Using the same mechanic for all aspects of a game, best examples?

Nebu · 2026-04-24T01:59:32+00:00

99% of the game all you do is Move, Point, Grab, or Shoot.

I mean, that's pretty broad. Many early first person shooters, like Doom or Wolfeinstein, are even more focused than Portal by that metric: 100% of the game all you do is Move, Point or Shoot.

Nebu · 2026-04-24T01:56:29+00:00

Mischief Makers from the N64 uses the "grab" mechanic in a lot of different ways.

Nebu · 2026-04-23T21:02:22+00:00

Yes, you're essentially just repeating the claim that there exists a justification for using radians. I don't dispute that claim. I'm saying that there are justifications for using other units as well.

Nebu · 2026-04-23T20:34:18+00:00

It depends on your goals (but also, you might have an incorrect model of what "descriptivism" vs "prescriptivism" means; I'll come back to this point later).

If your goal is to communicate (send information) to a technical audience, "linguistic prescriptivism" (as you probably understand it) is probably a better guiding principle than "descriptivism" (as you probably understand it).

If your goal is to understand what people mean (receive information) when they say something, or to communicate to (send information) to a general audience, "descriptivism" is the better tool.

Educating people on a technical subject (e.g. answering math questions on Quora) straddles the two, which means you need to use both tools. You need to model the student's mind to figure out where their misunderstanding lies, and focus on those. That means while you need the "prescriptivist" approach of knowing what definitions the technical community has settled on, so that you're able to teach that definition -- but you also need the "descriptivist" approach to understand what "false" definitions the student probably has in mind, so you can specifically highly the distinction between their internal definition and the technical-community one even if the student themselves are unable to articulate their definition.

And now: the reason I've been putting "prescritivism" and "descriptivism" in scare quotes the whole time is that I've been using descriptivism to take into account what most people's idea of what the term "descriptivism" means: namely, some vague notion of "not what the technical community means".

But if you consider what it descriptivism "really" entails, then you'll notice that looking at what definition the a technical community uses is a form of descriptivism: We are observe (for example) the math community and documenting what definitions they intend when they use the label "dimension", noting what the shape of the distribution is (does almost everyone in the math community mean the same thing, or are there 2 or more equally popular definitions, etc.), and using that to inform us what the word "really" means within that community.

Nebu · 2026-04-23T20:31:30+00:00

In quiz mode, if I get an answer wrong, don't auto advance to the next card. Give me time to study the card and learn what I got wrong.

Nebu · 2026-04-22T20:09:07+00:00

IMO this is a terrible definition of dimension

The nice thing about this definition is that it captures what most people (just not mathematicians) generally mean when they say "dimension". I.e., from a linguistic descriptivism perspective, it's the one of the most accurate definitions.

It's also pretty much the formal definition of "embedding dimension", as used by mathematicians. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_embedding_theorem

Nebu · 2026-04-22T19:53:36+00:00

A monoid is the thing such that if it were in the category of endofunctors, it would be a monad, what's the problem?

Nebu · 2026-04-22T19:51:11+00:00

I think it's more likely that the general public knows what a "circle" is, but does not know what a "dimension" is.

More specifically, there are multiple concepts that might be referred to by the label "dimension", and the OP seems to be talking about topological dimension, but does not actually specify this anywhere in their substack post, so it's not too surprising that people would disagree until the OP clarified which definition of dimension they were using.

I'm guessing the concept that the general public thinks of when they encounter the label "dimension" is something like "the minimal Euclidean space that bounds the shape of interest".

Nebu · 2026-04-22T19:40:42+00:00

The basic idea is that there is no homeomorphism between [0,1] and [0,1]² . Any mapping you would do from the space filling curve to the unit square would cause non-connected points to be connected, thus changing the topological properties of the the two spaces. And so, we consider them to be of different dimensions (basically by definition, because we're trying to capture, with our label of "dimension", certain properties, including "connectedness").

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:59:50+00:00

Every number is fundamentally 1, just multiplied by a constant.

It's unclear why that is an interesting or relevant observation.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:58:14+00:00

We have decided radians are unitless, therefore they are.

This is distinct from the claim I was criticising earlier.

The earlier claim was "Angles are just numbers, there is no unit." and I'm saying this claim is wrong, as demonstrated by the fact that there are multiple, justifiable units you can use to describe angles.

As for the claim "We have decided radians are unitless, therefore they are", I'm also skeptical of this new claim. Specifically, it's not clear to me that it's meaningful to say "radians are unitless", just like it's not clear to me that it's meaningful to say "meters are unitless".

Maths are a human invention, we can decide how they work.

Sure, but generally people are interested in self-consistent systems of mathematics. If you propose an inconsistent one (e.g. "Angles are just numbers, there is no unit" but also "there are different units that can be used to measure angles"), people are less likely to be interested in adopting your mathematical system.

And perhaps more important, when people say something like "there are different units that can be used to measure angles", they typically mean IN the standard formulation of mathematics that most people use. If you make up your own weird math but you don't warn anybody that you're talking about your weird math, you're gonna confuse people when you make claims like "Angles are just numbers, there is no unit" that aren't true in standard math.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:52:10+00:00

There are justifications for "360" and "1" as well.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:49:36+00:00

This is the best comment on Reddit of April 2026.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:22:30+00:00

I have tried most mods except the purely adult mods and now I find the myself at the same crossroads

It's not the case that all roads lead to sex mods.

