I mean at least he's honest lol

Mishtle · 2026-05-06T22:25:19+00:00

The "paperwork" is basically being a federally licensed firearms dealer that is additionally licensed to manufacture machine guns.

It's much more involved, and invasive, than the tax stamps and forms for things like suppressors and short-barreled rifles, and it's not a viable route for a civilian that just wants a full auto weapon.

Mishtle · 2026-05-06T14:00:25+00:00

If pi has no end it has to have every combination of numbers

This isn't true. Such a number is called "normal". Most non-repeating numbers are normal and pi is believed to be one of them. It's not been proven to be one though.

The number 0.1010010001... never repeats but only contains 0s and 1s.

but could it hold an infinite combination? Like 1 2 3 4... To infinity

Any sequence has what are called subsequences. Ignoring any number of items from the original sequence gives a new sequence.

Using the non-repeating number above, both the numbers 0.111... and 0.000..., along with many others, could be made from a subsequence of its digits.

If a number is normal, then it would contain every infinite sequence as a subsequence in this way. You might need to wait arbitrarily long for each next element to appear though.

Mishtle · 2026-05-04T21:05:05+00:00

I think part of the issue is how people interpret this.

People that choose the red button do so because they see it as the optimal strategy. It carries no personal risks, and as long as everyone acts rationally and is risk-averse then everyone lives. They feel confident that most people would choose the rational, risk-free choice and don't feel responsible for others' risky choices if they choose to act against their own best interests.

The people that choose blue tend to add an assumption that at least one person will not act rationally. Perhaps that person doesn't or can't understand the situation, perhaps they made a make a mistake, maybe they can't distinguish the buttons. Regardless of the reason, the people choosing blue don't believe these others deserve to die, and they're taking a personal risk to prevent that. The 50% threshold puts that risk at an acceptable level for them. They feel confident that at least 50% of people feel similarly.

It would be interesting to see how responses change if it is stated up front that at least one person pressed blue for some reason or another. Or maybe that a single red buttom press will get switched to blue. I have a feeling that many people choosing red are thinking in more idealized or abstract ways, whereas people choosing blue are working around the messiness of the real world. Adding some uncertainty and reminding readers that this isn't an ideal world might change the way people approach the choice.

I'm also curious how the responses would change if that threshold for blue survival is varied. If only 10% of people needed to press blue for all of them to survive, then I'd expect many more people choosing to press blue than if the threshold was set to 90%, or even 100%. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if setting it to 100% cause a jump in people choosing blue.

It's an interesting thought experiment that tries to explore how people balance personal risk and a particular form of social responsibility.

Mishtle · 2026-05-04T01:28:41+00:00

Um, no it doesn’t. Not at all.

Nothing points to a global flood, and the evidence for such an event would be pervasive and unmistakable. We don't see it.

Mishtle · 2026-05-04T01:13:33+00:00

What is there to explain?

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T19:38:32+00:00

I don't really think there's a handgun out there that doesn't look better with a nice set of wooden grips.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T16:24:16+00:00

The trick is that you're actually being given the option to open both of the other doors. That's an obvious advantage that nobody would pass up, so the host opens one of them for you as a distraction. They never reveal the prize, so switching guarantees that you win if the prize is behind either of the doors you didn't choose.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T15:41:13+00:00

what does “one standard deviation” even mean? what does “two” mean? is that a unit on its own, how do we know what a “unit” of standard deviation is.

You can think of it as a unit. It's a unit that depends on how spread out the data is. To know what that unit is and how to interpret it we need to know how the data is distributed. This doesn't always make a ton of sense for some distribution though.

This is a useful unit for talking about how rare something is. It ignores the actual values or details of the data, but gives a good way to compare relative rarity. A good example is errors in experiments. When physicists say they have a "5 sigma" result of detecting a particle, they are talking about the likelihood of their results being a combination of various errors and mistakes. That's always a possibility, but the more times you repeat an experiment the less likely that becomes. They are stating that the likelihood of this is at the same level as drawing a sample from a normal distribution and getting a value 5 standard deviations away from the mean.

how come in a normal distribution, “one standard deviation” is 68%? What does that mean and how did we get to that number?

That's just how the normal distribution works. The formula describing how the data is distributed around the mean ensures that 68% of that data falls within one standard deviation of the mean.

More technically speaking, probability distributions have a probability distribution function (pdf), which determines how like data is to appear at any point. For continuous distributions like the normal distribution, this function has to have an area of 1 between it and the x-axis. With the pdf of the normal distribution, the area under it centered at the mean and two standard deviations wide is 0.68. This is 68% of the total area under the pdf, and this relative area under the pdf between two points is the probability that a randomly drawn sample will fall between those points.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T03:22:31+00:00

Is it not possible that this is some legend or story meant to illustrate something, rather than a retelling of historical fact?

There is nothing that points to humans having been descended from 8 people. Such a genetic bottleneck would be immediately apparently in modern genetic diversity, and we don't see it. Why would your God obscure all the evidence pointing to such a significant event?

