A Point in Tumblspace

aspired rationalist, incentive landscaper, ingroup member

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

Hypothesis: laws are judged according to their spirit, but applied according to their letter.

[paradigm-adrift]

It would be nice to write down “Tell me whenever policy X changes,” or “Tell me when covid rates surpass X,” or “Tell me what countries the US is bombing and why every 6 months,” or “Tell me when Chelsea Manning is next incarcerated or next released,” and then get automatic updates when needed so I don’t have to obsess over scary data or do tedious web searches on a regular basis to keep myself in the loop.

[paradigm-adrift]

Maybe there could be something like a news API that you can hit every now and then, similar to how weather report desktop widgets work.

I could build and maintain such a thing for a few news questions myself, but presumably no one would actually use it.

[paradigm-adrift]

Okay actually the WikiData API could totally do a lot of this stuff. The Chelsea Manning page has a “place of detention” field and while the USA page doesn’t seem to have a “war” field, you could probably just search through “participant in” and grab anything with the word “war” or “bombing” in it. Probably the thing WikiData would be best at is telling you when particular people die.

It would be pretty limited, but I could totally make a program that periodically checks in on some of this stuff.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

I bet you can get like 90% of the benefit of the program by finding the information source you would write the program to scrape and then setting yourself a periodic reminder to check it quarterly.

Yes, it’s a little tedious, but I bet the total time expended checking is competitive with the time needed to write a program.

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

...what a difference five years makes!

[alexanderwales]

I wonder how esteemed someone would have to be before anyone started seriously considering the supernatural. Obviously there are athletes who move from one sport to another, people who get good at things in a hurry, who feel like they have a magic touch. There are multi-hyphenates and EGOT winners and whatever, translating talent in one sphere to talent in another. And there are people who are, within their own sphere, the Greatest of All Time, so dominating at some particular moment that they're nearly impossible to touch, or on such a run that everyone has to pay attention.

But how good would someone need to be at multiple things, or at one thing, for people to start questioning whether something was going on? How much could you get away with if you had superpowers or a path to victory or something?

Like, let's say that someone gets three consecutive hole-in-ones on the PGA Tour or something, at some point people would have to start saying "hey, there's just no way that you could have done that legitimately, even if every inch of it was televised". Or someone runs a touchdown and someone points out that the speed he was going, while carrying a football, in full gear, was enough to set a world record time in the 100 meter dash across forty yards.

The question is very relevant to science fiction and fantasy, but I don't think I can really model how the world would react to something that beggars belief while still being technically in the realm of the possible.

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

chatting with Claude, just had one of those "aaaaa, world so strange, I'm speaking to some more-alien-than-aliens intellect summoned from Mathematics into a lump of precisely-alchemically-contaminated silicon" moments

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

Graphs and topology

I've been diving down a [graph theory + topology] rabbit hole lately; here's some of the fruits of my labor.

("Rabbit hole? Fruit? Mix metaphors much?" Not at all, this is a peanut.)

As you likely know, K_n is the "complete graph" with n nodes, i.e. an edge between every pair of nodes. K_1 is a dot, K_2 is a line segment, K_3 a triangle; you can get K_4 by putting a dot in the middle of a triangle and adding spokes.

K_5 is famously one of the simplest graphs you can't draw without two edges crossing. ...on a plane, that is! But if you're drawing on a donut, you're in luck:

The obvious next question is, can we draw K_6 on a donut? Yes! K_7? Yes! K_n? ...turns out no, 7 is as high as you can go before you need to get more topologically interesting.

...and of course, given that, it makes perfect sense...

smbelcas' K_7 on a torus

This exhibits a cellular embedding of the complete graph on 7 vertices on a torus. K_7 is the largest complete graph that embeds on the tor

...that people who spend a lot of time thinking about K_7 tend to be into knitting.

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

a "revealed preference" is whatever ends up happening to you

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

I just reread The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life; it still "slaps," as I understand the Youth to say.

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

The True Megagon and The Thai Wizard

Sometimes I’ll get a great comment on one of my videos - a comment that really gets what I’m talking about and raises interesting points - and I’ll think “Oh awesome, a new cool person, I should try to bring them in and introduce them to people and so on”, and then I find it’s the alt account of someone I’ve known for years.

This is often the way when I find something great that’s relevant to my specific interests. When I go to see who’s responsible, I’m slightly disappointed to find that it was done by someone I already know.

The Megagon

A Megagon is a polygon with a million sides. They're sometimes used as an example in philosophical discussions, because it's basically a circle for any practical purpose, but it's importantly, mathematically, very much not a circle. It's an example of a well defined concept that nonetheless can't be visualised.

Wikipedia has a nice page about the megagon, from which you can learn, amongst other things, that if you made a megagon the size of the Earth, the edges would be about 40 metres long, and it would be very hard to notice the 0.00036 degree angle between adjacent sides.

The Treachery of Images

But, thanks to Chana Messinger (inventor of the term "Steel-man"), and Rob Bensinger, I came to learn a very disturbing fact about that wikipedia page.

