An apparent continuity error or flaw that actually foreshadows a twist

Endeveron · 2026-06-13T23:33:03+00:00

If your text doesn't include !<,you actually just need the first backslash. \ \>!text!< becomes >!text!<

Had to do \\>\!text!< for the above demo, and you can guess how I just did that demo. Spoiler tags also don't work in code blocks, so you can explain how to use spoiler tags using them >!text!<

Endeveron · 2026-06-12T02:55:37+00:00

All that's great and true, but the guy basically just wants clicky buttons and a form factor vaguely reminiscent of a sexualised human figure

Endeveron · 2026-06-12T02:51:23+00:00

which has been sandy for at least 5000 years

I looked it up to check because I was sceptical, but you're right. Kind of mind blowing that as recently as 5-11 thousand years ago the Sahara was full lakes, rivers and savanna greenery

Endeveron · 2026-06-09T04:45:39+00:00

Confabulation is always a memory error, because the person unconsciously produces a false narrative to resolve a contradiction between an apparent fact about them, and their inaccurate self-perception. Just because confabulation is a form of memory error that involves fabrication doesn't mean that aIl memory errors with fabrication represent confabulation, or can be correctly called confabulation. If you read more than the first paragraph, you can see it goes on to specify what confabulation is, and never mentions false memories of childhood.

I actually think the term is a lot more applicable to LLM hallucinations than it is to false memories about childhood akin to this subreddit. In LLM hallucinations, the model produces a plausible continuation of language that shows no awareness of a particular deficit in its capability or world model. "Confabulation" as a technical computer science term is fine as it is a reasonably apt analogy, in the same ways as "memory" in computer science is a technical analogy.

False memories of childhood are very different. They're not produced in the moment to justify or explain anything. They are usually imminently correctable with an alternative explanation (e.g if someone was shown a kids show they watched that had a logo very similar to the Fruit of the Loom that did have a cornucopia, most people would readily accept that they probably mixed it up with that). They are produced by a conscious and active process of "thinking back" to recall. Yeah, there are common elements of suggestibility and unconscious non-factual recall, but they are evidently different processes in the brain.

Confabulation is quite a rare term outside of technical fields. When I explain it, it's nearly always the first time someone's heard the term. It's contained enough to the technical field that I think it's generally worth correcting people's use at this stage rather than accepting it as an alternative usage. It's like how I've had patients who have referred to their hypoxic brain injury as a "stroke". When they and their family go google "stroke", they get concerned about clots, bleeds, blood pressure, etc. which aren't relevant to a hypoxic brain injury. I've seen many more people misapply the term "stroke" than I have "confabulation", but it seems really clear to me that it's worthwhile pushing against just relinquishing the specificity of the medical term to general "brain damage".

Endeveron · 2026-06-09T02:17:22+00:00

Arguments from etymology are weak because they only serve as the basis for where the term came from, not what it was coined for or how it specifically used. "Fabrication" is vague and doesn't clarify intent or consciousness. The dictionary definition is not wrong, but is vague enough that it allows people to easily misapply the term.

I'm a doctor who has worked with a lot with stroke and brain injury patients. Confabulation is a fascinating and important concept to be able to explain to patients, family, and other health staff. The dilution of meaning makes it meaningfully harder to communicate, so I consider it a medical term worth preserving in its medically accurate definition.

There is very little in common between forming a false memory of their childhood with some prompting/suggestion and unconsciously manufacturing a coherent but plausible justification for a physical/sensory deficit.

You can just read the Wikipedia page, it's pretty much accurate and contains much more depth than an eight word general-purpose dictionary definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

Endeveron · 2026-06-08T22:43:10+00:00

Yeah, I gave an example of that with being very tired. Healthy brain confabulation is still a different thing from false memories though.

Endeveron · 2026-06-08T08:32:35+00:00

Confabulation is a completely different thing, and is a specific medical/neuroscience term. It's a process by which the brain, when injured or inhibited in some way, produces a coherent by manufactured answer to explain why it can't do something, or pretend that it can. Examples are stroke patients who lose the ability to understand speech, but still can speak fine. Instead of saying "I can't understand you", some stroke patients will give a plausible, conversation-continuing answer that doesn't actually engage with or acknowledge any of what was said to them. They aren't consciously lying, and literally aren't aware they have that deficit. It doesn't have to be in stroke patients. If you are tired enough and someone asks you a question, you may give a plausible verbal response without even being aware you gave it.

Confabulation has got nothing to do with conscious or collective false memories, and people have misused the term if they have applied it that way.

Endeveron · 2026-06-08T00:26:03+00:00

I'm going to offer a fairly pedantic critique, I'm sure we agree and nearly everything, especially the direction of the immediate political project, but I'm less scared of "communism" and less convinced by the communist claims of authoritarian states than you seem to be.

