To serve. And perhaps protect.

Candle flame desperately burning against the darkness; Shards of glass that can sometimes hurt more by showing their surroundings than by cutting skin; Gradually forcing root access into my own cognition; would-be Roman torchwick apologist; author of the LiDD-verse and Broken Blades; CSO of Liminal; Cis Male

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I just discovered that Steam will inform you what proportion of players have completed any given achievement.  I have apparently done three of the hardest, each of which has been completed by fewer than 3% of players: Win with <= 5 cards in deck, win with only common cards, and win with only 1 relic.

On the other hand, 19.8 percent of players have played 25 cards in a turn, which I haven’t gotten done.*  And 11.5% have beaten a boss on the first turn!?  I’ve never managed less than 3 or 4.

*My eventual plan to do this is not a clever combo, but Necronomicurse + the candle, which would allow playing as many cards per turn as you have block+HP.

[sdhs-rationalist]

i see you’ve never been privy to the wonders of corruption dead branch (that’s how I got both FTK and 25 cards in a turn, body slam + charon’s ashes block ironclad is a hell of a drug) shockingly, this run did not do well against the time eater

[sdhs-rationalist]

I would like to present Self-Care, by Parks and Rec

‘treat yoself b4 u yeet yoself’

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

On the topic of pi, I’ve always wondered, because it was frequently described as a number where no digit(s) repeated themselves. This was a while ago, like in my childhood, so I don’t know exactly how to phrase it to make it clear, but it seems like they were saying it wouldn’t repeat itself at some level. However, presumably it wouldn’t be individual digits, because it couldn’t go past ten decimal places. Sorry that this is so unclear, but I was wondering if you could work out what they meant?

That’s a weird way to describe or classify pi, and I don’t blame you for being confused. What I think they were getting at is that Pi is irrational. It is not the ratio of two integers. It happens to be that ratios of integers (where the denominator isn’t 0), aka rational numbers, have either “terminating” or periodic decimal representations.

To see what I mean about “terminating” decimal representation, try computing ¼. It’s 0.250000000… so it has some various digits first and then just zeroes forever afterwards. We call it terminating because we can represent this as 0.25 and stop.

Periodic decimal representations have a string of digits that repeat. Take for example 3/7, which is

0.428571 428571 428571 428571 428571…

See that text that says “(period 6)”? That means that there is a sequence of 6 digits that repeat over and over again. Period refers to the size of the repeating sequence, and it can be any positive integer. In this case, we have six digits. If you were to start counting up by digit from the 4 just after the decimal place (starting with a 0, then adding one for each digit) you would see that the 0th, 6th, 12th, 18th, (6k+0) and so on digits are all 4, the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th (6k+1) digits are all 2, and so on.

But pi is not the only number like this. In fact, “most” real numbers are irrational. And by that, I mean that you can create a way to count all the rational numbers one by one, but you cannot count the irrational numbers because there are so many that if you start to count them, you have to skip some. Irrational numbers are so plentiful they kind of overpower the rational numbers. That’s set theory stuff, if you’re interested.

Pi is a ratio though, just not of integers. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter.

(To clarify something here, I’ve talked about pi, normality, and common misconceptions about numbers today (hence “on the topic of pi”) on a few occasions so I assumed Panic saw those and understood my explanations.)

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Ah fuck let’s go there again.

Many people think that Pi’s irrationality means it contains every possible digit substring known to man. Irrationality does not imply this. We have a few counterexamples of this.

[intimate-mirror]

Here’s a counterexample I just came up with:

The decimal number which encodes whether or not the nth Turing machine halts using 8 and 7 to denote halting and running forever respectively in the nth digit position is both irrational and clearly does not contain every possible digit substring. (3 doesn’t show up even once!)

It’s irrational, because if it were rational, then to compute whether a given Turing machine halts, you’d only have to perform a bounded number of steps of long division of two constants.

I’m not sure how much complicated math stuff you’d have to do to prove that this is a number, but I think that should be clear at least on an intuitive level. @the-real-numbers

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

I would have no idea. @sdhs-rationalist ?

(but also I mean avoiding number theory with turing machines is out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.)

There’s also the other transcendental number I talked about earlier:

\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} 10^{-(k!)}

It’s 0.1100010000…

[sdhs-rationalist]

Yup, that’s right–and actually a pretty clever proof

[sdhs-rationalist]

Similarly, I think the decimal point followed by every BB number should work too

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

On the topic of pi, I’ve always wondered, because it was frequently described as a number where no digit(s) repeated themselves. This was a while ago, like in my childhood, so I don’t know exactly how to phrase it to make it clear, but it seems like they were saying it wouldn’t repeat itself at some level. However, presumably it wouldn’t be individual digits, because it couldn’t go past ten decimal places. Sorry that this is so unclear, but I was wondering if you could work out what they meant?