The image used to represent the megagon, a shape whose main claim to noteworthiness is that it’s not just a circle, is just a fucking circle!

I was outraged. Certainly, a megagon will necessarily render on the screen as a circle, but Wikipedia images can be vector files. As an SVG, it can be a real megagon behind the scenes. It’s totally unacceptable to have the SVG internally represent the data as a simple circle.

I resolved that I would fix this. Probably there was some reason why the Wikipedians had taken this cowardly cop-out - perhaps normal vector editing software can’t do it - but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

First, I checked that I couldn’t just do it the obvious easy way and make the shape with Inkscape.

It couldn’t do more than 1024 sides. That’s fine, SVG is a simple enough XML-based format, you can write Python code to generate the correct file directly. That’s quite easy to do, and I did it quite easily.

The problem is, the resulting file was huge (for an SVG), at 21MB.

Visualising it was a little tricky.

Inkscape was happy to open the file, but I suspect it was taking some shortcuts.

The GIMP can also open SVGs, but did not prove strong enough to contain the power of The True Megagon.

Firefox could display it correctly, but only very very slowly, and with much whirring of fans.

When I tried to upload the file to Wikipedia to be the image for the Megagon page, they threw me in Noob Jail. I don’t blame them for this; I expect the overwhelming majority of the time that a brand new user account tries to upload a weirdly large file, it’s correct to not let them do that.

I later learned that Wikipedia’s SVG renderer won’t even try to render any file bigger than 8MB.

I couldn’t think of any way to get the file down below that limit. I could zip it of course, but that wouldn’t help, as the renderer needs to operate on the uncompressed file. I could make the individual coordinate numbers shorter, by rounding them to fewer decimal places, but that wouldn’t work either: the vertices of the megagon are so close together that you really need all of the decimal places available. Round off too many, and adjacent vertices start to fall on exactly the same point, which makes it not a real megagon at all.

And even if I could get the file small enough somehow, Wikipedia’s renderer would almost certainly fail anyway, like Inkscape or The GIMP.

Hope was lost. My goal, my dream of bringing The True Megagon to The People, was truly beyond my reach. I was defeated.

At dawn, look to the East

More than a year later, I was revisiting the site of my defeat, as I often did, idly picking at an old wound that might eventually heal one day if I could just stop opening it up again.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the page had been updated. A new file had replaced the acursed circle, and this one claimed the Mantle of the Rightful King, the True Megagon, foretold in legend!

Furthermore, imagine my astonishment at seeing the file size! Less than 8 megabytes, yes, less than 8 kilobytes! A miniscule 4KB file!

This was a work of deeper wizardry than any I knew of.

And on the file listing, these words appear:

Source: https://neizod.dev/locales/2021-05-27-megagon-and-sum-of-product-upto-index.html

I followed the link of course, and found this:

After asking Google to decipher this, I started to comprehend what had happened.

Our hero, who goes by the name Neizod, has since uploaded an English translation, so I will commend you to his blog rather than duplicating his explanation here. I assure you, it is very clever.

I'm delighted to have my normal narrative violated. Behold a new cool person!

[sandmandaddy69]

[rederiswrites]

There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

[alexanderwales]

You mentioned coppicing:

The coppice and pollard systems are one of my favorite pre-modern things, it's just so visually unique and sensible, but most people haven't heard about it.

When you coppice, you cut the tree close to the ground, so only the trunk is left, then the tree puts out fairly straight shoots that are great for firewood. They would typically have these trees harvested on rotation so new trees would be ready every year.

This is a coppiced tree:

When you pollard, you cut the tree to the trunk, but higher, and let the branches grow for longer. They'll be be nice and straight (depending on species) with fewer knots, and suitable to various crafts without much need to work the wood. Sadly seems to be etymologically unrelated to "pole", though the branches from these trees were used to make poles. Part of why you do this instead of coppicing is that the shoots are out of reach of animals.

This is a pollarded tree:

It's very likely that you'd see something like this as a sign of civilization as you came toward a town or village, depending on the species of tree that they have available, though note that this is something you do when you have a timeline of many years, rather than something you set up for the year after.

[alexanderwales]

"Yeah, never worn. No, nothing happened to the baby. Well so what if it sounds ominous? We bought two pairs of shoes for the baby and got another two from the baby shower, and honestly, there's not much of a reason for a baby to be wearing shoes. Well I mean she's either in the stroller, in the bassinet, or being carried by someone, she's not being put down on the floor. I'm saying that nothing happened to the baby. The baby is fine, she's just a toddler now, the shoes wouldn't fit her. I don't think you can do that, just ask people if their baby died. No, it wasn't a miscarriage. Look, are you interested in buying the shoes or not? I'm sorry that 'never worn' filled you with a sense of melancholy, but that's really not anything to do with me."

[alexanderwales]

Cookie Review: Selena Gomez Oreos

There is something about the way in which the words SELENA GOMEZ are emblazoned on this package, larger and more important than OREO.

