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[silverspawn]

So I've been watching a bunch of David Pakman (not nearly all though, thankfully, don't wanna get into the habit of consuming politics regularly) and one thing that stands out is that his actual takes tend to be genuinely rational and thoughtful, but every youtube title is the most sensationalist, trashy, utterly disgusting clickbait nonsense. I think the mindset of most youtubers is just that you have to do this to be competitive, so they bracket it as a separate area where all of the epistemic principles don't apply.

I hate all of this stuff so much, but avoiding all videos that sin in this way is not practical

[silverspawn]

I just want to have omnipotent powers to make it so that any clickbait title loses you between .1% and 1% of your audience, depending on its level of trashness

[silverspawn]

Unrelated, I completely do not understand why the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous math problem, rather than P =/= NP. On the surface it seems to be about an obscure property of an obscure function that normal people don't even understand, with no practical value. It's said to have all sorts of relevance for prime numbers and whatnot, but I guess you need to know number theory to appreciate those, and I sure don't. Whereas the relevance of P =/= NP is obvious.

[faust]

The thing about non-computable numbers that I immediately think of is that a specification of a number usually gives you a blue print of how you would construct such a turing machine (this is also the case for Liouville's constant I think). So the concept of a good example for a non-computable transcendental number is a little paradoxical. You'd have to specify it in a weird backwards way. Whenever you know a sequence of rationals that converges, I think maybe that's already enough to make it computable? Mabye you also need some property of how fast the seqeunce converges, not sure.

Yeah, I think this is the issue. The talk I heard about them dealt with proving that the results of some exotic invariant in knot theory that takes real values is always computable, basically by constructing the Turing machine.

I think what you'd need to do is find some non-constructive way to define a real number using the axiom of choice, but the issue with that is to find a definition where the value of the resulting real number does not depend on the specific choice made (and at the same time make sure there is no constructive way to define it).

[faust]

Unrelated, I completely do not understand why the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous math problem, rather than P =/= NP. On the surface it seems to be about an obscure property of an obscure function that normal people don't even understand, with no practical value. It's said to have all sorts of relevance for prime numbers and whatnot, but I guess you need to know number theory to appreciate those, and I sure don't. Whereas the relevance of P =/= NP is obvious.

Well, I cannot say I knot that much about number theory or complex analysis, but here are my thoughts:

• The Riemann hypothesis is older. The longer a conjecture goes unproven, the more interesting it becomes, simply because it shows how difficult it must be.
• P!=NP really is more of a computer science problem these days. The field has really moved away from the stuff the mathematicians think about (though sure there is still some overlap). Clearly math people are more likely to find a problem interesting that is central to their discipline rather than something that borderline belongs to another field.
• The Riemann hypothesis is all about connecting different fields of mathematics. For this reason, any proof found will likely improve the understanding in both number theory and complex analysis. The actual statement of the theorem will probably be less important than the methods developed to prove it, which would be able to applied in different settings. On the other hand, at least as far as I can tell, a proof of P!=NP is not that likely to involve some seemingly unrelated mathematical field.

I've been wondering what the most important conjecture for me personally would be. Until recently, I would have easily named the Poincaré conjecture, but since it is now proven things are more difficult. I care about the slice-ribbon conjecture, but that is a thing that probably mainly knot theorists are interested in.

[silverspawn]

So I've successfully retired online chess, but now I'm spending lots of time working through a chessable course. Which itself has none of the problem that playing has, but it seems pretty obvious that I won't retire chess permanently if I'm studying theory. But I think I'll at least keep it retired until I'm done with the course.

I think getting to 2000 should definitely be doable . . .

[silverspawn]

I've always thought that studying theory was stupid, and it's not so much that I changed my mind than that it's genuinely fun to do. I also think it's not as stupid if you think about why you make the moves, but yeah that's not the main thing that chnaged

[silverspawn]

I just set up a local mediawiki thingy on a private server... in 25 minutes. I cannot believe how easy that was. This was the kind of thing that I dreaded and hated more than anything during university. I'd not do entire courses just because they required something like this and the setup was always a nightmare if it worked at all.

GPT-4 was absolutely amazing. You can ask it whatever elementary question you want and it will give a detailed step-by-step answer immediately.

E.g., one of the steps was to open a specific text file and remove a semicolon before a specific line. With GPT, that took 2 minutes. Without it... idk depends on what I'd have found googling. I thought I had to install something rather than just change a config file, so I might have gone into a completely wrong direction. That step might have taken me hours, or even killed the approach entirely.

So yeah when it comes to setting up complicated things like web servers (shudder), GPT is far superior to google. With google it's just a matter of luck; sometimes you find exactly the right answer, and often you don't. Asking in a forum is possible but so much more stressful.

[silverspawn]

If only GPT had been around a few years earlier. but those moments of me struggling with setting up various bs are forever stuck in spacetime and can't be helped anymore.