That’s a weird way to describe or classify pi, and I don’t blame you for being confused. What I think they were getting at is that Pi is irrational. It is not the ratio of two integers. It happens to be that ratios of integers (where the denominator isn’t 0), aka rational numbers, have either “terminating” or periodic decimal representations.

To see what I mean about “terminating” decimal representation, try computing ¼. It’s 0.250000000… so it has some various digits first and then just zeroes forever afterwards. We call it terminating because we can represent this as 0.25 and stop.

Periodic decimal representations have a string of digits that repeat. Take for example 3/7, which is

0.428571 428571 428571 428571 428571…

See that text that says “(period 6)”? That means that there is a sequence of 6 digits that repeat over and over again. Period refers to the size of the repeating sequence, and it can be any positive integer. In this case, we have six digits. If you were to start counting up by digit from the 4 just after the decimal place (starting with a 0, then adding one for each digit) you would see that the 0th, 6th, 12th, 18th, (6k+0) and so on digits are all 4, the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th (6k+1) digits are all 2, and so on.

But pi is not the only number like this. In fact, “most” real numbers are irrational. And by that, I mean that you can create a way to count all the rational numbers one by one, but you cannot count the irrational numbers because there are so many that if you start to count them, you have to skip some. Irrational numbers are so plentiful they kind of overpower the rational numbers. That’s set theory stuff, if you’re interested.

Pi is a ratio though, just not of integers. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter.

(To clarify something here, I’ve talked about pi, normality, and common misconceptions about numbers today (hence “on the topic of pi”) on a few occasions so I assumed Panic saw those and understood my explanations.)

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Ah fuck let’s go there again.

Many people think that Pi’s irrationality means it contains every possible digit substring known to man. Irrationality does not imply this. We have a few counterexamples of this.

[intimate-mirror]

Here’s a counterexample I just came up with:

The decimal number which encodes whether or not the nth Turing machine halts using 8 and 7 to denote halting and running forever respectively in the nth digit position is both irrational and clearly does not contain every possible digit substring. (3 doesn’t show up even once!)

It’s irrational, because if it were rational, then to compute whether a given Turing machine halts, you’d only have to perform a bounded number of steps of long division of two constants.

I’m not sure how much complicated math stuff you’d have to do to prove that this is a number, but I think that should be clear at least on an intuitive level. @the-real-numbers

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

I would have no idea. @sdhs-rationalist ?

(but also I mean avoiding number theory with turing machines is out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.)

There’s also the other transcendental number I talked about earlier:

\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} 10^{-(k!)}

It’s 0.1100010000…

[sdhs-rationalist]

Yup, that's right--and actually a pretty clever proof

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

@sdhs-rationalist hi

[sdhs-rationalist]

can you remotely delet someone elses post

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Gemarah: pi is three

Mathematicians: I doubt that

Gemarah: remember that time I told god to suck it and won

[sdhs-rationalist]

Look u know what It's not r eliezer's fault that, as the last prophet, he was doomed to the same fate as every other Later Prophet, namely getting totally rejected by his society (yes, r eliezer was a prophet, it's subtle but definitely there)

[sdhs-rationalist]

they should call bribes in¢ives

my SO

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

What was your first magical math moment - the first problem that left you in awe of the power and meaning of math?

The month I decided to investigate why Wikipedia kept putting e^i theta stuff in the trig sections during my independent study in HS when I was first getting used to math. I struggled for days to understand, thinking about it pretty much non-stop. I did some more research, and with a hint from @sdhs-rationalist I was finally able to come up with my very first “proof” of Euler’s identity. I was ecstatic for weeks. I thought it was the coolest thing. I still kinda do.

[sdhs-rationalist]

a) god, that was _great_, at some point we need to get together so u can either return the favor for more graph theoryish stuff or so I can do that again but for information theory

b) i will note that this is the _second_ most excited i have seen eli in his entire life, closely following the time we spent 3 hours on a bus together during a flood and he tried to either murder or make out with me about 9 times and I couldn’t tell because I was too busy making math puns at him and giggling like a madman,  Followers of @the-real-numbers, take note.

[sdhs-rationalist]

Eli replies ‘lies, i was just trying to get closer to you so i could throw myself out a window’

that is lies. this fucker was sitting in a window seat.  I was in the aisle seat, as I always was whenever we sat with each other on the bus.  qed

this post has officially become a callout post for @the-real-numbers

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

No, no, the other window, obviously 😉

[sdhs-rationalist]

‘a window’

‘the other window’

your lies catch up to u

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

What was your first magical math moment - the first problem that left you in awe of the power and meaning of math?