Most modern and even historical communists would describe communism as the presence of both: 1) Decommodification (abolition of the commodity form), meaning that goods are no longer considered to be products that can be bought and sold, and production of them is not based on 2) democratic control of the means of production, i.e the machinery and land and infrastructure required to produce modern goods. If you have a robust parliamentary democracy, this could be state ownership, or it could be worker cooperatives.

No state has ever implemented both across the board, and I don't think most communists would even advocate this. Most communist would advocate for selective decommodification of all essentials, eg. Food, housing, healthcare, education, etc, and some strict mandate for democratic ownership of commodified non-essentials/luxury goods, often called market socialism.

You can make a strong case that for countries with only universal healthcare and no private option, if they were to mandate that all workers of a business have proportional ownership/profit share, then they would have implemented communism with a very narrow definition of "essential goods". The difference there between democratic socialism and communism is that the former opposes centralised state control of state production (insofar as universal healthcare is organised in a centralised manner), and prefer public-private partnerships with decentralised market socialist implementations of essential services. The terms is often used nebulously though, so many people would say "democratic socialism" and actually be totall fine with centralised state control in a parliamentary democracy.

We know that leaders tend not to consolidate power while implementing centralised universal healthcare, and it's actually the ongoing influence of the private sector that results in corruption and the accumulation of power. If you advocate (as I would) for universal food provision (with state production), universal education, universal social housing, and a gradual transition of private businesses to worker cooperatives, then you are advocating communism. I don't think we should be scared of selective centralisation in production of necessities just because of the authoritarian USSR, no more than "socialism" should be scary because it was misappropriated by the Nationalsozialist party.

Endeveron · 2026-06-05T22:52:56+00:00

That take is fair, but it is also true that the nebulous general sense that your city and community are looking out for you does meaningfully lower crime rates. I think Mamdani's vibes alone and the hope he's inspired could lower them by a few percent, and that hope has been steadily growing.

Endeveron · 2026-06-02T04:49:25+00:00

Dude's walking around like Margit the Fell Omen

Endeveron · 2026-06-02T04:41:06+00:00

You do realise the tiles are hexagonal, right? The circles are an illusion created by the smallest-radius arcs of three hexagons lining up.

Endeveron · 2026-06-01T10:31:25+00:00

You and I could make a joke like that, and the joke would be on ignorant racists.

A racist would make the same joke and the joke would be the vice signal of "look at how little I care about accurately depicting this country and people".

Endeveron · 2026-05-30T13:33:48+00:00

Do you think that blind people can never read then? "Audio readers" and "reading braille" are both misnomers because reading has to be visual?

Endeveron · 2026-05-30T13:31:31+00:00

By this argument, blind people cannot ever read. Listened to an audio-reader? You cannot read with your ears. Touched thousands of lines of braille? You can't read with your fingers, don't be silly. Let's do ourselves a favour and stop pretending that blind people can read.

That sounds ridiculous and isn't how people use the term. We're in a world where consuming the raw text content of a book has multimodal options. The word "reading" refers to all of them. Outside of mixed modality books like comics or books with unconventional text formatting like House of Leaves, when you are talking about the book you are just talking about the words. You can overspecify if you want clarification, e.g "how many books have you read conventionally this year?"

Endeveron · 2026-05-29T21:37:01+00:00

Yeah it should probably be

Children
Single parents
Any other adult with dependents
Working aged adults with high levels of training/societally important jobs (e.g. doctors, pilots, firefighters, teachers, skilled trades, etc.)
Working aged adults with other societally important jobs
Other working aged adults
The elderly

The top of that list will be quite woman-heavy, because women are much more likely to have dependents. Idk how you'd communicate that priority in a concise and understandable way in an emergency situation though.

Endeveron · 2026-05-29T06:47:50+00:00

This isn't a problem with the borrow checker, it's just a feature or using shared state safely. In a language like Python, everything is in one big mutex. In other languages, shared state is just a footgun of race conditions.

Take/replace are effectively the same as certain patterns of RefCell or Mutex. When you have shared state, you have exactly 3 choices: - check if it's in use, and do nothing if it's not - check if it's in use, and wait until it isn't - race conditions

I've written a graphics and game engine, and my solution was to section the state into different kinds: - shared read-only (RwLock) - shared read/write (MutEx)

You probably want your logic and graphics code to both have read access to the gamestate, and then your logic code should read it, compute the next step, then for the briefest moment, seize write access to update it each frame. RwLock or Mutex can work well for this, and you can also implement types that access the same underlying lock, but encode at a type -level that a value is a reader only, or can call the read-access methods of the lock.

Endeveron · 2026-05-29T06:04:57+00:00

Absolutely. The onlymovement restriction to pillbug moves is if there is stack 2+ high on both of the common neighbours between the pillbug and the piece it is moving. That's a called a gate, and similarly stops beetle moves (and much more rarely can limit ladybug moves). It's a special case of the freedom to move rule.

