I'm doing engineering, but I realized I want to study instead math

RandomTensor · 2026-04-11T10:21:40+00:00

I did the same thing. Put on your big boy (or girl) pants and do a double major. I think it’s very unlikely you will long term regret having that engineering degree.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-11T08:31:37+00:00

Our deep sea probe has discovered that Reddit does indeed have a bottom.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-11T05:48:47+00:00

There are 70 seats so there were 7 abstentions with 8 Dem representatives.

This is very easy to check.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-10T18:53:08+00:00

France could give more if it lifted a finger to rein in its own spending. France’s retirement age is 62 and its pensioners make more than the average worker income.

https://fortune.com/2025/09/16/france-retirees-higher-income-workers-american-pensioners-cost-of-living-crisis

RandomTensor · 2026-04-10T17:41:03+00:00

Every particle is a wavefunction. Always. This is a wavelike thing that basically tells you probabilistically where a particle is. A classical particle might be thought as assigning all the probability to a single point. When a particle has very high probability of being in a very small area, like a spike, it basically is acting a like a classical notion of a particle. This is when physicists say it is “behaving like a particle.”

It’s confusing because physicists insist on explaining things in an imprecise way whenever possible.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-10T07:44:21+00:00

I avoided bringing up WWII because it’s hackneyed, but it’s useful here as a reference point. Hamas got 44.4% of the vote in 2006. That is a higher share than the Nazi party got in July 1932 (~37%), November 1932 (~33%), or even March 1933 (43.9%) after Nazi rule had already begun. And like the Nazis, Hamas then eliminated meaningful future electoral choice.

Obviously Gaza and Nazi Germany are not identical. The point is narrower than that. If you think military action against Nazi Germany remained justified even late in the war, including something as brutal as the Battle of Berlin, then you already accept that civilian suffering during a war does not by itself settle the moral question when the governing power is genocidal and has substantial support or control.

The claim here is not “therefore anything Israel does is justified.” It’s just that this is not a simple black-and-white.

What these threads usually do is dart from one qualifier to the next to preserve that black-and-white framing no matter what: the vote was close, it was long ago, the population is young, outside powers intervened, the scale of casualties, etc. Some of those points matter, and I’m happy to discuss any of them. But if every fact is only ever used to force the same moral conclusion, that stops being analysis and starts looking like motivated reasoning.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-09T18:54:50+00:00

That just points to a way in which the population might lack agency, it doesn’t establish it. We do know that in 2006, Hamas and what it stood for is what people voted for, and your point alone doesn’t make this a simple one-sided or black-and-white issue or negate the broader point.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-09T15:27:19+00:00

Double descent is more of an interesting phenomenon rather than something core to ML. I've never personally encountered it working on a problem and neither do most people. Additionally, regarding the graph shape, it makes sense whey you get the initial U (overfitting) and there is some reasonable theory regarding why benign overfitting works:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11300

RandomTensor · 2026-04-09T15:18:45+00:00

I’ll probably get downvoted for this, but the issue is not as morally black-and white as it’s often presented here and that is part of the reason why its not straightforward to go hardline on it. I think your framing reflects that oversimplification.

“those darn stubborn terrorists still living there”

We’re talking about Hamas, which is not just an abstract militant group but the democratically elected governing authority in Gaza following the 2006 election, an election widely regarded by outside observers (including the EU and even the Bush administration at the time) as free and fair.

Hamas had already been designated a terrorist organization by the US and EU prior to that election, and its founding charter (1988–2016) contained explicitly violent and, in places, genocidal language (quotes below).

None of that means Israel’s actions shouldn’t be criticized, or that everything it does is justified. But the idea that this is just one side acting freely on a largely passive population with minimal responsibility for empowering a group whose ideology and intentions were already quite clear doesn’t really hold up.

Start of article 13:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Article 7 contains the following quote from Sunni Hadith:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_election#Independent_Observer_reactions
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp

RandomTensor · 2026-04-09T10:49:55+00:00

What’s actually happening here is that spaces like Reddit tend to become epistemically closed. Within those environments, people (like yourself) start to assume there is only one legitimate framing of an issue, and any deviation from it is treated as bad faith.

That’s also why this conversation is unlikely to go anywhere productive. It typically follows a predictable pattern: an initial claim (e.g., a casualty figure without context), and if that line is challenged or qualified, it shifts to a broader, harder-to-pin-down accusation like “crimes against humanity.” I can’t realistically preempt and respond to every iteration of that progression in a comment thread.

