Untitled

not a paperclip minimizer

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[loving-n0t-heyting]

imagine if teachers taught elementary schoolers the algorithm of long division but without explaining that the point is to split up the dividend into quotient-many even pieces, its just introduced as this arcane bit of hocus pocus and yr still tested on it but no intuitive interpretation of the machinery is given, at most the teachers will say if pressed "oh, well, technically this is related to the operation of the multiplicative inverse in the field of the reals... dwai tho thats some really advanced stuff, you dont need to understand it in order to do long division (:"

im pretty sure thats what its like teaching hs kids about matrices with zero connection to lin alg

[fipindustries]

the laws of thermodynamics are fucking wild when you think about it it’s like such a trivial thing about movement and heat and yet it has such incredibly far and profound implications for our understanding of chaos, order, eternity and entropy

is like if you screamed into the heavens “why is there evil in the world? why is it easier to destroy than to create?” and a scientist came to you like “actually we figured that out in 1824, see, heat flows from hot to cold which is why the perception of time and causality and the concept of information exists, any other questions?”  

[sigmaleph]

imagine you’re a 19th century engineer trying to figure out how to make steam engines more efficient and you do a bit of math and accidentally discover that the fundamental nature of the universe is that all that is good is temporary.

[theunitofcaring]

lie and hurt people?

Yes, like, when I interview people I have gotten the intrusive thought “I could claim they did badly on the interview even though they did well, and then they wouldn’t get the job” or when I’m buying someone food I have gotten the intrusive thought “I could avoid mentioning this has peanuts and then they’d have an allergic reaction”. I have never done any of those things and obviously never would. Intrusive thoughts aren’t a sign about what you secretly want to do or anything (in fact, I get them more in situations where doing right by someone is more important to me). They’re just a kind of error message that some brains throw. 

[latribzdani]

I tend to think of intrusive thoughts as your mind training to *not* do the thing. Like, if you’re standing near a ledge and having thoughts about jumping, part of your brain is going “jump!”, but a much stronger part of your brain is going “DON’T JUMP” and learning how to inhibit any movements that might lead to jumping, even in the face of an impulse to do it. Every time that happens, you will get better at *not jumping*, including by accident.

This model suggests that the more you care about not doing something, the stronger your intrusive thoughts about it will be; I think that lines up with reality.

Obviously this is wildly speculative and not the whole story, but it might be a productive way to frame such thoughts.

[theopjones]

Gaah. Lost a clipper card (transit pass). Fortunately, I had a spare around and the one that got lost only had ~$7 loaded on it. But annoying. 

What advice do people have for avoiding losing things like that? 

(although, the fact that I have a bit of a cold probably means my focus was pretty broken today)  

[latribzdani]

I keep my Clipper card in my wallet and never take it out. I just unfold my wallet to to tap it.

[just-evo-now]

Could standard (non cryptographic) hash functions be implemented in hardware? Is the gain in speed not worth the chip real estate?

[latribzdani]

CRC32 is a checksum, not a hash function, but x86 has it: http://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/CRC32.html

[theunitofcaring]

You don't believe it, and yet you fantasize about it. Meanwhile you want us to kowtow to a bunch of tech corporation overlords because apparently their rule will be so much better.

I think maybe not everyone has the emotional experience that I’m trying to describe when I say that sometimes I wish the U.S. government would just stop, even though I don’t actually believe that that would be a good thing. 

It’s like -

- every day, the police show up at someone’s door and drag them off to prison for something that should never have been a crime, that is only a crime because politicians were thoughtless and cruel and insulated from the consequences of outlawing it. Every night, they shoo homeless people out of the public spaces where they’re prohibited from sleeping. Every day and night, people are held in prison in conditions that literally qualify as torture, forbidden access to information and basic hygiene supplies and communication with their families, forced to work for basically nothing, 

Every day, buildings blow up killing everybody inside, ten-year-old kids and their six-year-old siblings and their pregnant mother and their disabled father and the uncle who was supporting the whole family driving a truck that we mistook for a terrorist truck. Thousands of Afghan civilians were killed in 2017; we also conduct drone strikes in countries where we aren’t even at war, and we cheat at counting the civilian casualties, asserting that any man or boy wasn’t a civilian, so that we can pretend the numbers are lower than they really are. 