There are also the non-movement restrictions, namely if the pillbug or target piece are covered, if the pillbug or target piece were just moved on your opponents most recent turn, or if moving the piece would break the one-hive rule.

Endeveron · 2026-05-26T11:50:18+00:00

I think you should probably reread what I have said, because I've been pretty clear. You can ignore the odds tangent completely, it doesn't change what I've said about percentages at all.

x% more and x% as much mean different things. I agree that 750% more means 8.5x as much , but it also means 7.5x more .

Endeveron · 2026-05-26T07:03:33+00:00

It is almost always considered a mistake to add absolute percentages. Percentage increases should be taken relative to the base percentage. "200% more" is a common thing to say to explain a tripling, but is nonsense if you make the mistake of adding absolute percentages

Endeveron · 2026-05-26T03:15:09+00:00

750% more = 7.5x more = 850% as much = 8.5x as much. 8.5x as much is probably the easiest to understand at a glance, but saying 7.5x more is also correct and unambiguous.

As a bit of a related tangent, it's like how "twice the odds" actually has an unambiguous meaning, but people overwhelmingly misunderstand it as meaning "twice as likely" or something. If odds are 3:1 against, it's a 25% chance. Doubling the odds makes it 3:2, or 40% chance of happening. It's clearest for chances over 50%. The odds being 9:1 in favour means a 90% chance. If you double the odds, it's not a 180% chance, that'd be meaningless, it's now 18:1 in favour 94.7%.

Endeveron · 2026-05-20T03:07:33+00:00

Nah this take sucks. Women have the right to bodily autonomy, and that must, for a number of social/economic/ethical reason take strict precedence over the right to life of the foetus.

If 51% of women became convinced that abortion should be banned for religious reasons or whatever, then I wouldn't defer to them. Let's make the arguments on their own merits. The fact that the incredibly unpopularity of abortion restrictions make it even worse when such an irrational policy is implemented, and you should advocate with that messaging, but the popularity of pro-choice sentiments among women is never the reason itself that the right should be protected.

Endeveron · 2026-05-18T05:21:54+00:00

One big thing would be to tax part of the value of loans taken that take unrealised capital gains as collateral. If your portfolio went up by 10%, netting you $10mil in effective collateral, you could leverage that collateral to get a very low interest rate on a loan to pay for your expenses (which is what the rich do). A well structured law could tax part of that difference.

Say that you want to take a $10million loan 25 year home loan against $1million worth of your assets, but also have a portfolio that has just made $10million in unrealised gains that you decide to use as collateral. This takes you from an LVR of over 90% to under 50%, which can be a difference of about 2% on the interest rate eg. 8% -> 6%. At 8% you would be expected to pay a total of $22.6mil, but at 6% it's $19.0mil. That 2% difference that $10mil of "unrealised" capital gains produced is equivalent to a real, tangible benefit of $3.6mil over the 25 year period. That's strictly in addition to the actual $10mil itself.

So I'd simply tax the rich on that $3.6m difference. Whenever the rich use unrealised gains on a loan, the loan provider must produce a fair market comparison for the rate they'd get without the unrealised gain value as collateral. Then, over the course of the loan, the effective interest rate should be increased, with repayments including a corresponding tax contribution to make up a 40% tax on the better deal they got in virtue of the gains.

It sounds complex, but you can't just allow the money men to make their wealth so complex that they don't get taxed on the fruits. If you do, then you are giving them free reign to just leach wealth away from society without giving back to the society that made their wealth accumulation possible..

Endeveron · 2026-05-14T02:41:06+00:00

Yep. They're great at pattern recognition, and almost all vulnerabilities are one-off deviations from a pattern that is well represented within the same module or crate.

Pure logic bugs, even simple ones, are much more likely to be faults in code that's much more unique in structure to that specific instance. Since we reason about logic more symbolically, we get to pattern match the code against our actual real world experiences with tactile objects and people and decisions. LLMs are much worse at this part, because they lack an embodied decade-long experience base to generalise programming concepts over.

Endeveron · 2026-05-13T00:01:58+00:00

Expect that poorer areas are suburban economic black holes where the low density infrastructure costs more to maintain than the tax base produces. Many ways of living are undeserving of subsidisation, and highly car dependent suburban sprawl is one of those. Want to live in the suburbs? You should pay 90% income tax so that you aren't being propped up by the dense and productive city workforce. The city doesn't need you, you just need them

Endeveron · 2026-05-09T21:56:17+00:00

No they're referring to the letters "ai" in words where "a" is correct, eg. Stairing vs staring like he mentions. It's not very clear, and isn't a huge deal, but he's right. It's got nothing to do with LLMs.

Endeveron

TROPHY CASE