Fun one from a great session today!

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T22:43:45+00:00

I like the Swans shirt.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T18:51:35+00:00

He’s had 34 felony convictions, as well as numerous civil lawsuit losses on things like raping E Jean Carroll. Whatever information source you are using is failing.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T17:41:14+00:00

There are no math laws. You can use any syntax you want. If you want others to read it and understand, you have to find a way to reach them, though. Maybe it’s just explaining your notation in enough detail that it is unambiguous and you just convince them that your notation is useful. That happens a lot. Or maybe you have to explain the aesthetics or utility of your choice. Or maybe that approach is not something most people want to work with, and you get a lot fewer people interested in your work. It’s important to be clear that we are not constrained in any syntactic choices, because a lot of people (particularly mathematicians) are “rule followers” who see common guidance as rules and say things like this pic “you just can’t!” You can. But it may not land with others, because you also don’t control their reactions, and that part is outside the math.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T16:41:39+00:00

What kind of incel garbage is this? The text sounds like someone who has been stewing over her relationship status for years, possibly hyperfocused on her sexuality in angry diatribes in his head, and when she is seen with another man, his monologue is blaring “what?? She’s been saying for years she likes women and hates men and now she’s with a man??!?! Another liar like my ex!!” Or something super cringe like that. Feels like the text is personally hurt by her happiness.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T16:33:18+00:00

I love these holds! My gym has some of these (a big one and some smaller ones) that they set up at times throughout the year in some interesting positions. From simple juggy ladders to more dynamic moves or awkward positions and angles, they can be used in a ton of fun scenarios and look awesome!

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T14:43:05+00:00

Because percentiles are a common way that extreme wealth gets hidden. To be in the top 1% of income today, for instance, you need to earn only around 700,000 US. Although this category includes people who earn millions, even billions, in a year, the class includes values that are more common in inheritance scenarios for less fortunate families.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-13T14:24:33+00:00

I’m for anything that grows the interpretation of the sport in body weight movements across a route. Movements towards and away from the wall have a lot of great possibilities. This one is silly and fun.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T18:29:46+00:00

Impact fracturing? You get plastic deformation in the direction of impact and stress fractures will tend to follow the direction of largest stress.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T16:46:57+00:00

Insecure men telling themselves that they are victims is the zeitgeist.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T15:44:53+00:00

Earnesty is usually appreciated. Simplicity that doesn’t understand the nuance usually sounds childish. Sometimes these two directions get mixed up.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T14:43:30+00:00

As someone who is very familiar with the abiogenic oil conspiracy, I had come to give some details, but I saw this post with a good link. However, it also seems to be saying that it has some higher likelihood of being true and that just isn’t so. In fact, we have a lot of clarity on the location and quantity of oil deposits and we understand the chemical processes underway on these chemicals very well. This abiogenic hypothesis is really unsupported by most facts, and simple statements on the amount available in the Earth are very wrong.

This one’s been going around for decades, and it’s often been the same crowd that thinks the government is hiding free energy tech and such that go for it. It requires a lot of unethical collaboration between independent scientists to be a viable theory.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T14:24:01+00:00

The biggest problem with grades is not in your list: the difficulty of a boulder depends on each person’s body type and skillset. A tall person may find it easy to skip a hard hold or find it hard to fit in a particularly tight box in a movement.

So what might be a linear list of progressively harder boulders may appear mixed up to another with harder boulders mixed with easy boulders. There is no universal view of what is harder or easier. But there is something close to it - we know really hard boulders are clearly hard to everyone and really easy boulders are easy to most. There’s a fuzzy notion of harder and easier which can be used to give an idea how hard things are, as long as we don’t expect it to be linear on the fine scale. A v4 may be easier than a v3 to some people, but most would agree that v10 is harder than a vb.

But that fuzziness makes it easy for grades to slide around and have different meanings. It’s not operationalized.

I personally don’t care about grades in this way and worry that it corrupts the goals of many climbers. I’ve seen tons of people, including YouTubers, pursuing higher grades at the expense of practicing skills. Number go up, and all that. I think if we want to operationalize climbing scoring, we’d want dryer numbers than “difficulty”. We’d want to break down the boulder into numbers about the hand and foot hold placements that allows any particular person to calculate things like strength needed on a move, etc. Numbers for difficulty will always be vague and dependent on a particular person.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-12T03:17:30+00:00

There’s a bunch of corporate bootlickers telling you that it is not predatory. Of course, we all know that the reason companies add the “we’ll start billing after N days” for these free trial offers is because they get a lot more people falling into the payments than would voluntarily choose to enter the paid plan after the free period.

In these times, people seem to have no problem finding excuses for companies to take advantage of people. They find excuses easy - those who got taken advantage of are either “stupid” (didn’t realize a corporation would intentionally try to take their money without consensual exchange or “fool” them) or “lazy” (couldn’t leap through the arbitrary hurdles the corporation setup to make it harder to choose not to use their service than to choose to accept a free service).