The month I decided to investigate why Wikipedia kept putting e^i theta stuff in the trig sections during my independent study in HS when I was first getting used to math. I struggled for days to understand, thinking about it pretty much non-stop. I did some more research, and with a hint from @sdhs-rationalist I was finally able to come up with my very first “proof” of Euler’s identity. I was ecstatic for weeks. I thought it was the coolest thing. I still kinda do.

[sdhs-rationalist]

a) god, that was _great_, at some point we need to get together so u can either return the favor for more graph theoryish stuff or so I can do that again but for information theory

b) i will note that this is the _second_ most excited i have seen eli in his entire life, closely following the time we spent 3 hours on a bus together during a flood and he tried to either murder or make out with me about 9 times and I couldn’t tell because I was too busy making math puns at him and giggling like a madman,  Followers of @the-real-numbers, take note.

[sdhs-rationalist]

Eli replies ‘lies, i was just trying to get closer to you so i could throw myself out a window’

that is lies. this fucker was sitting in a window seat.  I was in the aisle seat, as I always was whenever we sat with each other on the bus.  qed

this post has officially become a callout post for @the-real-numbers

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

What was your first magical math moment - the first problem that left you in awe of the power and meaning of math?

The month I decided to investigate why Wikipedia kept putting e^i theta stuff in the trig sections during my independent study in HS when I was first getting used to math. I struggled for days to understand, thinking about it pretty much non-stop. I did some more research, and with a hint from @sdhs-rationalist I was finally able to come up with my very first “proof” of Euler’s identity. I was ecstatic for weeks. I thought it was the coolest thing. I still kinda do.

[sdhs-rationalist]

a) god, that was _great_, at some point we need to get together so u can either return the favor for more graph theoryish stuff or so I can do that again but for information theory

b) i will note that this is the _second_ most excited i have seen eli in his entire life, closely following the time we spent 3 hours on a bus together during a flood and he tried to either murder or make out with me about 9 times and I couldn’t tell because I was too busy making math puns at him and giggling like a madman,  Followers of @the-real-numbers, take note.

[sdhs-rationalist]

things i’ve learned during my freshman year

right so I was supposed to write up a summary of my year in college I guess?

it is, however, 8 am, and I am not super-awake, so enjoy this vaguely unfiltered mess instead

1) prereqs are _lies_.  I’ve learned a crazy amount this year, basically bootstrapped myself into graduate level cryptographic knowledge, original research, and being a well-regarded person on a few relevant telegrams/public facing groups by sheer dint of seeing courses I was unprepared for and saying ‘fuck it’, then teaching myself all the relevant math on my own time basically just to solve psets.

2) college might have a higher set point, but the issues with professors are the same – relatedly, anybody who’s going to harvard and is debating taking CS51, anticipate literally the worst governed class I’ve ever taken, and my high school taught the fucking hydroplate theory about the noahide flood to a graduating class of 47.

3) executive function is way more a matter of producing effective routines than any other technique–get yourself into a flow state of assignments/how much time you spend on them daily, and the rest should come naturally.  this does have downsides of being stressed about assignments with 3 days of downtime before they need to get done bc you missed a day of routined work

4) fucking eat and sleep regularly.  i should not have had to tell myself this, but i did.  multiple times.  i thought I was sick like 5 times this year and it turned out to be because i hadnt consumed nourishing calories in like 18 hours. also drink water, and go into the sun.  college doesnt obviate the need for the necessary elements of survival.

5) having multiple consistent social groups is good, even if only to practice going in and out of different personal modalities of interaction

6) i probably should have more stuff here but I can’t think of any

[tototavros]

I’m not sure how much this varies college to college, but if you just talk to the professor to clarify what they want from prereqs.

I was looking to take Lin Alg, which required a Calc III prereq, which I figured I could just teach myself, but I hadn’t realized how big a deal vectors would be, which I’d only seen presented geometrically in my physics classes, which is not great, because I have fuckall for visualization. So, I took Calc III, and it ended up being very useful for that. On the other hand, Lin Alg also recommended a “Nature of Proof” prereq, but having a decent logical background + taking some oddballish classes before (two classes, one on Aristotle + Euclid + Descartes, another on Lobachevskii + Godel, essentially), that prereq wasn’t really necessary.

Set aside time for dealing with bureacratic bullshit ever week. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to use it, but if you’re me, you’ll end up needing it. A lot. (I still have a bunch of catchup I need to do on that front). Even if it’s something as simple as returning library books or doing your housing application, I get really burned on those things that are theoretically one-off, but there are weekly one-offs.

