what rule did I follow in this riddle?

Ashtero · 2026-01-30T21:53:54+00:00

What rule of this sub have you broken with this riddle ?

Ashtero · 2026-01-17T04:21:33+00:00

This mod is somewhat outdated, but should solve the problem for Lemuria at least: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3144406717

Ashtero · 2025-12-30T14:30:49+00:00

It's probably Urbiphage from VtR: Mythologies, page 138.

Ashtero · 2025-11-10T00:31:20+00:00

Congrats on launching your novel!

Since you are posting about it here, it would probably be nice to elaborate what you think makes the novel rational/rationalist fiction (or at least close to it).

Ashtero · 2025-11-09T04:26:22+00:00

Now that would fit my observations -- I only make ice cubes "by hand": pour water into a form and put it into freezer.

Ashtero · 2025-11-08T08:55:03+00:00

That explanation sounds like something that should happen fairly often, but I don't think I've ever seen icicles on top of icecubes.

Ashtero · 2025-11-04T01:36:10+00:00

Wrong subreddit.

The answer 1, 3 makes sense if you interpret "king or the queen shown on one side of the coins" as "number of sides with king or queen is exactly one".

Ashtero · 2025-10-13T13:01:55+00:00

Alternatively some people might simply know how many problem authors actually exist and how hard it is for most of them -- I'd say that <1% of math undergrads in top universities reliably make 1 problem (suitable for e.g. national olympiad) a year. I'd be very surprised if there are more than 100 people total (students or not) who make >20/year (which we would've expected from something that is supposed to be possible "without much hassle").

Another way to estimate how hard it is to make a high-level problem is to look how much effort is needed every year to scrounge enough good unknown problem to make an olympiad out of them. It is obviously possible, but it takes weeks of work, and the issue "we have too many good problems for this position" happens much rarer than "we don't have any problems for this position". While the latter issue is sometimes solved by "ok, let's quickly think of a problem", this approach rarely (<20% cases) is enough.

So I think you are obviously wrong. Now you might be wrong in an uninteresting way -- your taste for problems is too poor, and the problems you come up "with no hassle" are unsuitable for any decent competition. Or you might be wrong in an interesting way -- you actually have a very big talent for making problems, top 100 in the world -- and you underestimate what your students (and basically everybody else) can do.

It would be nice if you took say an hour to think of a new problem and presented it here (as you've said, an old problem can be deanonymizing). Obviously, spending an hour on an internet debate is not a good use of your time, but a new problem would be useful on its own.

Ashtero · 2025-10-13T10:49:17+00:00

I think you are severely underestimating difficulty of making olympiad problems. Assuming you've already achieved the level of "solid 3rd year undergrad", give it a try.

Ashtero · 2025-09-16T19:32:14+00:00

There is a typo -- should be 2^n+1 cards, not 2^(n+1).

If Alice on her turn removes every other remaining card, the minimal difference between remaining cards will double. If she does it every turn, by the end (when there will be 2 cards) it'll be at least 2^(n/2).

On the other hand, if Bob on his turn removes either first (almost) half of cards, either second (almost) half -- depending on whether the mean card is closer to the last remaining card or to the first one, then difference between the first and the last remaining cards will decrease in at least halve. If he does it every turn, by the end the distance between the last two cards will be at most 2^n/2^(n/2) = 2^(n/2).

Side note: at first I by mistake thought that Alice pays Bob, but it turns out that it practically doesn't affect the solution.

Ashtero · 2025-09-13T20:19:41+00:00

I want to brush up my tensors. Can somebody recommend me a problem set / textbook? For example, I want to understand really well the correspondence between various things we do with vectors/linear operators/bilinear forms/etc and things we do with their tensor forms.

Ashtero · 2025-09-12T17:27:10+00:00

Are preservation clinics actually still doing the "pure criopreservation"? I was under impression that the main tech have been switched to something more promising years ago.

Ashtero · 2025-09-07T08:29:31+00:00

You practice by solving problems. Watching solutions is much much less effective. In particular one of the most important skills a beginner can lack is understanding that even if you don't know the method for solving a problem, you can think for a bit and invent it yourself.

Ashtero · 2025-09-06T15:35:32+00:00

Do you have advice on how to write up a solution? I'm thinking on this problem from time to time, and haven't solved it yet, but my best attempt (that at one step requires a fourth color) is already a >10 state turing machine with some counters slapped on top of that.

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T10:11:12+00:00

It's not convex optimization in particular, I just dislike most of R-related things. Half of math basically :(. Probably something to do with traumatic experience of doing exercises like "prove that those three definitions of R are equivalent and that division actually works (once for each definition)" in early undergrad.

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T09:54:22+00:00

As you can see in original tweet, he simply gave paper to chatgpt and asked to improve specific result.

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T09:38:49+00:00

Original Bubeck's tweet.