Every day, we deport people, often into situations where they’ll die, often as they literally tell the border agents ‘I won’t live two weeks back there’, often as journalists diligently trail along to confirm that they are entirely right. 

And every day, lives are warped and harmed and ruined in subtler ways - people forbidden from getting medication they need, people discouraged by an incomprehensible web of laws from starting a business that would have made them and their neighbors happy, people staying in an abusive marriage for their immigration papers, people suffering because the state in its blind idiocy ripped up their paths out of suffering and trampled new ones which don’t fucking work.

I hate how Facebook shows me stories I don’t care about instead of people who I do care about, but, uh, I think I am correct to be more upset about the war in Afghanistan.

And it’s okay to be angry. Even if, like me, you’re a dedicated incrementalist who thinks that political change should be slow, careful and evidence-based - even if you are against eliminating the U.S. government on the spot, and wouldn’t do it if you had a magic button - I think it’s important not to write all of that off as acceptable losses just because we don’t have an avenue to change them. It hurts, to live in a world where these things are true. It hurts to live in a world where I enable them, paying in with every paycheck to support the system that does it. It is evil, and it is wrong, and I absolutely do fantasize about the whole fucking system grinding to a halt and letting people live, and I’d worry there was something wrong with me if I didn’t.

The government also does some good things, and even where it’s doing bad things, sometimes an immediate transition would be chaotic and harmful. Predictability is important and people deserve to have reasonable expectations that the world will keep being safe and will not suddenly fall apart for some distant greater good. We should end surveillance and drone strikes and deportations and the drug war overnight, but we should dismantle the military slowly and carefully, and end incarceration slowly and carefully, and overhaul immigration policy carefully and overhaul regulatory policy carefully. And the U.S. government is not uniquely bad - not even close - and most institutions which would arise to replace it if it vanished would probably be much worse and in many ways we’re extraordinarily lucky.

But you know what? The U.S. government is evil and I wish we could abolish it. I do. It is an instrument of enormous harm and tolerating such enormous harms because that’s How The World Is sucks and it hurts and I hate it.

I don’t not want a government. I don’t want Google to run the world, although honestly if you think tech companies are eviller than the war in Iraq then you’re really granting governments a kind of moral authority they don’t deserve. I believe that redistribution of wealth is critically important, and one of the few things which a government should do. I don’t want this government, and I think it is actively good to say so.

[quantumofawesome]

At the risk of losing all of my friends

Cats are amazing bundles of wonderful, and some dogs are cute and most dogs are… only good because of how happy they make other humans. Which, to be fair, is still crazy hecking good.

[latribzdani]

I mostly agree with you but what about BIG DOGS? Big dogs are great. We don’t need chihuahas but big huskies or samoyeds or Bernese mountain dogs -- those are important.

[latribzdani]

Figured out why I was feeling tired/bleh/unproductive today: mild food poisoning from the burrito I had last night.

Dammit, Berkeley Bowl! Everyone loves you, why can’t you be better at food safety?

[latribzdani]

Back in Berkeley!

[quantumofawesome]

Oops I was too busy having feelings to say goodbye to @latribzdani

Hey dude let’s keep in touch if you’re into that

[quantumofawesome]

Actually I am pretty bad at keeping in touch with people, but what if we exchange just enough messages to create an affordance….

[latribzdani]

Awww, I was just thinking "Too bad I didn't get to talk to @quantumofawesome more". Would be nice to keep in touch. I'm also sorta bad at it, but maybe if I start posting more (which I've vaguely intended to do, we'll see) we can reply to each other's posts when it makes sense.

[gasmaskaesthetic]

Finding the right words when attempting to be comforting is hard. Because I want to strongly communicate the intention of not making anything worse in any way, up to and including shutting the fuck up, without being annoying or making them feel bad for making me walk on eggshells.

