 months ago

The drug is called AD109, but the title seems misleading as the drug is apparently still under trial, though it has shown good results there so far

Comment · 5 months ago

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" to be the moment when the already-trained weights are sent to the GPU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)

Comment · 5 months ago

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).

Comment · 5 months ago

Before the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus, enormous ingenuity and whole careers were spent doing calculations which the fundamental theorem trivialized. To be clear, I'm not just saying that the people involved were doing lots of mechanical arithmetic (though they did that, too). I'm saying they did creative, inspired, nontrivial mathematics to calculate certain things, all of which was then trivialized and made obsolete by the fundamental theorem of calculus.