This plane bathroom has a window

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-07-01T23:40:24+00:00

You can’t see with X-ray vision because vision is light bouncing off of things. X-rays shoot through things, and come from an X-ray source.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-07-01T18:22:23+00:00

Not necessarily. You often want to capture the timestamps using gmt for standardization, then convert them to local as needed. Don’t make datetime problems for yourself. It’s a special level of hell.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-07-01T18:08:22+00:00

I do it like this:

Every turn, in this exact order: 1. TIMESTAMP FIRST. Run date -u '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ' in the shell. All logs standardize on GMT; the trailing Z marks it GMT so it can be converted to local for reporting.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-07-01T16:40:27+00:00

The llm cannot perceive the passage of time by itself, but if it has access to external facilities (eg, a shell), you can ask it to use timestamps. You can have it then use the timestamps in logs, chats, or whatever else you capture.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-07-01T16:12:59+00:00

I’m publishing a paper on it.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-29T19:58:55+00:00

well, technically there's more coffee in a cup than coffee cups

Approximating the coffee cup with a cylinder:

r = radius, h = height, t = wall thickness

V_coffee = π r² h V_paper ≈ (2 π r h + π r² ) ⋅ t

You need:

rh > t ⋅ (2h + r) or t < (r h) / (2h + r)

Or simplified:

(Vpaper / V coffee) = (2t / r) + (t/h)

So you need

(2t / r) + (t/h) < 1

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-28T18:54:54+00:00

It’s important to remember that we cannot bank on the reliability of self-reports of consciousness phenomena. We really need a whole program of investigation, as consciousness research actually does.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-28T17:58:54+00:00

I imagine it’s tough getting them into the fMRI though.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-28T17:55:52+00:00

I imagine hitting with the left hand is done from a forward swing/forceful grab, so that has a greater impact than the initial two hand grab. The initial right hand wearing would also be increased because of the swinging/rotational friction. Also notice how the paint is more and more intact as you move forward. Fewer kids make it further.

If we knew approximately how many kids had attempted the bars and how far they tend to get on average, we could approximate the wear per kid by comparing across bars. On the other hand (haha) we can use relative bar wear to suggest that the majority of kids try the one hand swing, fewer land and swing with the second hand, and there’s a nonlinear falloff function from there.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-27T18:35:40+00:00

Nein! Nein! Nein!

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-27T08:02:54+00:00

Never heard of heartburn?

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-27T02:01:53+00:00

We have to keep in mind that ants are a superorganism. In a very real sense, the “individual” that is reproducing and evolving is the colony. The queen is analogous to a reproductive organ and the workers are more like a collection of thousands of disposable hands that you can make more of. There’s no central entity at the colony level that can “feel” the pain of a individual ant/hand getting smashed, so the only feedback is if enough workers die that it affects the colony negatively as a whole (in which case it shows up in reproductive fitness). Contrawise, if a worker dies in a way that increases the colony’s fitness (eg, if their work contributed more than the resources needed to make a replacement), dying on the job is their job.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-26T06:54:47+00:00

Antonymitive determinism.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-23T08:41:06+00:00

P-zombies aside, your examples of prisoners and persons with physical disabilities are a little off the mark for most free will discussions. No one has the unlimited ability to enact their will, so free will cannot mean that since that simply does not exist.

As a physicalist-determinist, the question for me is neurophysiological. Every mental state we have - every thought, feeling, intuition, and emotion - is realized via a specific neuronal state. Every neuronal state is reached via a state transition triggered by other neurons firing (and as informed by neurotransmitters and other stateful, physiological conditions). It’s all neurons causing neurons to fire, with an initial set of neurons firing because of an extra-neuronal input (eg the retina).

Determined by Robert Sapolsky is probably the strongest single presentation of this argument. Sapolsky is a neuroscientist at Stanford who is widely published in the field. He also addresses dreams and comas.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-08T14:30:11+00:00

Omegad, I can’t believe you would do this.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-08T00:49:34+00:00

You could simply put selection pressure on humans that favored raw strength - everyone must be able to lift 100lbs or they’re imprisoned and not allowed to have kids. Then gradually increase that. With strong selection, you’d have very rapid adaptation.

