kdmccormick (u/kdmccormick)

kdmccormick commented on Happy New Year 2025 · Posted by u/martynvandijke

roenxi · 8 months ago

They do indeed have an internal relation - they all add up to 2025.

Obviously all the formula will be equivalent to each other. They are, by construction, all restatements of each other.

kdmccormick · 8 months ago

I would say that a rule is "cheating" iff it is implied by another rule for any arbitrary N.

kdmccormick commented on Why do animals adopt? nautil.us/why-do-animals-... · Posted by u/dnetesn

FrustratedMonky · 9 months ago

I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.

In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?

I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective, just assume a choice is being made and roll with it. Don't get tied in knots about the question of free-will, we know we don't have it, but just assume we do in order to make our perspective work out.

kdmccormick · 9 months ago

> I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.

IMO, no.

> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?

To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.

> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,

Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.

Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.

Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv

kdmccormick commented on Why do animals adopt? nautil.us/why-do-animals-... · Posted by u/dnetesn

FrustratedMonky · 9 months ago

"develops predispositions and behaviors"

Can't you take 'predisposition' to be a little more hardline, and that it removes all 'choice'. We are so 'predisposed' by biology/chemistry that animals, and humans, don't have any agency of choice, no free will to calculate anything.

kdmccormick · 9 months ago

This is two ways of saying the same thing.

To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.

i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.

kdmccormick commented on No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains blog.transitapp.com/go-un... · Posted by u/dotcoma

dietr1ch · 10 months ago

I don't get why ads are prioritised over travel information.

kdmccormick · 10 months ago

It's very simple: Transit in many places is underfunded. Travel info screens cost money to install and maintain. Ads, on the other hand, make money.

kdmccormick commented on Buy payphones and retire computer.rip/2024-10-26-b... · Posted by u/cratermoon

bufferoverflow · 10 months ago

Rent seeking is not immoral. You own something. You choose to let others use it for a fee per month or per day. Some other person voluntarily thinks your deal is good and agrees to pay to use your something.

Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

If you disagree, let's make a deal where I get to use all of your stuff for free forever.

kdmccormick · 10 months ago

Bad comparison. I am not seeking rent on any of my stuff.

Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.

> Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.

kdmccormick commented on Buy payphones and retire computer.rip/2024-10-26-b... · Posted by u/cratermoon

andrewla · 10 months ago

The concept of "passive income" is almost a scissor concept. Or maybe only if you couple it with the categorical imperitive.

On the one hand, it's so obviously true that it would be great to have passive income. Draw the salary you're drawing now, with some growth, and not have to work.

On the other hand, if everyone had access to this capability then society and civilization would grind to a halt. People make things; if people don't make things, then we don't eat, we don't drink. If the goal is to have a system where everyone can have passive income, then achieving that goal is the end of the world.

The categorical imperative roughly says that something is moral only if its universal adoption would benefit society. So there is a break there. The idea of passive income is isomorphic to rent seeking, which we generally agree is a bad thing.

kdmccormick · 10 months ago

I agree with your parallel to rent seeking. Rent seeking is indeed both (a) arguably immoral and (b) seemingly inescapable in a society which respects property rights.

The theory of Georgism [1] suggests a way that we could eliminate rent seeking: by taxing ownership of all common resources at the value of the rent they would demand. That way, property owners, telephone operators, etc. would be rewarded for their labor in development and upkeep of the property, but would not be rewarded for ownership of the property itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

kdmccormick commented on Why wordfreq will not be updated github.com/rspeer/wordfre... · Posted by u/tomthe

DrillShopper · a year ago

Their batteries on the other hand…

kdmccormick · a year ago

Sure, they're worse than walking or biking, but compared to an electric car battery or an ICE car?

kdmccormick commented on Why wordfreq will not be updated github.com/rspeer/wordfre... · Posted by u/tomthe

shortrounddev2 · a year ago

Man the AI folks really wrecked everything. Reminds me of when those scooter companies started just dumping their scooters everywhere without asking anybody if they wanted this.

kdmccormick · a year ago

At least scooters did something useful for the environment.

kdmccormick commented on If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity strongtowns.org/journal/2... · Posted by u/philips

kkfx · a year ago

The issue is not about walking vs using some transport tool, but what's needed to support people only walking.

There are many who state dense 15'-cities are eco-friendly because people move without polluting, but no considerations seems to exists about how many others pollute much to supply anything needed by the eco-friendly pedestrians and IMVHO and experience (as a former big city resident now living on mountains) the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.

Strong Towns should start to consider that their model is not those of the modern cities but the one of the older villages, witch due to tech changes is now the model of spread areas. There is no strong-walkable-town possible in the modern world, only polluting monsters, modern Fordlandias doomed to fails like the original, take Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, Prospera, Telosa, ... as good examples.

Than start to ask who profit from them, and you'll see the big financial capitalism behind the (dollar/stereotypical toxic waste leaking from rusty barrels) green fog.

kdmccormick · a year ago

> the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.

This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.

Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.

Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.

kdmccormick commented on Let's stop counting centuries dynomight.net/centuries/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Terretta · a year ago

Except we do, as soon as we need the next digit.

In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th.

We talk of a child in their 10th year as being age 10. Might even be younger. Try asking a people if advice about a child in their "5th year of development" means you're dealing with a 5 year old. Most will say yes.

So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've experienced zero years yet!

Similarly "centuries" don't have a century digit until the 100s, which would make that the 1st century and just call time spans less than that "in the first hundred years" (same syllables anyway).

It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of the two hardest problems in computer science along with caching and naming things.

kdmccormick · a year ago

What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life.

You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.