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[markusin]

This thread really is "Random Stuff" by another name, isn't it.

Another thought apropos to nothing: people go around life behaving as if they will remember what they learn. This is nuts. We forget almost everything. I'm not saying this means we should stop studying, but nonetheless, surely this fact should be taken into account more!

Skilled people who give talks do that, but I don't really see it in school or in textbooks. Wouldn't most learning materials make sense in a world where we don't forget almost everything over time? If so, this can't possibly be ideal.

I think it's a matter of training your recall. Knowing that you know something is half the battle, and knowing that makes it easier to find that information again. It's like building an index search in your brain.

Regarding MTG, I was playing on MTG arena a bunch, but then I lost interest in standard and I became too busy to do the grind. I'm not sure if standard has more or less first-person advantage than eternal formats, but given how the threats are outpacing the answers, curving out first feels like it's game deciding.

[silverspawn]

Aggro decks were very popular for most of this cycle -- like I said, the control decks got a bit more popular near the end. Against aggro decks, first player advantage is huge. The mono red one with maybe top 20% of their draws on the play would beat my deck no matter what. I could order my deck and it wouldn't matter.

[silverspawn]

But I'm pretty sure you don't even remember that you once knew most of the things you learned at school

[Awaclus]

This thread really is "Random Stuff" by another name, isn't it.

Yes, and Random Stuff is so rarely posted in that you could go play Necro Wars in it.

[silverspawn]

Within Temptation's music is so beautiful

... for about 10-20 minutes, then it gets annoying

[silverspawn]

I think I've broken a new record with # of fruit flies in my kitchen. Isn't it great?

[silverspawn]

no it's not

[silverspawn]

oh my god eth is not doing well

[silverspawn]

But this is what I signed up for so that's ok. Can't gamble and then complain about temporary losses.

Just wish I had waited until *now* to invest in Eth!

[silverspawn]

Joscha Bach:

I sometimes forget that the "computers cannot be conscious" people still exist; these people are mystifying

Empirically true. People can't predict my behavior so I must be mystifying.

[silverspawn]

Btw, people talk way too much about the Turing Test. The Turing test is dumb. It would be dumb even if consciousness were about information. No, it doesn't tell you if AI is conscious. It doesn't you anything important. It's just an arbitrary test, and not even a well-defined one.

[silverspawn]

Not that Joscha Bach did this, I'm sure he knows that the Turing Test is dumb

[silverspawn]

If you want to talk about Turing, talk about the Turing Machine. That is enormously important for computers, computation, modern computer science, all of it. Extremely influential idea.

[silverspawn]

faust, you don't happen to be familiar with the Wasserstein metric?

[Awaclus]

But this is what I signed up for so that's ok. Can't gamble and then complain about temporary losses.

Just wish I had waited until *now* to invest in Eth!

If you buy more ETH now, it's like you waited until now to invest in ETH for that sum of money!

[Awaclus]

I recently learned that the Social Insurance Institution demands that I send them complete records of all of my crypto transactions in order to grant me my welfare benefits now that I own ETH. I can already foresee how this is going to go: if ETH goes substantially up in value, I lose 1:1 that much in benefits since they will count it as income; however, they're not going to care or do anything if it goes down in value.

Oh well, it's unlikely to spike that much until I'm hopefully employed and no longer have to give a ShiT about the SII.

[Awaclus]

(I don't know what they would actually do if ETH went up by, like, 20x which would make my gains significant enough to affect it. I'm pretty sure the law says nothing about cryptocurrencies wrt welfare benefits so they're just going to do something that's justifiable with other things in the law. I suppose it's possible they just want my transaction history to make sure I'm not actually getting paid in crypto which they would count as income, but won't care about my existing assets going up in value, which would be cool but being optimistic about the SII tends to result in disappointments.)

[Awaclus]

In principle, I'd much rather invest in things that produce value over time than things that I'm hoping to go up in value over time. The fact that the SII would instantly require me to sell it as soon as I made any such investments and then subtract the selling price from my benefits is one substantial reason why investing in ETH seemed fun, but it's disappointing if I can't get around that meaningfully after all.

They did let me keep my ETH and granted me the full benefit for the summer though, so it's not the worst possible news. Only pretty bad.

[faust]

faust, you don't happen to be familiar with the Wasserstein metric?

No, I steer clear of any probability-related math 

[silverspawn]

If you buy more ETH now, it's like you waited until now to invest in ETH for that sum of money!

Unfortunately, that's not really a responsible option since I will soon stop being a teacher and then require some sort of income

[silverspawn]

I hope I'm not responsible for any financial losses.

Should also say that ETH could totally go down more in the near future. In fact, it's been on a downward trend forever; this is just how these crypto cycles work, there are long periods of downward and long periods of upward trends. Buying ETH in the middle of a downward trend, like I did, arguably makes sense since currently the price is low, but it also means that near term losses are probably. (Though I didn't expect them to be that bad.)

[silverspawn]

probable*

[silverspawn]

faust, you don't happen to be familiar with the Wasserstein metric?

No, I steer clear of any probability-related math 

but probability is so beautiful!

[silverspawn]

Now I will probably have to wrap my head around this surprisingly complex metric just so I can calculate exactly two things because I thought it will souns marginally better to write "this metric doesn't matter, but the result is 2 in this case" rather than just "this metric doesn't matter" in the example

[Awaclus]

I hope I'm not responsible for any financial losses.

It was my decision to buy ETH, I spent an amount I could easily afford to lose, and I mostly did it for fun, although you influenced the timing. It's not terribly surprising to me that it's going down for now; the global economy is not terribly stable at the moment and that makes crypto less appealing for investors and therefore less valuable.