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Author Topic: The Necro Wars  (Read 337269 times)

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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3775 on: June 19, 2022, 07:51:54 am »

Go ahead.

(I think the other bet is fantastic for you, the only problem is that the sample size is too small to reliably get credit.)

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3776 on: June 20, 2022, 02:26:44 pm »

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling at Baranasi in the Deer Park at Isipatana. There the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus of the group of five thus:

"Bhikkhus, these two extremes should not be followed by one who has gone forth into homelessness. What two? The pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasures, which is low, vulgar, the way of worldlings, ignoble, unbeneficial; and the pursuit of self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, unbeneficial. Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata has awakened to the middle way, which gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.

"And what, bhikkhus, is that middle way awakened to by the Tathagata, which gives rise to vision ... which leads to Nibbana? It is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. This, bhikkhus, is that middle way awakened to by the Tathagata, which gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view ... right concentration.

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3777 on: June 20, 2022, 02:27:02 pm »

One should be wary of this text since it's good poetry and will therefore sway people for the wrong reasons

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3778 on: June 20, 2022, 02:40:48 pm »

Very interesting:



But i think wrong? I like writing things when they seem obvious. Though I also feel no-one else can do that well, so the chart is good advice for everyone else, so probably I'm delusional and it's also good advice for me?

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3779 on: June 20, 2022, 03:37:21 pm »

I have no idea if it's good advice for you, but I would definitely write more things if I always wrote everything in the write it now phase. However, I don't think this is good advice for me either, because I don't actually want to write things I'll later decide are a bad idea to write.
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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3780 on: June 20, 2022, 03:41:44 pm »

Most, or perhaps all, of the longer OPs I've written on f.ds, for example, were written pretty much at the "write it now" point or earlier. Writing and publishing something when you're not entirely sure you know what you're talking about is a great way to learn.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3781 on: June 21, 2022, 04:41:03 am »

If I had gotten a dollar for every time that I've misspelled panpsychism...

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3782 on: June 21, 2022, 04:56:59 am »

In every class where we do databases, I announced in the first lesson that the first question of the exam will be to explain what databases are good for, since you could also just store information in a text file. (And then gave them the explanation.)

So far, no-one has full points (2 out of 2) on that. Most people just made something up. Some remembered that it was about access times.

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3783 on: June 21, 2022, 04:59:35 am »

This ties into my main takeaway from teaching for a year, which is that because students fundamentally don't care about the subjects and won't think about it when they don't have to, spacing out lessons is really bad. I predict that having all lessons within the span of two weeks (and then writing the exam) would yield drastically better results than spacing them out over 4 months.

(This isn't the most important thing about school, just the most important update for me.)

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3784 on: June 21, 2022, 05:00:39 am »

Or differently put, give me one of the many students who did poorly in the exam, let me teach them privately for 4 hours a day before the exam instead of visiting class for 4 months, and I bet they'd do better.

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3785 on: June 21, 2022, 05:10:29 am »

David Chalmers on Strong vs. Weak Emergence

Extremely important concept, and pleasantly lucid and non-poetic for a philosophy paper.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3786 on: June 21, 2022, 05:25:02 am »

Eliezer described Chalmers as a maximally frustrating philosopher since he lays out all of the points with great clearity and then draws the wrong conclusion wrong them. I see what he meant. This was probably the best written philosophy paper I've ever read! Granted, the subject isn't very confusing, so it's easier to be clear than with other topics, but still.

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3787 on: June 21, 2022, 07:27:09 am »

Digital Computers Will Remain Unconscious Until They Recruit Physical Fields for Holistic Computing Using Well-Defined Topological Boundaries

Content is next level, but like most things Andres writes, it has severe pedagogical issues. Also not very optimized.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3788 on: June 21, 2022, 07:35:55 am »

In every class where we do databases, I announced in the first lesson that the first question of the exam will be to explain what databases are good for, since you could also just store information in a text file. (And then gave them the explanation.)

So far, no-one has full points (2 out of 2) on that. Most people just made something up. Some remembered that it was about access times.

My answer would be that the data is structured in a sensible way, which makes some operations substantially faster if there's a ton of data, and it makes it way easier for the devs to mentally keep track of what they're doing. There's also a bunch of pre-existing solutions to a lot of things you might want to do either because they're built into the database system itself or because a third party already made that thing for that database system, like hosting and connecting to the database, conflict handling when multiple clients are accessing the same database simultaneously, and visualizing the data or otherwise getting the useful information out of the data more easily than you could from a text file, and of course the basic queries and whatever other features the database system has.

Nobody has ever explained me what databases are good for. How many points would I get?
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3789 on: June 21, 2022, 08:24:17 am »

Probably 1.5/2. (Your first sentence is basically it, but I wanted to also have en explanation for *why* finding elements is faster if the data is sorted. This doesn't necessarily follow from the question, but I said that that's part of the answer I want in the aforementioned first lesson.)

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3790 on: June 21, 2022, 10:02:03 am »

Probably 1.5/2. (Your first sentence is basically it, but I wanted to also have en explanation for *why* finding elements is faster if the data is sorted. This doesn't necessarily follow from the question, but I said that that's part of the answer I want in the aforementioned first lesson.)

