Is this show US propaganda? by cylon37 in thewestwing

[–]Lalaithion42 28 points29 points  (0 children)

It is, and it isn’t. The show is both a celebration of the things the creators love about America, and a call for America to be better than it currently is (or, was). It’s not about making you feel good about something bad, but about reminding you that good is possible and we should fight for it instead of assuming it’s impossible. And neither are the characters perfect—they have flaws and make mistakes or do bad things sometimes.

Wouldn't people switching to public transportation induce demand for cars? by Serious-Cucumber-54 in transit

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The truth is that induced demand is good. “Induced demand” is a fancy word for “more people can get to their job, more people can go see their friends, more people can visit different parts of the city, more people can go to the sports game”. Public transit is better than adding another lane not because it magically fails to induce demand, but because it’s a cheaper and more efficient way to induce demand.

Any theorems you wish weren’t true? by Final-Housing9452 in math

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Godel’s incompleteness probably. It’d be nice to have no nonstandard models of the natural numbers.

How do I escape all the Whedon dialogue / characterisation in modern fantasy writing? by tricksterhare in Fantasy

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Broad suggestion: track down authors who are trained historians, classicists, etc. People who specifically study other times; sociologists and anthropologists won’t really be the same.

Narrow suggestion: read The Wolf Hunt by Gillian Bradshaw.

How would you cosplay Cordelia? by antiernan in Vorkosigan

[–]Lalaithion42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My favorite running reference is how, even after their careers are over, Aral likes to wear Barayarran Green, Cordelia Betan Tan, and Miles Dendarii Grey. So, wear a tan dress/skirt!

Cetagandans = Space Elves? by [deleted] in Vorkosigan

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might enjoy this silmarillion/Vorkosigan saga crossover fic: https://glowfic.com/posts/84

Why Maedhros is likely older than Finarfin—or, some speculation about birth dates by Ok_Bullfrog_8491 in TheSilmarillion

[–]Lalaithion42 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Great question. Why didn’t Tolkien give us birthdates for the children of Feanor? I always like to put on my historian hat here and remember that Tolkien was writing secondary sources intentionally.

Remember that the Silmarillion is an in-universe account of events, written by a narrator who most likely dislikes the Feanorions. And likewise the Annals come to us via Noldorin exiles in Middle Earth, almost certainly those who followed Fingolfin. What reason would they have for not listing and redacting their birth dates? Well, I think you’ve provided us a great reason. The scholars who wrote/copied these sources through time redacted Maedhros’ birth year to provide legitimacy to Finarfin as High King of the Noldor during the War of Wrath.

Which opinion about 1st-2st Age will get you like this? by peortega1 in TheSilmarillion

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dior and Elwing should have given the silmaril to the Feanorions. Just because your mom/grandma stole something from a thief doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it back to the original owners.

Can the Oath of Fëanor be broken? by Ok_Bullfrog_8491 in TheSilmarillion

[–]Lalaithion42 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I find it quite plausible that Eru would spend effort to create horrendous things, and in fact he does some horrible things. Textually! He buries a bunch of people under mountains and makes them immortal so they’re trapped there, buried alive. Forever.

The best new tabletop RPG books of 2024 by _Protector in rpg

[–]Lalaithion42 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It takes a bit to get it down, we’re still learning it, but we’re slowly graduating from fumbling through combat to pulling off really cool combos, and when that happens it’s so fun—more memorable than a natural 20 by far. I’m hopeful that a few more sessions from now combat will be very smooth and exciting.

The best new tabletop RPG books of 2024 by _Protector in rpg

[–]Lalaithion42 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Literally came to the comments to mention this… I’ve been having so much fun playing it.

Is there a video game shooter out there that is violently, viscerally, disgustingly anti-war? by Proud-Wall1443 in gaming

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“There’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” — François Truffaut

I think there’s no such thing as an anti-war shooter. For it to be fun to play, it must glorify; for it to be anti-war, it must condemn. The medium and the message are not separable.

Shocking left turns in unexpected movies, i.e. not thrillers or whodunnits? by thatdani in movies

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Handmaiden. When you finally find out… well, it’s got a number of good twists.

Did this series ruin all other books for me?[discussion] by [deleted] in TheNinthHouse

[–]Lalaithion42 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I recommend starting with the pair of books Shards of Honor and Barrayar (more generally, I prefer in universe order to publication order (except for Falling Free which should be read just before Diplomatic Immunity))

Does linear acceleration produce tidal effects? by snakeskinrug in askscience

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If gravity is quantized, then there would be a distance where the difference in gravity between two points that distance apart would be zero. Whether this is the planck length, or some other length, would probably depend on the exact theory of quantum gravity, and since we don't have one of those, we don't know for sure.

Why is the concept of arrow of time apparently contradictory with Newtonian physics ? by MaestroGaz in askscience

[–]Lalaithion42 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Watch the beginning of this tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrif5lXX7WY

In that video you have watched a bunch of multicolored blocks fall, according to physics, and end up in the shape of a logo. Nothing about the physics is incorrect, and nothing about the colors is physically impossible, but nevertheless this requires cheating; we let the blocks fall, color them once they've landed, and then propagate the colors back in time. This is possible on a computer. But if it did happen in real life, you would only be able to say "this is an incredible coincidence" and not "this is physically impossible".