I want to make people *feel like they can communicate whatever they need without causing offense,* such that they are actually more likely to communicate it if so inclined. I learned a long time ago that it isn’t enough to just *say* that you’re open to hearing things most people find offensive. If they don’t actually *feel* like they can say those things, they won’t, words be damned. So it’s about making it easy and fostering trust over whatever time frame is relevant to the interaction. This is not trivial.

Highly skilled communicators can code- switch depending on who they’re talking to, laying the groundwork that facilitates as much information transfer as possible. They don’t coerce, they just make it safe. I have not met a lot of people who are actually good at this, but I’d like to be one of them.

Basically, there is no one-size-fits-all for comfort that is maximally beneficial for whatever amount of benefit they are looking for. Communication is hard.

[sufficientlylargen]

Javascript in only six characters.

I think we should all take a moment to appreciate JSFuck, Martin Kleppe’s method by which you can write arbitrary javascript code using only the six characters [, ], (, ), !, and +.

How it works:

Basics:

Because we have [], we have the empty array and the ability to index things with other things. We can immediately construct undefined by [][[]].

! turns anything into a boolean. So ![] is false, and !![] is true.

+, used as a unary operator, casts anything to a number. So +[] is 0, and +!![] is 1. Of course, we also have + as a binary operator, so you can get any other number just be chaining - 5 is +!![]+!![]+!![]+!![]+!![], for example.

Adding an empty array to something turns it into a string, because javascript is terrible. So since ![] is false, ![] + [] is the string ‘false’.

This means we can make individual letters:  (![] + [])[+[]] becomes ‘false’[0] becomes ‘f’.

Building an alphabet:

At this point everything becomes about getting more letters. We’ve already built false, true, and undefined, as well as all integers, so we can build any string as long as it only uses characters from ‘0123456789adefilnrstu’.

Characters so far: ‘0123456789adefilnrstu’

Those characters are enough to make ‘find’:  (![]+[])[+[]] + ([][[]]+[])[+!![]+!![]+!![]+!![]+!![]] + ([][[]]+[])[+!![]] + ([][[]]+[])[+!![]+!![]]

Well, [].find is a method of arrays, so [][”find”]+[] is a string that starts with “function find() {” (there’s more to this string, but in some environments like firefox there are newlines and in some there aren’t, so we can’t reliably get the rest).

Characters so far: ’ ()0123456789acdefilnorstu{’

Now we can spell “constructor”, so we do ([]+[])[“constructor”] to get the String type; String[”name”] is the string “String”.

Characters so far: ’ ()0123456789Sacdefgilnorstu{’

The S and g were all we were missing for toString. Number.toString takes a base, so e.g. 17[”toString”](36) returns 17 in base 36, which is “h”. We can do this for every number 10-36 to get all lowercase letters.

Characters so far: ’ ()0123456789Sabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{’

Going Global:

[][”find”][”constructor”] is Function, the function type. Applied to a string, this yields a function whose code is that string. This means that we can execute any javascript as long as we can write it. In particular, we already have enough letters to call Function(”return this”)(). This gives us the global object (called ‘global’ in node, ‘window’ in the browser), which means we can now call any global function if we can spell it. We’re nearly there!

Finishing the set:

Finally, we can now access global[”escape”] and global[”unescape”]. escape(”(”) gives us “%28” and thus the % sign, and now we’re done: we can make any hex number, prefix it with %, and call unescape on it. For example, unescape(”%27″) is a single quote, unescape(”%7e”) is a tilde, and so forth. Every single ascii character is now available to us.

Characters so far: ALL

Putting it together 

So now, given any javascript, you can compile it into an enormous, unreadable mass of ()!+[]s! All you have to do is encode it grossly, wrap it in a Function() call, and call the resulting function!

In practice, there are lots of optimizations - you don’t have to build the full unescape sequence to get ‘N’, for example, because +[![]] is NaN so “N” is the relatively short (+[![]]+[])[+![]].