You can obviously keep data in a text file sorted.

If my understanding is correct, you can actually move the pointer anywhere in a text file in O(1) time in most cases, which means that you can even do a binary search in O(log n) time as long as each element in the file takes up the exact same number of characters, which you can achieve by using a specific character for padding — otherwise, you have to use a specific character like newline to signify where each element starts/ends, and then searching will always take at least linear time because you won't know where in the file the newlines are without reading each character one by one, even if the data is sorted. This method is only super confusing to work with.

But what you can't do with a sorted text file is adding or removing elements in faster than O(n) time, because in order to do that, you have to rewrite all the data after that element. With a database, there's probably some kind of a tree structure going on in the background, which means you can insert and delete stuff without having to move other stuff, and you're only left with the O(log n) time it takes to find where in the tree you're performing the operation.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3791 on: June 21, 2022, 10:10:21 am »

there's probably some kind of a tree structure going on in the background

yes, there is

I still think it's fair to say that having a datastructure that you can find elements in O(ln(n)) time is the main idea of a data base? Yes, you can also do that with a text file. You can have text in a text file sorted. You can have several text files that structure your data. You can in-principle keep a structure that gives you O(ln(n)) access time forever, along with optimality on all the other operations. You can have a text file such that you maintain an implicit tree over it.

But then you're just emulating the properties of a data base manually instead of automatically. I mean, ultimately there is no sharp distinction between any of this stuff. "Database" is not a primitive object in the computer, ultimately it's all processor operations over binary data.

So maybe a more accurate description would be "there's a bunch of nice properties that you'd like your data to have, and if your use case requires large amounts of data, at some points it becomes sensible to automate those, and that's a data base. But like, pedagogically simplifying it to "databases keep your elements sorted and that gives you faster access time"... still seems reasonable to me

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3792 on: June 21, 2022, 11:23:32 am »

So when I put text into Grammarly, it virtually always complains about a bunch of places where I've used "this" as a substantive. E.g., "<assertion>. This means that <conclusion>". I've always thought these complaints were stupid and happily proceeded to use "this" as a substantive.

Until I read this LessWrong post. Since then, I've tried to phase about 'this' as a substantive almost entirely in my sequence. (I don't do it in this thread because writing 'this' is still natural and requires too much effort to write around.)

It's quite difficult! And I'm still not entirely sure it's actually worth doing. But the logic that it requires extra thought on part of the reader is sound, and I do think you want to minimze that.

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3793 on: June 21, 2022, 11:23:58 am »

Tell me if i've posted that exact thing before

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3794 on: June 21, 2022, 11:27:41 am »

Nowadays, whenever I write "actually" I feel like I'm doing a super pro move where I intentionally disobeying common wisdom. Sort of like using disharmonious arrangements in music or something

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3795 on: June 21, 2022, 11:28:12 am »

Tell me if i've posted that exact thing before

I don't think you have.
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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3796 on: June 21, 2022, 11:51:57 am »

there's probably some kind of a tree structure going on in the background

yes, there is

I still think it's fair to say that having a datastructure that you can find elements in O(ln(n)) time is the main idea of a data base? Yes, you can also do that with a text file. You can have text in a text file sorted. You can have several text files that structure your data. You can in-principle keep a structure that gives you O(ln(n)) access time forever, along with optimality on all the other operations. You can have a text file such that you maintain an implicit tree over it.

But then you're just emulating the properties of a data base manually instead of automatically. I mean, ultimately there is no sharp distinction between any of this stuff. "Database" is not a primitive object in the computer, ultimately it's all processor operations over binary data.

So maybe a more accurate description would be "there's a bunch of nice properties that you'd like your data to have, and if your use case requires large amounts of data, at some points it becomes sensible to automate those, and that's a data base. But like, pedagogically simplifying it to "databases keep your elements sorted and that gives you faster access time"... still seems reasonable to me

I mean, "databases keep your elements sorted and that gives you faster access time [compared to not sorting]" is not wrong but to me, that is not the main reason why I would use a database. The main reason why I would use a database is that someone else has already thought of everything and made it both good enough and easy to use so why reinvent the wheel, and I would do it even for a relatively low number of elements, when the access time is negligible no matter how it's implemented. If I am primarily concerned about the speed at which I can perform certain operations, I would usually prefer to store the data in whatever way and load it into the program's memory as the data structure that best fits the use case instead of using a database, unless there's so much data I can't do that reasonably, and that would be unusual.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3797 on: June 21, 2022, 12:02:55 pm »

This is probably the more relevant practical consideration, but I was approaching it from the perspective of "what is the principled reason why this idea is useful". The reason I did that is almost certainly because that's the main thing I want to know. (And I didn't know about data bases when I was in school, which I think strongly contributed to my dislike.)

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3798 on: June 21, 2022, 12:04:57 pm »

This is why technical fields are so much more tolerable than other areas: there usually is a theoretical reason. The alternative is that someone just came up with something and now we're in an equilibrium because everyone is using it.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3799 on: June 21, 2022, 05:09:32 pm »

With growing age and wisdom, I think i appreciate Adventure time more rather than less!
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