It's a little bit of a joke to say that these cookies have the flavor of Selena Gomez, but I do think that's how they're positioned, as otherwise, what is it? Selena Gomez is known as an actress and singer. You don't buy these cookies because you think that she makes great cookies which is then somehow distilled by the food scientists at Oreo, or that she has good taste as a culinary expert, no, the important thing is that they are a totem of the cultural artifact of Selena Gomez, a way to have a piece of her in cookie form. There is something of the Eucharist in it, a mystical communion with a transcendent figure.

There is, in small print, a concession to the idea that these have a specific taste that can be divorced from Selena Gomez herself. They're cinnamon and chocolate. But not just cinnamon and chocolate: Selena's cinnamon and chocolate.

Somewhere, there is a real Selena Gomez, but we are now so many steps removed from her that her name is a simple signifier, pointing not to the real physical woman, but to the concept of the woman. In the same way, the flavor of the cookies is one of the least important things about them, positioned in small print at the bottom of the labeling. The text sits there embarrassed, ashamed to admit that it is not simply the flavor of the abstract concept of Selena Gomez.

I read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and kind of hated it, mostly because it said with many words what could have been said with few. But one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that we have entered an era of hyperreality, one in which traditional distinctions between reality and representation have collapsed entirely, a world where we have symbols which refer only to themselves. The symbol of Selena Gomez still does point to a person and her body of work, but when looking at this package of cookies we can see how the symbol spills out beyond the bounds of reality. We are left to grapple with the fact that some things are implied to have Selena Gomez nature. This is the promise of the cookies.

And this raises the question: does the real, actual, living person Selena Gomez possess Selena Gomez nature? A part, certainly: this is the wellspring of the symbol, as managed and curated as she's been since her early days as a child actor. But we must expect that there are parts of Selena Gomez that don't have Selena Gomez nature, and in some sense we could call this authenticity, but in another sense, inauthenticity.

And even those elements of Selena Gomez that are known and presented to the public in this carefully curated way might not have Selena Gomez nature. The modern memetic cluster that defines Selena Gomez, the Selena Gomez referred to on the package of Oreos, has little to do with her childhood performances, and in some sense they are alien to the symbol now.

The most striking part of this packaging, for me, is that Selena Gomez appears to us only in letters, only in a monogram on the face of a cookie, a pair of headphones with Selena Gomez nature, a specifically chosen metallic red color that must also have Selena Gomez nature. But there's no image of Selena herself, the flesh and blood person, all that is merely implied, but also unimportant. You are meant to recognize the name, or possibly the aura.

They taste about how you'd expect a chocolate-cinnamon Oreo to taste.

[cryptotheism]

They should add a second child and see if omelas gets more awesome

[bayesic-bitch]

Starting my speech at the Omelas city counsel with a child acknowledgement statement

[einaudis]

Question: What is the greatest magic of all? Answer: Friendship, right? [B]: The greatest magic of all is not friendship, it's chronomancy, the ability to control and warp time. If friendship were the greatest magic, look, it's a pet peeve of mine (...)

DUNGEON MASTER BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN ANSWERS DnD QUESTIONS (TECH SUPPORT | WIRED)

[alexanderwales]

See, what you have to do is build the world from the very start so that friendship magic and love magic are a part of it, and everyone is highly adapted to it, and the social structures are built around it.

"Anyone who died wasn't loved enough" is a fantastic premise for a world. Having friends and family (and multiple redundant friends and family) is suddenly vitally important, especially if it's protecting you from death by old age and the sudden stopping of love can kill you.

And there's an edge to it, isn't there, if love is what keeps you alive? If you need to keep cultivating love even if you're not particularly feeling love yourself, if you have to "force" relationships even when you're kind of fed up with other people? There's a strong incentive to lie for love, to manipulate for love, to get love from other people with the minimum amount of work.

But for love and friendship magic to work, it has to be authentic, you can't have someone fake love you, otherwise the spell just fails. And that's horrifying, right? Worrying that you don't actually love someone enough to save them, watching them die and knowing that it was only because you didn't have the compassion and empathy within you to overcome some mild annoyance with their behavior?

I'm picturing people dependent on love and also constrained by it, and maybe the people at the top really do thrive on managing their public image and cultivating hundreds of close friendships to make sure that nothing can slip through the cracks and murder them. Love-liches motivated by fear of death who have to fight their natural urge to treat every person around them as a resource in their barrier against harm, because people don't love being used by that. A terrible world where everyone counts their friends, where you're judged on how many friends you are, where friend count is a metric that people use to hire you.

It could work! A world where friendship is magic, and the implications of this are taken to their logical extremes, where the protagonist isn't special because his mother loved him and thereby saved his life, this is just a totally routine thing that happens all the time!

[max1461]

I can't even complain about culture war shit on here because all the people who would agree with me would be agreeing naively rather than looping around from the other side of the horseshoe and agreeing cultivatedly which is what I'm doing. You can't even. You have to loop around the horseshoe exactly as many times as me, or your a fool. I judge people's politics by winding number

[argumate]

Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman’s sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be.

Devereaux absolutely murdering me in this paragraph.