For reference, alert(0) looks like this:

[][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]][([][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+([][[]]+[])[+!+[]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]+([][[]]+[])[+[]]+([][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]]((![]+[])[+!+[]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(![]+[][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]])[!+[]+!+[]+[+[]]]+[+[]]+(!![]+[][(![]+[])[+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]])[!+[]+!+[]+[+[]]])()

and alert(”Hello, world!”) is 18,616 characters long.

And now you know!

[quantumofawesome]

Whence the ’m’ in “name”?

[latribzdani]

From the Number constructor:

(0["constructor"]+[])[11]

[michaelblume]

A minimalist government which provides only a small handful of essential services like enforcement of property rights, defense of the nation, and redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

[latribzdani]

Plus taxing externalities.

[serinemolecule]

In Japan (and less commonly in China), there’s a concept of a 30-hour day.

Not in the sense that two days would be 60 hours, but more that the days overlap between midnight and 6 AM. So, for instance, it something happened 2 AM on Sunday, you could say “2 o’clock on Sunday”, but you could also say “26 o’clock on Saturday”.

Which MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. When you talk about things happening “last night”, it doesn’t suddenly stop being “last night” the instant the clock strikes midnight because I’m not Cinderella.

In conclusion, I wish America had this so I could throw it in the face of every smug friend who says “DON’T YOU MEAN LATER TODAY????” when I tell them “see you tomorrow” at two minutes past midnight.

[serinemolecule]

Some more sources:

This is most common in TV schedules:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OtakuOClock

Anime aired from around 11 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning, occasionally indicated by the odd-looking “22:00-27:00” notation. […]

The trope name refers to the odd way of noting when the shows start airing; it’s common to see a show aired at 1:00 am listed at “25:00”. This is largely done to align the schedule with that of the previous day; many Japanese TV networks still sign off in the middle of the night, and those who don’t will only switch to “the next day”’s programming at 4 am or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan

Times past midnight can also be counted past the 24 hour mark, usually when the associated activity spans across midnight. For example, bars or clubs may advertise as being open until “26時” (i.e. 2 am). This is partly to avoid any ambiguity (2 am versus 2 pm), partly because the closing time is considered part of the previous business day, and perhaps also due to cultural perceptions that the hours of darkness are counted as part of the previous day, rather than dividing the night between one day and the next. Television stations will also frequently use this notation in their late-night scheduling. This form is rarely used in conversation.

cultural perceptions that the hours of darkness are counted as part of the previous day

idk about you, but I have the same cultural perceptions. Let’s get this popularized in the US!

[just-evo-now]

This is Correct.

[latribzdani]

My dorm (Random) at MIT did this and called it Random Standard Time. People’s ridiculous sleep schedules made it very necessary. (For a time one person had a roughly 28-hour sleep cycle, making him nocturnal during the weekends and diurnal during the day.) We did in fact use it in conversation.

[latribzdani]

I found myself wanting to say “To first order, they are linear”, and then I realized that was... more tautological than I intended.

[latribzdani]

Three days in

Today was my third day of my CS PhD career. A few highlights:

On my first day I managed to get mildly told off by Fei-Fei Li herself for accidentally talking too loud in a hallway while a talk was happening in an adjacent hallway. Oops. (and yes yes there goes my anonymity. Like Scott Alexander, I’m going to try to stay non-googleable here but it’s fine for people to be able to figure out who I am.)

At one point yesterday I opened the door to my office (which I share with three other PhD students) to find a horde of Japanese visitors right outside. I've seen at least two large groups of Chinese visitors touring the AI lab areas, once with a live Chinese-English interpreter. At MIT I was used to having to duck in order to not accidentally photobomb Asian tourist photos, but people never actually specifically visited my lab or anything. (I guess AI really is getting a lot of hype these days...)

On a related note, a lot of my fellow PhD students are from China, which is making me very tempted to try to learn Mandarin.

I thought the free food barrage would end after orientation week, but today I had both lunch and dinner covered. Yum.