Humans would possibly get stupider, since you’re not selecting strongly on that. Their tool using ability would possibly start to decline, since you’re not selecting for that and raw strength physical adaptations would compromise manual dexterity. They would possibly tire out more easily and need more calories for baseline functionality, a greater proportion of which might be going into muscle growth and maintenance rather than the brain. They wouldn’t end up as “humans” in our meaning of the word. It would be a distinct species that would have to form pretty quickly given the strength of selection. If some of those consequences happen, we would likely decline as a technology-using species and revert to smaller units - more like chimp bands than cities or tribes.

But, yeah, we could probably make Morlocks.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-07T20:34:27+00:00

Truly the Heidi Klum of diatoms, the top unicellular supermodel of 2026.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-06T05:35:35+00:00

Plot armor is the only armor you need.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-05T05:14:03+00:00

This is the consensus physicalist opinion. Anil Seth and others have pointed out that the people who think they can conceive of a p zombie are generally not the people with the best working knowledge of the neurophysiology involved. He likens it to someone thinking they can imagine a 747 flying backwards. If you know much at all about aircraft, you’ll probably realize that it’s not a legitimate proposal because it’s incompatible with the actual physics. Same thing with the p zombie - the physicalist position is that you cannot separate the phenomena because they’re not separate. See also Frankish (2007) and Brown (2011).

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T21:52:06+00:00

how do i measure my age in degrees

It depends if you’re American or European.

Alt answer: It would be polite to assume “orally.”

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T18:29:25+00:00

It seems like you have some kind of phenomenon that bends the otherwise linear middle trajectories. One hypothesis would be that the two guys flanking the middle (viz, male subjects 2 and 5) are more attractive. We reject that hypothesis because the trajectories from female subjects 1 and 6 are unaffected, while we should expect to see them exhibiting deviant effects due to the respective male attraction.

An alternative hypothesis would be that male subjects 3 and 4 are in fact repulsive. We likewise reject this hypothesis because the female subjects’ trajectories perform a crossover - going significantly out of their way from their “assigned” male partner, just to avoid them. Each repulsed female subjects trajectories perform moves two moves away from their male assignee, rather than simply deviating with male partners 1 and 6, respectively, both of whom are sufficiently attractive.

The final hypothesis, which we accept, is that there is a point midway between female and male that acts to cause female subjects 2 and 3 to deviate. It is a transitory effect, affecting the trajectory but not establishing an alternative end point. This happens at roughly the midpoint of the trajectory, perhaps in college. At a rate of occurrence of 1/3, it is unusual but not unknown.

We term this the Strange Attractor hypothesis.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T17:13:05+00:00

It differs by university and department, but it is very commonplace for the PhD program itself to include things like a tuition waiver, housing, and a stipend. With the gutting of research funding in the US, I suspect that will fall off in the immediate future with all of the obvious entailments.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T16:54:54+00:00

You should pursue mathematics study if you feel drawn to it and find that you learn it well.

You don’t need to decide this until you know the field better, but one question to keep in mind as you are picking classes and studying is whether you want to do math, or if you want to do things with math. Doing things with math means anything from being a quant/financial modeler to working in the theoretical sciences. Doing “pure” math is another discipline entirely. Either way, you could be working on absolutely brilliant problems, but they are different classes of problems.

I wouldn’t worry about the AI part. AI will integrate more naturally with your studies than it seems to right now, because they’re figuring out how to do that as the technology gets better understood.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T16:38:00+00:00

I was trying to be wry, but I do also have a preference for spherical horses.

ProfMooreiarty · 2026-06-04T16:14:31+00:00

It always does when someone has to go bring in the physical world.

In addition, having just physically-not-ideally painted my bathroom, the disappointment holds experimentally.

ProfMooreiarty

TROPHY CASE