Sometimes it’s a matter of resolving to do “just one” thing. A single problem, a single chapter, a single paragraph of writing. Once you’ve done it, then you’re stuck in a place where “well, it’d be easier just to keep going, right?” instead of that stupid “I could get up and find the reading and then get the book and then get comfortable and then start the reading, or I could just refresh Tumblr, it says I have 3 new posts to read!” loop.

Keep some food and water in your room, enough food for to last you a few meals, because sometimes you hyperfocus on Sunday and it’s 6:45 and the dining hall’s closed, so I guess I have to get Chipotle? No, I don’t. I personally like trail mix and noodle cups for this, because they’re simple and cheap, but if you can, Soylent or meal squares might be a better option.

Very useful. I find myself bogged down in mostly one social group, which leads to problems when everyone’s like 2 nodes away from each other (excluding you) and X complains to you about telling A to Y, and Y getting unreasonably upset, but turns out Y ended up being your best friend and X was in the wrong and…yeah, it’s nonsense.

Try to get a campus job. If you find a good one, they’re easy (I’m currently writing this at mine), low stress, and nobody really gives a shit, but it’s a good way of forcing connections without having to go out and explicitly do the Social, as well as spending money, for when you’d like a binder for TAPL which you just used your excess printing credits or you want to take the train into the city to meet up with really cool people.

EDIT: Student jobs are also a lot more accommodating, so I’ve been let off the hook for more than I probably should have, with regard to lateness, while I was forced to quit another job because I was told, an hour after I was scheduled to stop working, that if I didn’t keep going for another hour after, I’d be fired.

Also, mental health can easily be bullshit. I was having difficulties with a professor and a classmate saw me on an off-day, reported me through the campus mental health system, and I was required to meet with the residence hall advisor for fear of escalation (which I had been told could lead at worst to some form of forced intake at the local hospital) and when I informed him during my second meeting that the first had made it difficult to sleep, he just shrugged it off as “merely unfortunate”. Find people who understand you and you can trust.

[sdhs-rationalist]

quality additions here, though I can’t speak to yes or no campus job having not had one

startups are cool tho

if you find one you’re interested in that can, like actually give you things in return for work ‘s prob a good way to get relevant industry experience

[theweirdwideweb]

[sdhs-rationalist]

things i’ve learned during my freshman year

right so I was supposed to write up a summary of my year in college I guess?

it is, however, 8 am, and I am not super-awake, so enjoy this vaguely unfiltered mess instead

1) prereqs are _lies_.  I’ve learned a crazy amount this year, basically bootstrapped myself into graduate level cryptographic knowledge, original research, and being a well-regarded person on a few relevant telegrams/public facing groups by sheer dint of seeing courses I was unprepared for and saying ‘fuck it’, then teaching myself all the relevant math on my own time basically just to solve psets.

2) college might have a higher set point, but the issues with professors are the same -- relatedly, anybody who’s going to harvard and is debating taking CS51, anticipate literally the worst governed class I’ve ever taken, and my high school taught the fucking hydroplate theory about the noahide flood to a graduating class of 47.

3) executive function is way more a matter of producing effective routines than any other technique--get yourself into a flow state of assignments/how much time you spend on them daily, and the rest should come naturally.  this does have downsides of being stressed about assignments with 3 days of downtime before they need to get done bc you missed a day of routined work

4) fucking eat and sleep regularly.  i should not have had to tell myself this, but i did.  multiple times.  i thought I was sick like 5 times this year and it turned out to be because i hadnt consumed nourishing calories in like 18 hours. also drink water, and go into the sun.  college doesnt obviate the need for the necessary elements of survival.

5) having multiple consistent social groups is good, even if only to practice going in and out of different personal modalities of interaction

6) i probably should have more stuff here but I can’t think of any

[sdhs-rationalist]

...god, it has been a while since I posted here.  Would ppl be interested in a summary of what’s been happenign with my life?

[everyones-beau]

small brain: live-action Worm adaptation

exploding galaxy brain: Studio Trigger anime Worm adaptation

[theaudientvoid]

Omniverse Brain: Worm as a Marvel or DC comic book.

[gcu-sovereign]

Cosmic buddha brain: Worm as a visual novel.

[sdhs-rationalist]

Transcendent apotheosis brain:  Worm as a serial webfic

[orbsdotorg]

Every time twitter deletes accounts for joke theft or tumblr deletes “Russian psyop” blogs it’s just another reminder that they absolutely could be deleting the Nazis but won’t.

[sdhs-rationalist]

eh, the russian psyop thing was based on IP farming, not content analysis, imo

[hametronit-deactivated20240806]

יש בארץ שתי עונות: קיץ, וקיץ חם פחות.

[sdhs-rationalist]

As someone who lived on Maale Gilboa for a year

this post is a lie

a beautiful, evil, cruelly hopeful lie

(unless you only live in the south or the valleys)