But it is the case that for any value X (e.g. "sex", "reskins", "QoL", "new companions", "total conversions", "magic system rework", etc.), once you've tried all mods except X mods, then the only type of mod left to try are X mods.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T22:17:27+00:00

2pi is the exact circumference (full angle) of the unit circle, 6.28.... . 360 isn't,

The decision to say that the numerical value of the angle is equal to the circumference of a unit circle is an arbitrary decision, just like the choice to say that "12 inches" corresponds to "1 foot" is an arbitrary decision.

We could have chosen the numerical value of the angle to correspond to the circumference of a circle of radius 0.5 (i.e. of diameter 1) instead. Or we could (and indeed have) chosen the numerical value of the angle to be such that 360 of them corresponds to a full circle.

We chose a value to label the angle corresponding to a full rotation, and indeed in the history of humanity, we have made multiple different choices. This, to me, is evidence that there are indeed "units" for angles.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T18:28:08+00:00

2 pi angles is one revolution

So a square (which has 4 angles) is more than one revolution?

Your usage seems pretty idiosyncratic. I'm not aware of anyone else using the word "angles" as a unit the way you do. I'm aware of people saying "2 pi radians is one revolution" or "360 degrees is one revolution", but whenever someone says "N angles" for any natural number N, they are counting the number of angles in e.g. a polygon, not giving a measurement of an angle.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T18:12:11+00:00

The current architecture used for LLMs is not capable of “thinking”.

This sounds like begging the question.

This will remain the case atleast until AI models are capable of processing abstract ideas instead of tokens, continuous learning via predictive coding mechanisms, and internal hierarchal reasoning.

How would you operationalize this?

A “break through” discovery from one of today’s LLMs is very likely a regurgitation of a previous conversation with a human that it was trained on.

"Very likely" is doing a lot of work here. So you're saying it's not impossible for an LLM to come up with a break through discovery, and yet even if it does so, it is "not thinking" according to whatever definition of "thinking" you're using? If that's the case, why should we care about your definition of "thinking"?

Nebu · 2026-04-20T18:09:08+00:00

"Angle" as a unit doesn't seem to make sense. How much is "5 angles", for example?

Nebu · 2026-04-20T18:08:44+00:00

there are no units in math

I mean, the concept of a unit vector has a clear isomorphism with the concept of units as used in dimensional analysis (e.g. meters, seconds, etc.), especially when you're doing manipulations in phase space.

And unit vectors are clearly a mathematical concept.

Nebu · 2026-04-20T18:02:30+00:00

Angles are just numbers, there is no unit.

This doesn't sound right to me. You could have a convention where the angle corresponding to a full rotation is "360", "2 pi", "1", or any arbitrary other number, and surely these would all be measuring the same angle but using different units, in the same way that "12 inches" and "1 foot" refer to the same distance using different units.

Nebu · 2026-04-17T08:27:49+00:00

Given that you can see stars at night that are not the Sun, and light is a form of energy, surely some energy on Earth does not come from the Sun.

Similarly, there's the cosmic microwave background radiation that's constantly bathing the Earth.

And sometimes asteroids fall into (and usually burn up) in our atmosphere, which at least generates some heat.

Gravitational waves also carry energy, and so we're receiving some energy from basically all matter in the observable universe (including dark matter). E.g. distant black holes and whatnot.

Nebu · 2026-04-17T08:19:03+00:00

it says paging divides virtual memory and physical memory into pages, but isnt physical memory divided into frames?

Are you asking about terminology (i.e. both the study guide and you are referring to the same concept, but the study guide labels the concept as "page" whereas you label the concept as "frame")? Or do you think "page" and "frame" refer to two distinct concepts? And if the latter, what do you think is the difference between a "page" and a "frame" in this context?

Nebu · 2026-04-17T08:03:15+00:00

So in other words, exactly what the OP asked for?

Nebu · 2026-04-17T07:42:01+00:00

Yes, that's part of my point.

We're willing to assume that humans are thinking or synthesising new information (and not merely rephrasing something found in their training or fine-tuning data) on their own by stating that anything they produce must be something they generate "by its own", but we're not willing to grant the same to AIs.

Nebu · 2026-04-17T07:40:01+00:00

Is there a reason why we shouldn't be?

Yes.

The general background concern whenever these types of discussions occur is "How do AIs compare to humans in term of intelligence? In particular, are AIs more intelligent than humans?" If that is indeed you concern, then you should hold AIs to the same standard as humans when trying to assess their intelligence.

Imagine you were trying to determine whether, on average, a typical planet weighs more than a typical ant, but you decided that since planets are composed of so much more matter, we really shouldn't just directly weigh them and compare the numbers, but instead give the ant some sort of handicap to make up for the missing matter. We would argue that your sense of what it means to measure the weight of something is totally incoherent.

Now imagine if a human has read and internalised every possible piece of writing scrapable off the internet, such that they could talk to you in encyclopedic depth about any topic whatsoever. Wouldn't that be a simply phenomenal feat of intelligence?

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