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[faust]

one meal a day doesn't seem like it's bad for you in any way.

Well, it's bad for your general quality of life, at least if you enjoy food.

[Awaclus]

So according to the Veritasium video, the following things may or may not help with aging:

- 0: don't get DNA damage. Use sunscreen etc.
- 1: eat less; specifically less protein
- 2: get really exhausted from e.g. working out
- 3: be uncomfortably cold or uncomfortably hot

If AGI requires a paradigm shift it could take who knows how long so this is again relevant.

Well I am definitely uncomfortably hot, so I should be fine! 

[Awaclus]

I'm also uncomfortably cool.

[silverspawn]

It would be really cool if I understood the free energy principle

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

Another cool sorting algorithm is to sort the list using quantum flips, check if it's sorted correctly, and give up if it's not. Great runtime and guaranteed success!

[silverspawn]

Ah, Wikipedia was faster.

Quantum bogosort

Quantum bogosort is a hypothetical sorting algorithm based on bogosort, created as an in-joke among computer scientists. The algorithm generates a random permutation of its input using a quantum source of entropy, checks if the list is sorted, and, if it is not, destroys the universe. Assuming that the many-worlds interpretation holds, the use of this algorithm will result in at least one surviving universe where the input was successfully sorted in O(n) time.[9]

[Awaclus]

A nice (and very drunken) stranger treated me to vodka today.

[silverspawn]

Just watched the entire Bogosort competition

at 16x speed

[silverspawn]

If there are infinite universes, then there is a universe where Bogosort is right every single time and nobody knows why.

[silverspawn]

So stooge sort is kind of interesting. The insight is that you can sort a list by

1. sorting the first two third
2. sorting the last two third
3. sorting the first two third

Why? Well, doing (1) doesn't guarantee that the first two third of the full list are now correct, but it does guarantee that none of the elements now in the first third actually belong into the last third. And that means that all elements which belong into the last third are in the last two thirds, hence step (2) guarantees that the last third of the list is correct! And when the last third is correct, you need only sort the first two third, and the full list is correct.

after #0: 8 2 9 1 7 5 4 3 6
after #1: 1 2 5 7 8 9 4 3 6  (( 125 not in the final third! ))
after #2: 1 2 5 3 4 6 7 8 9 (( 789 is correct! ))
after #3: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (( ))

[silverspawn]

Consequently, any sorting algorithm of complexity f(n) can be modified to have complexity 3 * f(2/3 * n) instead. Unfortunately, even if f is quadratic, the new complexity is 3 * (2/3n)^2 = 4/3 n^2 so the procedure now takes longer than before.

However, if f is a cubic, then the new complexity is 3 * (2/3n)^3 = 8/9n^3. So stooge sort can be used to upgrade sorting algorithms with cubic runtime! Now you need only come up with a scenario where you would ever use a sorting algorithm with cubic runtime, and then we have a use case!

[silverspawn]

Which is why recursively using stooge sort gives a complexity between n^2 and n^3, namely n^2.7095.........

[silverspawn]

Remember when I accidentally bought a magazine subscription? Well I used my 14 day withdrawal right and now I'm getting all my money back *and* 3 of them for free!

They could be genuinely useful. No-one in this house reads newspapers anymore so I was running out of paper to use for bio trash...

[silverspawn]

Speaking of bio trash (you should probably say "waste"?), I would say the lavender scent against fruit flies was disappointing. However, I've mostly solved the problem by just not having any bio waste in the appartment. Anything that fruit flies like has to be moved out of the house immediately. Thankfully, on most days I just have tea leaves which flies don't care about.

And that genuinely works. Every now and then I still see one lone fly, but that's it.

[silverspawn]

The Onion was kind of onto something:

[silverspawn]

How good posts are created

1. Have an idea
2. Write a really confused version of the idea
3. ??? (most difficult step; can be implemented via talking to others or just by thinking)
4. Understand the idea on the simplest level such that it now seems trivial
5. Rewrite the post to be much shorter
6. Get feedback on the post. Get told that it's somewhat difficult
7. Rewrite the post to be longer and explain the same idea in more detail

Even though this yields a parabola shape of length, the result after 7 is not at all similar to the one after 1.

Ofc this is only the simple case. Harder cases can include several cycles through 3-7 if the new understanding is merely better and not yet good.

[silverspawn]

You can measure the intrinsic moral worth of a chess playing humanoid by their losing stats. They are decomposed into

Resignation
Checkmate
Timeout

The higher the resignation, the better.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

elegant solution to the gross faces nonsense: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-thumbnails/

[silverspawn]

If I had gotten 100$ every time I heard someone say that [Gödel's incompleteness theorem means some true things aren't provable], I might be able to afford another ETH now.

[silverspawn]

there's nothing quite like the text communications of extremely autistic people

[silverspawn]

In his book "The World in your Head", Steven Lehar makes a big deal out of indirect perception, the idea that what you see is not the world itself but a mental construct of the world. He describes how he kept bringing it up to colleagues but wasn't able to convince anyone, and how it was this incredible shift in world view for him.

This is totally ??? for me. Of course what you see is a mental construct. This feels completely trivial. I don't think there is a way for indirect perception to be false that makes any sense. Are there really people who honestly doubt it?

[silverspawn]

Maybe there is a way to imagine seeing the world directly, but not without totally throwing out the most basic neuroscience

[silverspawn]

So Hans Niemann cheated in top level chess against Magnus Carlsen. (I think.) Drama!