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@lolitsnotreal_ Go insane faster and save your sanity for later? (The Ford Prefect strategy.)

@amir although I do wish that these internet weirdos would stop referring to themselves as "autists". They're like 5% away from baseline NTs at best, as an Actually Autistic guy I feel like they're diluting my brand :P

@amir it's almost like, reducing transaction costs through information technology makes it harder for closed institutions to capture value from wide, chaotic, yeasty free markets. I'm not in on GME myself (just don't have that kind of risk appetite) but *loving* watching it.

@amir I tried to Fermi estimate around that here twitter.com/ecree429/status/13
Conclusion I came to was that lockdowns are a terrible idea. Granted, I already thought that before doing the calculation, but still...

@ayegill The beginning of wisdom about entropy is understanding that it's defined only in relation to the set of macrovariables under consideration.

@ayegill The beginning of wisdom about programming is that code is primarily a communication to other* programmers, rather than to the compiler.

* including your future self, who will _not_ remember how that 'clever trick' you just came up with works

New article on my website: jttlov.no-ip.org/writings/mone The Structure of Moneys — why
is not a replacement for .

@iamnoah when you're a really good engineer, subtle functional judgements present themselves to you aesthetically (code that looks ugly to you turns out to harbour bugs). Linus Torvalds calls it "taste".

The problem, of course, comes when you *think* you're that good but aren't. Only reliable way I know for determining if someone has taste is to ask someone else whom you know has it & is familiar with their output.

@WomanCorn Unfortunately AIUI the only fully robust way to handle this is Bayes on a Solomonoff prior, which is so uncomputable it's not even funny.
But I think you can get somewhere by not fixating on a _single_ model; instead, have an ensemble of models, one of which is the maxentropic "Something I have not thought of" model, and weighting them according to their predictive performance over time. (Make sure to *actually* predict and not just retrodict.)

@WomanCorn My understanding of it is that identity isn't transitive. I.e. all my past selves are me, and all my fork's past selves are him, but even though those sets overlap my fork isn't me.
But quantum suicide does still freak me out. Especially when invoked to explain nuclear near-misses like the one Stanislav Petrov averted.

@cuttlefish So, uh, are you trying to communicate, or are your toots purely performative? I want to assume good faith, but you're making that difficult.

@cuttlefish Not heard of him, found nothing on Google. Can you provide a link?

@WomanCorn So it turns out that somewhere between 52-48 and 54-46 is the threshold between "you don't have a mandate, we need a People's Vote" and "everyone on the losing side is now an unperson".

Unity, Tolerance, Democracy, Trump, and 46%.

A thread.

@ppng So you have no interest in knowing what the fuck you're talking about. Good to know.

@fediverse I think it assumes it's symmetric; measures round-trip latency and divides by 2. One of many reasons to fix bufferbloat!

@ppng Okay, so explain to me how Adam Smith's book is a "defense[sic] against" a critique that wasn't written until a century later.
I'm not "quibbling" anything, I'm just explaining that economics does not match your intuitions.
Go and read a textbook on Price Theory. When you understand what I mean by "price = marginal value = marginal cost", then you'll be equipped to critique capitalism. Until then, you're just embarrassing yourself.

@ppng The investor isn't 'appropriating' anything, just receiving the rewards due to him for having produced without consuming (and thus contributed more *to* society than he took *from* it. Money & equity are just tools we use to account the difference between the two).

@ppng OK, simple example for you. A man can chop down a lot more trees with an axe than with his bare hands. Thus, whoever made the axe played a role in the production of those logs. The reason they were able to make an axe is that someone, somewhere, chose to not immediately consume all the wealth they produced, but set some of it aside (capital formation) so it could be used to create 'produced means of production'.

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