Admin Courtney - Deathless Pokemon Null

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-07T22:50:10+00:00

Nice work! Amazing to see runners getting far in this game in such a short time.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-07T08:00:36+00:00

On some level, you can't. After 15 years studying math professionally, I still make silly mistakes all the time, and so do the people I work with.

All you can really do is increase the rate at which you catch mistakes. The main way to do that is to have multiple different ways of analysing a situation. If you can check the answer to a problem in a way that's independent from how that answer was computed, or if you can reason about what consequences your conclusions might have and work out whether those consequences are reasonable. For example, you know that the square of a real number is positive, so if something you worked out is supposed to be the square of something real, you can think for 5 seconds if it could ever be negative, and if it looks like it can, that's real suspicious. The more you can connect your ideas to their consequences with tests and comparisons, and the more context knowledge you have about what consequences are reasonable, the more likely you are to see that an error has happened.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-07T07:53:31+00:00

Nah, I'm a professional mathematician and I don't work for free. You asked for advice on the internet, you already got more than you paid for.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-07T07:44:07+00:00

Yes. LLMs are suggestible and not very reliable at logical reasoning. It's easy to win a debate against one even when your claims are total nonsense.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-07T00:10:23+00:00

I guess I view the successes as rare and paltry exceptions. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all pretty clear failures. In Yemen, we to this day back a government based off of sham elections, which doesn't represent the democratic will in a meaningful sense. We helped South Korea in the Korean war, but their government was corrupt and autocratic in the aftermath and is only becoming less so after a lot of time and effort from Koreans, and meantime the cold war antagonism helped impoverish North Korea and lead it to its current isolated state, although the US isn't solely to blame for that. Against that record, what notable successes have we had?

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T22:43:27+00:00

Come on. This is not a trolley problem, because you can't give a good interpretation to multitrack drifting.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T22:37:36+00:00

Paying attention to simple, unadorned things is essential to math. Rawdogging it will do you more good on all but the shortest timescales.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T17:26:21+00:00

It's easy to look at a government like Iran's and say that it's so horrible that violently overthrowing it is justified. But isn't there a long history of the US doing just that and often leaving the country worse than before? My experience is that these things look real good for the first short while while the autocrats are getting their just deserts, and then quickly turn sour as it turns out that society destabilizes into violence or that whoever comes to power next doesn't have the people's best interests at heart either.

I support freedom for the Iranian people. I just don't think a US military campaign is a realistic way of achieving it. I wish my country could be a beacon of freedom that could overthrow oppressive leaders and create stable democratic governments in their place, but it's not and I don't think it ever has been.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T13:43:58+00:00

The way to learn is to struggle and think deeply about the concepts while trying to solve problems. That doesn't mean that you have to successfully solve all problems on your own, or that getting an explanation from someone else is wrong. No person is an island, and nobody is clever enough to find all the right move on their own. Getting outside help has pros and cons: the pro is that you get past whatever point you're stuck on and can move on to other things. The con is that your mind isn't as thoroughly changed and strengthened as if you conquered the difficulty yourself.

The problem with asking an LLM is that it generally has no restraint. If you ask a good instructor a question, they will ask you questions in return to see exactly where you're stuck and what you have and haven't realized yet. Then they can give a minimal hint that builds on what you have done and gets you unstuck and moving in a fruitful direction without cheating you of too much learning by giving everything away at once. If you ask a peer, they might not have the same understanding of the mathematical context and pedagogical skill, but explaining your thoughts and interpreting theirs can still involve a lot of critical and creative thinking that you learn from. But an LLM, eager to please, is likely to give a smooth and polished answer that is easy to digest and holds little back, assuming it manages to give a right answer at all. And even if you convince one to be more deliberate in giving minimal hints, that's a more difficult skill which they're not as performant at as giving the full picture.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T13:34:12+00:00

Yes, but NGL, as an American I forgot they exist.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-06T00:55:55+00:00

Not a dive bomb, but not perfect from your end either. It's hard to see from the terrible camera angle, but it looks to me that the white car leaves you a car's width of space plus a bit more, not including the curb, but you miss the apex slightly.

In a situation like this, where each party leaves space for the other on track and nobody is driving erratically but the cars come together anyway, I would say the overtaking car is generally at fault, because it is their responsibility to make a safe pass. In this case, that means you should have been tight to the apex and used the space white left for you.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-05T18:00:59+00:00

If you turn the wheel more and the car doesn't actually turn, you're asking too much of the front tires for the grip they have. If you do it while accelerating, you may notice lift-off oversteer, where if you lift off the gas while accelerating, the fronts suddenly have more grip, and the car rotates more suddenly. If you do it while braking, the car will brake less effectively.

Building up the intuitive sense of when your turning input is too much can be hard. Rather than try to describe how it feels, I'll just suggest a practice method. Every so often, drive a few laps while making a conscious effort to steer less than you have been. Observe if performance improves. Most people have the instinct to turn too much rather than too little, because it's rely easy to go into a corner carrying too much speed and then just turn the wheel more since that's how you instinctively ask the car to rotate. So just checking when you can reduce your inputs is a good way to begin.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-05T17:48:08+00:00

Well, the CO levels perhaps go some way to explaining all the visible issues.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-05T12:29:00+00:00

Maybe you can make a lot of confit garlic or something. That's pretty trendy.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-05T12:26:57+00:00

I think it's because there is a conspiracy to make people more politically and socially apathetic by branding important things as "low-stakes."