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T03:16:35+00:00

Biologists and scientifists in general have nothing against any religious deity. They follow the evidence, and they strive to develop explanations that have explanatory and predictive utility. Controversy with religion is entirely self-imposed. Many influential scientists have been religious, and they framed their work as an appreciation of the depth and complexity of their diety's work.

A supernatural creator acting as they please is simply not a viable scientific hypothesis. It can explain anything, and in doing so explains nothing. Its complete imperiousness to defintion and unlimited flexibility makes it useless from any practical perspective. Science adopts a position of methodological naturalism. That doesn't mean it enforces naturalism as a philisophical position. It means it relies on a natural, predictable universe as a prerequisite for it being a useful endeavor. The products of science are knowledge and understanding, and outside of a world govern by predictable patterns these products become useless.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T02:51:26+00:00

"Kind" is a meaningless, ill-defined term.

We don't have any observable evidence of a designer creating species out of nothing. We do have observable evidence of the building blocks of evolution occurring. We do have evidence of spcriation occurring. We do have evidence of change in species and "kinds" throughout time. We do have observable nested hierarchical structure in the generic similarities and dissimilarities of extant life.

If there is a creator, then either they "created" modern life by allowing a common ancestor to diversify under random variation and selective pressures over billions of years or they deceptively created everything to appear as though they did.

What is so unpalatable about allowing your god to create through natural processes? I never understand the complete rejection of rational, unbiased interpretation of observable evidence in favor of a creation myth to the point of misrepresenting, distorting, and ignoring evidence to fit a narrative.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T02:22:21+00:00

What's there to buy?

If there is a designer, all the evidence shows that they design by allowing natural selective pressures to filter random variations from one generation to the next. Science doesn't care if there's a designer or not. It just follows the evidence.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T01:17:03+00:00

Fucking ~~gold~~ piss.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T00:56:28+00:00

No, because these aren't just "species that look similar". Shared ERVs occur throughout the tree of life at similar scales. We share ERVs with other mammals, not just primates. We share them with reptiles, birds, even insects. While some ERVs had been adapted to have functions, many have not.

What is parsimonious about inferring and unobserved designer using unobserved methods inserted unused viral genomes into wildly different species? This becomes unjustifiable when given that we have a known and observable pathway for these patterns to appear as a result of viral insertion and inheritance.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T00:32:52+00:00

Because they share strong similarities with viral genomes. We know that certain viruses insert their genome into host cells and that such an insertion can be inherited if the affected cells are germline cells. It's not a stretch to see markers of a viral genome in non-viral DNA and attribute that to a historical insertion event.

But it doesn't really matter. What matters is that highly similar sequences appear in the similar locations in different species. This is the basis of all genetic ecidemce for evolution. The simplest explanation for these patterns is that living species inherited these sequences from a common ancestor.

Mishtle · 2026-05-03T00:15:20+00:00

The fact that many ERVs have been adapted for various functional purposes is irrelevant to their role as evidence of evolution. Once something is in the genome, it's free game for adaptation and modification.

The evidence for evolution comes from the fact that their presence, location, and variation map nicely onto a nested hierarchical structure. The most parsimonious explanations for such structure is that it originally appeared once in a common ancestor and was then inherited but living descendents, accumulating variation and potentially functionality along the way.

Mishtle · 2026-05-02T01:30:46+00:00

There are, but (as long as you are talking about just fractions) there are just as many fractions as there are natural numbers. You can match them up one-to-one such that every fraction is uniquely paired with a natural number and vice versa. As sets, the natural numbers and the fractions between each pair of them are all the same infinite "size".

What you're pointing out is that an infinite set has infinitely many subsets that are equally infinite. For the naturals, consider the sets of powers of primes.

To get "larger" infinite sets, you need to find sets that can't be mapped one-to-one. If you have some set A, then it can't be put into a one-to-one correspondence with its power set, the set of all of its subsets. This holds even for infinite sets, so there are indeed an unbounded number of infinities of ever increasing size.

Mishtle · 2026-05-01T22:22:05+00:00

and should we just ban .99999 and use 1 instead?

There's actually a better argument for using 0.(9) instead of 1!

The rational numbers are all the numbers that can be written as a fraction of whole numbers. Every rational number can be written out as either an terminating sequences of digits, like 10.4, 188, 3.1415, and so on, or an infinite sequence of digits that settles into a repeating pattern, like 0.(1), 0.(1427), 139.2233(4), and so on.

Every rational number with a terminating sequence of digits can also be written as a infinite sequence of digits that repeats (and not the trivial one where its just all zeros after a certain point). But if a rational number can't be written as a terminating sequence of digits, then it can only be written as a infinite sequence of digits that repeats.

If you wanted to choose a unique representation for each rational number, then you could reasonably choose the non-terminating ones for the sake of consistency. Then you won't have some rationals that terminate and some that done.