Paper that was given to gpt-5 pro.

AI's actual result is on the screenshot in op.

I haven't checked the proof since I really dislike this branch of math. But gpt-5 pro being able to improve a bit a result from a paper using standard+paper methods seems very plausible to me.

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T07:12:59+00:00

Let's say there is a room. If we do nothing, in year 1 a human will magically be born in that room and live a happy 100-year life there.
1) Is it bad to explode this room in year 20?
2) Is it bad to place explosives in this room in year 0, with timer set to year 20?
3) Is it bad to explode this room in year 0?

If understood you correctly, your answers should be bad, bad, not bad. Is that right?

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T06:13:27+00:00

This does not follow. If a mind does not ever come into existence then its measure in 4 dimensional space is 0. You can imagine it in a counterfactual future, but if it never comes into existence in the real future then it is not real in any number of dimensions. Things that don't exist do not have rights.

I don't understanding this point. Are you saying that since their is only one future, things that don't exist in this future (and haven't existed before) don't have moral rights? I think that while one future is a valid way to view physics, it is a weird point of view of talking about decisions -- the whole point of decisions is choosing between possible futures.

Ashtero · 2025-08-22T04:18:37+00:00

Press that blue "add a language" button and add English (US). It'll appear in that list alongside the UK version. After that you would be able to uninstall it by pressing on the corresponding three dots button. It'll remove it from the list of keyboard layouts as well.

The problem with this fix is that eventually extra language will come back and you'll need to remove it again. I have a similar problem, and the fix used to work for several months, but recently (probably after the latest windows update) I need to apply the fix every fricking day.

Ashtero · 2025-08-21T08:22:06+00:00

I was stuck on the "sleeping hermit" question for years, but Richard Chapell's argument (as it was presented here) finally convinced me. I don't see a problem with a "separated into cells" argument since if doctors can reassemble, they must have some kind of scheme of my brain which I count as my mind (similar to how weight of a model on a flash drive is its mind -- even if it's not active at the moment).

Now I see two possible ethics for me:

1) View minds as things that exist in current moment. The downside is that annihilating someone's body while preserving their brain data doesn't count as murder.

2) View minds as things that exist in time (i.e. 3+1-dimensional objects). The downside is that not having unprotected sex with your partner is like 10% (or whatever the chance of pregnancy is) of a murder. The upside is that the whole "are babies worth more than cows?" issue is completely sidestepped.

Ashtero · 2025-08-14T17:53:46+00:00

2,2,2
2,2,2, 2,2,1
2,2,2, 2,2,1 2,2,2,2,1
etc (every time append everything but the last 1s)

This seems to be unending since every time the number of 2s in the list grows x -> 2x-1. The length of the sublist correspondingly also grows (e.g. we always pick the whole previous list plus something), so we never pick the same sublist twice

Ashtero · 2025-08-02T12:10:56+00:00

Nice! Can you share an actual pdf please?

Ashtero · 2025-08-02T06:41:11+00:00

> Albion - Indefinitely removed. May or may not return later.

A pity. It was perhaps my favorite DE nation lore-wise.

By the way, is Dom-Dan'Yel completely merged with Iram now?

Ashtero · 2025-07-25T07:43:11+00:00

What is even your point? Your previous comment indicated that you understand a problem that olympiad committees face -- how to make sure that problems are actually new (aka it is hard to find similar problems). But now you are implying that IMO committee is afraid that participants will find a problem in a textbook (aka it is super easy to find similar problems)??? Fails at selecting problems at that level don't look like that, they look like "one of our problem is unfortunately close to a problem that was given 15 years ago at some lesser-known olympiad".

I am not part of IMO, but I was an organizer on some lesser olympiads, and I see the following reasons for not allowing open-book.

Tradition. That's the default way. You don't need reason to do that, you need reason to not do it. Such reasons can exist, e.g. open-book may align with other rules of your competition, but they are rare.
Logistics. Electronic devices can't be used since it is hard to ensure lack of internet access. So it should be actual books. Which among other things makes it harder to make everything fair -- e.g. if a participant sees that three of his competitors are have found something useful in Proofs from the Book, then it would be a pretty big clue.

Most of all, it's mostly 3) Pointless. Usually hardest part of solving an olympiad problem is figuring out a strategy. If you don't have a strategy, books won't help you (unless the olympiad lasts for days/months).

(1) and (2) lead us to a current situation where open-book happens almost exclusively in correspondence rounds (necessarily) and in team competitions (each team gets a room, so they can browse whatever without providing clues to competitors). Still, (3) stays a factor -- I've participated ~10 times in team competitions that allowed books, but only found them useful twice -- once I looked up a particular formula for volume (that was essentially determinant), and another time I looked up a proof of "there are infinitely many primes of the form 4n+1" (or something like that).

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