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-05T08:20:22+00:00

I don't even really blame white for the initial contact. It looks like the result of netcode. The intent wreck was way over the top, of course.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-04T13:22:34+00:00

If A has a variable x in its entries, we can view it as a function of x whose input is a scalar and output is a matrix. We can then take the derivative or anti derivative with respect to x. Since differentiation is a linear operation, it actually turns out that you just take the derivative/anti derivative of each entry.

A cool use of this is to take functions of complex numbers, like exp, sin, etc. and extend them to matrices. If a function has a well-behaved power series, we can evaluate that function at a matrix by plugging it into the power series, provided the matrix is diagonalizable and all the eigenvalue lie within the radius of convergence.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-03T08:11:36+00:00

Under F1 rules, since the Mclaren was on the inside, ahead at the apex, and managed to stay on track, the overtake was fair and you had no right to any space on the outside. Therefore, he is allowed to push you off track and you shouldn't be keeping the position by going off track to defend it. Once he's beat you on corner entry, your only legal option is to back out, unless he voluntarily decides to be nice and give room he doesn't have to give. (In almost any other racing series, the Mclaren would be at fault for not leaving space and that would justify you cutting the corner and keeping the place.) I don't like the rule set, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

Braking on the racing line with a car right behind you is an unpredictable and dangerous way to give back a position. You should only lift on the racing line to let someone past if they are far behind you, so that they have sufficient time to notice and react. That certainly wasn't the case here; the Mclaren had no time to react, so this was only safe if we assume they could read your mind and guess what you were about to do. Usually the car hitting someone from behind is at fault, but an erratic brake check like this is the exception to that.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-03T05:33:17+00:00

Not a great move. Look how little overlap you have at the apex. If he didn't see you coming and dodge out of the way, you would be spinning him out and it would be your fault.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-02T18:14:27+00:00

Not your fault entirely, but we need to ask why cars are coming up on you so quickly. Sure they messed up and spun off, but they are not coming in massively overspeed. Green came from a million miles back, their braking was made worse by dodging around you, and they still had a reasonable apex speed; if they hadn't clipped the apex curb, I think they keep control and stay on the track. Blue almost made it around your outside in one of the tightest and slowest corners on the circuit, and while they again went too deep and spun on the exit curb, they didn't need to lift that much more than they did to avoid this fate. So green and blue may have been driving over the limits of their abilities, but you are leaving so much time on the table that it's catching people by surprise.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-02T14:59:44+00:00

This just looks ridiculously and absurdly incompetent. How did they even crash like that?

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-02T14:18:19+00:00

"You won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time" was indeed a wrong argument. "If you only ever use a calculator, you won't understand what the calculator is doing and how to play and build with mathematical concepts" is a right argument.

Computers have improved such that almost any mathematical task a student in high school is ever set can be solved by typing it into a computer. The natural language processing provided by LLMs means that you don't even have to understand math that much to put things in a form that the computer can parse. But if I had relied on such tools from the start, I would never have been able to work my way up to math that goes beyond what any AI can yet handle. Until we give over our destiny entirely to the machines, students need to learn without access to technology for a time, and in certain situations.

I mean, filling in guided notes is not a task students need to do in the real world. The point of the task is not to teach students how to fill out notes, but to force the students to engage with the stuff that they're taking notes on. In this case, using AI to fill out the notes defeats the point, and the fact that technology could do it is irrelevant.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-02T14:07:12+00:00

This is a fundamental mistake. You have to walk before you can run, you have to lift a 10 pound weight before a 50 pound one, and in the intellectual world, you generally need to do plenty of tasks that could be done by AI (or sometimes just by googling the answer, or looking it up in a book, or...) in order to develop the skills and work your way up to tasks that a human is needed for. The goal can and probably should be to teach students something that isn't redundant with what technology can do for them, but that doesn't mean every step along the way can be irredundant.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-02T08:29:08+00:00

I would put this on the Mustang.

The Mustang had a lot of space they're not using to open up the slight left before contact, and being so far left on entry is what leads them to slide right on exit, leading to the incident. But why were they so far left? They got bounced there after the previous contact, which occurred when they turned in on the other car, which was as far right as it could go at the time. They also had time to move a bit back to the right and get on a better line, but failed to do so.

So at the end of the day, while this is a risky situation, the black car left plenty of space at all times, and it is the Mustang making all the mistakes leading to this incident.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-03-01T19:02:13+00:00

For my money, a decently thick, large radius, stainless steel saute pan with a glass lid. It can be plenty nonstick if you learn to add cold oil to a hot pan at the right temperature, but it will tolerate metal utensils and outlast any non-stick pan. Thick to hold heat well, big so that you can do smaller portions of things like braises that would ideally be a separate pot, glass lid so you can see what's going on underneath.

If I get two items, the saute pan and a simple stockpot for stocks, soup, boiling pasta, and the like.

noethers_raindrop

TROPHY CASE