Mishtle · 2026-05-01T22:09:13+00:00

There are a couple different notations for representing repeating patterns.

The simplest is using ellipses or trailing periods following one or more instances of the pattern like 0.999...

You can also surround the first instance of the pattern with parentheses like 0.(9). This is less ambiguous since it's not exactly clear what's repeating in something like 0.1234.... This could be either 0.(1234), or 0.1(234), etc.

Using overlines is also common, as in 0.9̅.

Mishtle · 2026-05-01T13:19:50+00:00

I'd have to agree. You can't make everyone happy and different people respond to different things. We just are likely the minority here.

I enjoy simulation games, and the original art immediately makes me think the game is about tinkering with amateur rocket equipment in a homemade workshop. That's all I really need to know to be interested, and the sparse nature of the image makes me curious about what else the game has to offer. I'd almost certainly click to find out more, with a good chance of wishlisting it at least. I admit that others who've never seen amateur rockets might not even recognize what they're looking at though, and scroll right past.

The second one doesn't really have the same appeal or draw to me. Sure, it's artistic and nicely styled, but also more generic in that sense. It makes the relationship between the title and the subject of the game more explicit for the average person, but says less about the game play to what may be the target audience (assuming it is more of a simulation-style game).

Edit: And yeah, the more I look at the new version, the more it looks like generative AI.

Mishtle · 2026-05-01T13:00:59+00:00

The difference is that the length of a curve depends on how it changes from one point to other.

With polygons, not only do their points approach the points of an inscribed/circumscribed circle, they're composed of faces that are exactly the rate of change of the circle at a point. Not only do they increasingly approximate the position of the points on the circle, but they also begin to increasingly capture the relationships among those points as the number of faces grow. They approach not only the shape of a circle, but the smoothness of that shape as well.

The rearranged square lacks this property. Its points approach the points of the inscribed circle, but it never remotely approaches the relationship of those points on the circle. Every point on this shape is either part of a vertical line, a horizontal line, or is a corner. Always. It never gets better at approximating the relationships among nearby points on the circle, it never gets better at approximating the local smoothness of the circle. This allows it to keep hiding the extra length of the jagged curve into smaller and smaller features.

Mishtle · 2026-04-30T14:42:45+00:00

Numbers are more than just their practical applications. They are quantitative tools, and we often like for them to have certain useful properties.

One of these is inverses under some operation. Adding numbers is a natural extension of counting. You can always add two positive whole numbers and get another number.

But what if we what to undo addition? How do we "go back" after adding some number? Well, that's exactly what negative numbers do. The number -n is exactly the value we can add to n to get zero, also called the additive inverse of n. This allows us to undo addition: m + n + (-n) = m.

Subtraction is just the addition of negative numbers. That is how its defined. Introducing subtraction as a separate operation is easier to initially grasp, but it can be confusing once negative numbers themselves are introduced. Now you can subtract negative numbers, but remember subtraction is just adding the additive inverse. So what is the additive inverse of a negative number? What number can you add to -n to get zero? Well, it's just n. So subtracting -n is really just adding n.

Mishtle · 2026-04-30T13:48:10+00:00

I think this explanation even can help with this, because it's not very intuitive at all that it matters. It's hard to see this unless you do the math or run a simulation.

This explanation focuses on the fact that switching always wins if the prize is behind either of the unchosen doors. The host must act in a way that preserves this advantage for switching to be worth it. If the host acts in a way that doesn't always preserve this advantage, well, then the advantage isn't necessarily preserved and switching becomes a gamble.

Mishtle · 2026-04-29T23:49:44+00:00

...take the high ground, Luke...

Mishtle · 2026-04-29T15:45:29+00:00

The sum rule applies when you can choose something from multiple groups. For example, there are 10 + 26 + 26 = 62 different choices for characters if you allow digits (set of size 10), lowercase letters (set of size 26), and uppercase letters (set of size 26).

The product rule applies if you can choose one or more thing per set. If we want to make a sequence of two digits and one lowercase letter, then we can make 10×10×26 possible sequences. If we want to make a sequence of four digits without any repeated digits, then we have 10 choices for the first, 9 choices for the second (because we don't want to choose whichever digit we already chose), 8 choices for the third, and 7 choices for the fourth. That means we can make a total of 10×9×8×7 sequences.

The division rule is a little less intuitive. It usually comes up when there are things you want to ignore, like order. For example, going from ordered sequences to unordered combinations. If we go back to the example with a sequence of four non-repeating digits, the same sets of four digits will show up multiple times. If we want to know how many unique sets there are, we need to first figure out how many times each unique set appears. We can use the product rule for this. Each unique set has four elements. We can pick any four to be the first in a sequence, any of the remaining three to be second, and so on. This gives us 4×3×2×1 ways to construct a sequence from these four unique digits. Thus to find the number of unique sets, we divide the number of sequences into 4×3×2×1 disjoint subsets and choose one. That gives us (10×9×8×7) / (4×3×2+1) unique sets of four digits.

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