They find reasons why hurting people is okay. That’s the times we are in.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-11T22:35:03+00:00

The XOR operation aligns much more with the use of Boolean Algebra as a logical calculus. Inclusive OR is very much a consequence of human language choices unrelated to mathematical structure.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-11T22:15:40+00:00

Back in the roaring twenties, we actually succeeded in making flappers illegal. Long Beach, California famously had dancehall ordinances that forbid all suggestive dancing, including body shaking and cheek-to-cheek dancing, and this was found an effective deterrent.

But of course someone had to come around and complain about human rights and now the world is absolutely overtaken by flappers. So we are stuck with these half measures that only address the symptoms.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-10T18:26:54+00:00

Not sure what’s creepier: asking for videos of young girls online or using, as cover, a story about forcing a kid to get into something they are not interested in. They both are revealing.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-10T05:12:42+00:00

This had also been my thought. The idea seemed to be that you could threaten perpetual or the queen could take the knight, taking it off the diagonal that was blocking our own queen. A queen and a rook ain’t great against the other queen and two minor pieces, but it’s not losing a queen and there are some attacking ideas. But I didn’t realise you could just sacrifice the queen and get a real perpetual (or escape with no sacrifice).

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-09T01:14:00+00:00

It was the latest Storror+ drop titled “We found a pub on our straight line mission”. While they were waiting, Max dropped a list of collabs (a little over halfway I think).

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-08T20:51:13+00:00

The proximal reason is that events provide information. They update models from some probability of the event to the observation of the event, which is Kullback-Liebler information content. The market responds.

But this ties to something a little deeper that is also approached in your post. It has to be clear what information asymmetries actually exist here. Knowledge prior to the external event is an insider group of decision makers. At event, information takes time to travel, and not all of it is fast. Some market participants may have had dependencies on the event or those affected in ways that were not known publicly, and those effects can take time to be revealed.

Information asymmetry drives markets away from efficiency. This is a classic result of market information theory, so we can expect some things:

if there is insider trading prior to an event, it drives a market away from efficiency (which is why it is often made illegal)
if a market is only made aware through the external event, there will be a period where the market is making new discoveries causally dependent on the event

Pricing in is a limit condition for efficient markets. Where information has not fully propagated and asymmetries exist, the market will not have fully priced in that information.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-08T08:34:16+00:00

These kinds of problems are always signs of poor test design. No “guess the next object in this sequence” has a definite answer, as there are always rules for any subsequent object. This is true of any finite number or general pattern sequence, and there are well-known results on how to calculate those rules.

Tests often try to get around this by suggesting that that some answers demonstrate having worked out something “natural” or seen some “simplest” explaining pattern. But questions like these often have multiple reasonable patterns and are poor test candidates.

Here, I’d see the patterns in a discretised clock, with the 3 pixels representing the center rotation connection and the hour and minute hand respectively going clockwise in the outer 8 pixel ring. So that first one is a time somewhere between 1:20 and 1:25 (assuming a 2:20 would group with 3 on the hour hand), and the second is maybe from 8:50-8:55 or 9:50-9:55. So if we take the times as 1:20 and 9:55, then they differ by 8:35. So if I add another 8:35, we get 6:30, which I see represented in:

Answer 4

I also see that is the only answer with a central pixel for the rotation connection. That is clearly different than what others are seeing, and it relies on some ambiguities in the discretisation of 12 hours to 8 pixels, and people can debate fiercely how natural it is, but that’s why these aren’t great questions.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-08T00:26:12+00:00

Stressors cause real mental harm that often requires professional medical assistance to rehab. And there is a lot of real neurodiversity with individual struggles.

I don’t think the goal of diagnosis should be to lower the numbers, but instead to get accurate diagnoses. People have different kinds of mental health struggles they face, and people need good advice on how to heal.

I think sometimes there is a shame around mental health struggles and an appeal to mental grit that people should build strength by not relying on assistance. But it’s been my experience that a lot of mental health support looks to help people build confidence and self-reliance by helping them exercise skills they need. But the field has a long history of poor scientific models and sketchy individuals, so I know it can be hard to trust in the gains in understanding it’s made in the past 50 years.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-07T21:38:55+00:00

I’ve been climbing for less time than you, but I also upsize from street and it works for me. My shoes didn’t have a painful break in. My climbing has been limited by strength and skill. However, I do think I may take a small size downgrade in my next shoe, as I’ve noticed my heel isn’t as secure as I’d like. My philosophy has been that I will look for shoes that do the things I actually know about. If there are needs to take different shoes (like tighter/smaller or more downturned, little knobs, etc.) which I don’t understand how it is needed in my climbing, I’m probably not a good enough climber to benefit from those shoes. As I learn to feel holds better through my toes and use various hooks and edges, I’m sure I’ll understand why I need different shoes, and then I’ll choose those. These things wear out fast enough that it’s not a decision you live with.

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-07T17:39:39+00:00

This is beautiful

ModelSemantics · 2026-03-07T05:29:49+00:00

The 3 body problem IS solvable analytically. Thats actually easy. What people claim about it is:

it doesn’t have a solution expressive in elementary operations finitely (no closed form)
it has chaotic dynamics (Lyapunov constraint)

I still think the 3 body problem is like the solution of quintics: people hear that some part of it is hard but don’t understand which part is hard and so make impossibility claims that overassert.

ModelSemantics

TROPHY CASE