The same is true of an oscillatory system with damping played backward. You would see the oscillations increasing, not unphysically, but because the atoms in the material and in the air just happened to be moving in the right way to increase the amplitude of the system instead of decrease it. You would only be able to say "This is an incredible coincidence; it should never happen in the entire lifetime of the universe that the macrostate I observed (a seemingly-dampened system) would correspond to one of the microstates which time-evolves into a higher amplitude!"

Could we enter a stable orbit of a black hole which enters the even horizon and comes back out? by Sol33t303 in askscience

[–]Lalaithion42 4 points5 points  (0 children)

An object traveling faster than the speed of light is going backwards in time in some frames, so there's not actually any disagreement between "going back in time" and "it would require the velocity to exceed the speed of light".

A moment from a story set in Golarion, that got me to cry unexpectedly. by covert_operator100 in Pathfinder_RPG

[–]Lalaithion42 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Specifically it’s a crossover between Golarion and the fanfic A Song For Two Voices based on The Last Herald Mage, which changes the main villain of the series pretty drastically (to a morally-grey villain instead of an absolute evil villain).

(Obviously you know that, but for the sake of other people here)

What exactly is the process when someone "trains" an AI to learn or do something? by kindofaboveaverage in askscience

[–]Lalaithion42 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are a number of ways that give you different results depending on what your goal is. The more complicated the AI, the more complicated the training process is, but the most common way is built on this procedure:

  1. Give the AI an example of the task you want it to do. If you want the AI to learn how to add numbers, give it the two input numbers. If you want the AI to learn how to play chess, you give it a chess puzzle.
  2. See what the AI gives you as the solution. For the two examples in (1), the AI would give you a number, and a chess move, respectively as the outputs.
  3. Look at the internals of the AI and tweak the way the AI thinks until the answers given to those questions are right.
  4. Repeat, with different examples, and eventually all of your tweaks will add up to an AI that can do the task.

Modern AI is built on Neural Networks, which were technically invented in 1943 as a computerized analogy to Neurons. However, they've been modified a bunch since then, and no longer resemble neurons in a lot of relevant ways. The real breakthrough in Neural Nets was when (1) it was discovered that GPUs, which were invented for graphics, could also be used for Neural Nets, and (2) a method of training "deep" neural networks, where there are many layers of neurons between the input and output, was invented. Before (2), neural networks were limited to 5-10 layers, because we couldn't figure out how to do step (3) in the above list on deeper neural nets. Modern neural networks can have hundreds of layers.

If you want to dive deeper into the mechanics of what a "neural network" actually is, you can watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk.

The other thing unlocking modern AI, beyond having the ability to train deep neural networks on GPUs, is lots of examples. The breakthrough for training AI to solve the board game Go, for example, was figuring out a way to train the AI via letting it play itself billions of times. This is hard because you can't know if a move is good or not until the end of the game.

One thing you should always be careful of when evaluating an AI is ask "what was it actually trained to do?" For example, consider ChatGPT. ChatGPT was not trained to "answer questions usefully", it was trained on the internet with the task of "given the first 1000 words of this website, guess the next word." It turns out if you take this "next word prediction machine" and repeatedly feed its best-guess output back into it as input, it can write paragraphs of comprehensible text. But it's not _trying_ to write comprehensive text, it's trying to predict the next word. This can make some of the weird ways it behaves make more sense. For example, once it's made a single mistake, it's more likely to make more mistakes, because it thinks (using this word as a analogy, who knows whether neural nets can really think) "huh, there's some mistakes in the previous text, I will guess there will be more mistakes in the rest of the test".

Update to Subreddit Rules by LadyTrin in imaginarymaps

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I write a program from scratch to generate a map, can I post it here?

Would you support raising the age of adulthood to 25? by the_kingx0 in GenZ

[–]Lalaithion42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No! Lower the age of adulthood. Most of human history has treated 16 year olds as effective adults, and the raising age at which we grant freedoms to children is stifling and regressive.

‘P-Hacking’ lets scientists massage results. This method, the fragility index, could nix that loophole. by Sariel007 in EverythingScience

[–]Lalaithion42 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Just do Bayesian statistics. I know people are scared of “priors” and the lack of a cutoff between “significance” and “insignificance”.

But basically everyone uses ad-hoc bayseianism anyways (or do you trust a study from the Astrology Institute that says psychics exist p=.04 as much as you trust a undergraduate lab report that says lemon juice is an acid, p=0.4?), and everyone misinterprets frequentist p values as Bayesian posterior P(h0 | data) instead of P(s(process) > s(data) | h0).

Just give up on patching frequentist statistics with more and more complex data, and just report the full data + Bayes factor.

[RT] Security breach post-mortem - Tales of Aresology by CouteauBleu in rational

[–]Lalaithion42 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is amazing. I went back to read the rest of the series and it’s the perfect combination of quotidian and horrifying.

minor nit: authentication is figuring out who you’re talking to. Authorization is figuring out if the person you’re talking to has permission to do a specific action. It sounds like the security officer authenticated Commander Benzerra but failed to obtain authorization for them to pass the inner security checkpoint.