[silverspawn]

I keep waiting for GPT to lose patience and just go STOP ASKING ME ALL THESE RANDOM IRRELEVANT QUESTIONS but so far it's not happening

[Awaclus]

Alternatively, you can just look up a tutorial on YouTube and there's probably a video that does exactly the thing you want to do step by step from a freshly installed OS with nothing on it and you can just do exactly the same things and it'll work. I can believe that GPT-4 is somewhat of an improvement over that, but I have never had problems setting up web servers for small things like that.

[silverspawn]

there's certainly going to be a video that claims to solve the problem, probably several, but what usually happens is that all of them tell me the stuff I've figured out already and skip the actually problematic step. Or, perhaps a video solves the problem perfectly; it does happen. It's like with StackExchange posts. It's just not reliable.

I know other people don't have problems with this kind of thing. It's a me-specific problem. Idk why it's been been that way forever

[silverspawn]

The second ever slow rated game I played (in an actual in-person tournament)! I'm not showing the first because I lost and therefore it's boring. (As it happens it was in fact pretty boring, whereas this one was super tense. You can't really ask for a more exciting game.)

[silverspawn]

I'm white. And losing until Kd8 from black.

[silverspawn]

The opening studies were entirely useless here, alas; this is one of the defenses from black that I didn't study, and it's so complicated that it wouldn't have helped much anyway

[silverspawn]

If Grammarly tells you one thing and GPT-4 tells you another, who do you trust?

Grammarly wants to put a comma after "time" in this sentence; GPT-4 says nah

In the second case, the x-axis denotes time and the y-axis vertical oscillation.

My intuition is with GPT-4 but idk, I don't know any grammar rules; I've learned English by pattern-matching not learning rules. But I feel like Grammarly is inconsistent and doesn't generally want commas in this kind of sentence

[faust]

If Grammarly tells you one thing and GPT-4 tells you another, who do you trust?

Grammarly wants to put a comma after "time" in this sentence; GPT-4 says nah

In the second case, the x-axis denotes time and the y-axis vertical oscillation.

My intuition is with GPT-4 but idk, I don't know any grammar rules; I've learned English by pattern-matching not learning rules. But I feel like Grammarly is inconsistent and doesn't generally want commas in this kind of sentence

Not an expert, but this is my intuition:

Grammarly seems to think the structure of the sentence is like this

In the second case, [stuff that is specific to the second case], and [now I'm no longer talking about the second case but the general setting].

In which case I think the comma would be appropriate because it bounds a parenthesis. But the actual structure is:

In the second case, [stuff that is specific to the second case] and [other stuff also specific to the second case].

So the parenthesis stops only at the end of the sentence, and thus no further comma should be used.

[silverspawn]

So there's this position



and this position



and this position



And even though all of them are about black snatching the pawn from the Queen's Gambit, they all play completely differently. In the course I'm working through, they're in three different chapters. The first is called the Slav (or according to Chess.com, the "Slav Defense: Modern, Two Knights Attack"), the second is called the Semi-Slav (or according to chess.com, the "Semi-Slav Defense Accepted"), and the third, why, the third is the Queen's Gambit Declined: Modern Variation, 4...dxc4. Totally different.

Also in case you were wondering, this is not confusing at all.

At least now I know why even after reaching 111111111118888888888888888888888000000000000000000000 I could never figure out when you are and are not supposed to take-and-then-defend this pawn and what to do about it if your opponent tries. Turns out there's a huge and pretty crazy theory on how to play in all cases. Except he third one of course, since that just plays like delayed queen's gambit accepted. Obviously.

[silverspawn]

So the Semi-Slav Defense Accepted is actually the union (in terms of combining the moves that have been made) of the Slav Defense: Modern, Two Knights Attack and the Queen's Gambit Declined: Modern Variation, 4...dxc4. Who'd have thought?

[silverspawn]

I could never figure out whether to play a4, e4, or e3 as white when black takes the pawn. Naturally the course recommends a different one of these in each of the three positions.

[silverspawn]

Apologies, I missed one. I got something mixed up and hence thought there wasn't another one. Don't know how that could happen since all this is so simple.

Anyway, there's also this position



which is called the Noteboom (or according to chess.com, the "Slav Defense: Modern, Triangle, Noteboom Variation"). But the recommendation is also a4 so we have a repetition. No more symmetry! Boo!

[Awaclus]

Personality tests in general have very low ability to predict life outcomes, and binary MBTI is closer to astrological signs than to Big 5 (on a linear scale, although arguably a logarithmic scale might be a fairer comparison).


source

[silverspawn]

All I see is more evidence that MBTI measures something legitimate since it's predictive of life outcomes

I mean you'd home that the mainstream academically improved test does better on the life outcome metric, otherwise it'd be pretty embarassing

[silverspawn]

The source just links to the personality test. (I was gonna book mark it to use it as evidence against the next person who claims MBTI is meaningless.)

[silverspawn]

For context, I think in the last debate outside f.ds a person literally said that MBTI is astrology