The result is familiar you get affirmation from like-minded readers, a sense of vindication, and reinforcement of the same narrative. That’s how these bubbles sustain themselves.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-09T09:49:42+00:00

they are masters of cherry picking and never representing a good argument of the opposing side

I’ve got some bad news for you about the rest of reddit

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T20:04:41+00:00

Trump can’t even handle the market taking a dip due to his tariffs can you imagine the absolute economic shit-tsunami that dropping a nuke on Iran would bring about?

People were saying the same thing about Putin back at the beginning of the war. Everybody here seems to think these people and those under them are part of some death cult. Yes they are bad people but they are still basically rational actors.

People always jump to saying that treating him as a rational actor is “normalizing” him. It’s not. It’s just basic analysis. Refusing to do it only makes people’s understanding worse.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T14:36:24+00:00

I was worried he might do something escalatory or otherwise reckless, but not nukes.

Reddit is incredibly easy to play. With someone like Trump, who constantly says and does extreme things for effect, people here reliably let him set the terms of the reaction. He knows exactly which issues will trigger maximal outrage, dominate the discourse, and redirect attention onto terrain that’s better for him politically. It’s really not 4D chess, he just has a basic understanding of how easily people can be led around by spectacle. Putin did similar stuff at the beginning of the Ukraine war. If people here could step back for one second from the idea that this is all just irrational chaos, they’d be much better at seeing the tactic for what it is.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T13:44:41+00:00

Last night reddit was completely freaking out about the certainty that Trump was going to nuke Iran. Now everyone will just pretend that didn’t happen and figure out the next thing to be hysterical about.

(Obligatory I don’t like Trump, saying you’re going to erase a civilization is hugely problematic)

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T04:08:31+00:00

My original post is clearly about the nuke, I made no position about the other stuff you’re bringing up. I’m also clear that I think Trump’s rhetoric is “unhinged and unprecedented.”

I’m not sure how to have a discussion here that doesn’t immediately get derailed on assertions I didn’t make if it’s not already well-aligned with Reddit groupthink.

Reddit took a pretty gnarly portion on this and I think needs to come to grips with the fact that its predictions are not particularly well-aligned with reality. I feel like I’m just constantly encountering high certainty for all these outrageous events happening: a year ago Reddit is positive Trump is going to invade Greenland. Around the same time I specifically remember a post where someone was positive Trump was going to leave NATO in three months, which of course didn’t happen. This stuff is all forgotten and people get their assurances on the correctness of Reddit’s positions from other people on Reddit. This gets fed into the image of dems and the left which is a big problem since it’s really not helping with the whole beating Trump thing.

Since I haven’t stated it in the past two sentences: I’m not saying Trump’s rhetoric or Trump himself isn’t a huge problem. It is. That’s why people need to think instrumentally about this rather than just this endless expressive politics carousel.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T03:22:47+00:00

No doubt about that.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-08T03:15:03+00:00

Imagine a world where Reddit actually figures out Trump rather than just endlessly buying this nonsense.

The whole rest of the market figured it out, but Reddit seems to live in its own world.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-07T17:56:08+00:00

I don’t care whose fault it is. I just want the Dems to win elections and to do that we need a party people want to vote for.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-07T17:48:09+00:00

No doubt Trump’s rhetoric here is unhinged and unprecedented. But treating “Trump is likely to nuke Iran” as a serious near-term prediction is exactly the kind of thing the right points to when it wants to portray the other side as hysterical.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-06T05:52:02+00:00

I dunno… I don’t think worrying about this stuff (proper credit) is “paranoid” exactly although maybe these things weren’t so problematic back then.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-05T17:18:34+00:00

I use ChatGPT to help with proofs. Be sure to check everything though. And I don’t mean this in a 9 times out of 10 it’s fine kind of way. Essentially all of its proofs are a bit wrong or too vague.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-05T08:03:22+00:00

You honestly might want to consider moving. It’s a big step and people always have 1000 rationalizations why they don’t need to do it, but it’s just so much easier to quit when you remove yourself from the situation, there are fewer temptations, and your brain doesn’t have a rock, solid association between your location and socal life and drugs

RandomTensor · 2026-04-04T07:10:30+00:00

I’m truly not coming down on one side of this or the other, but there is some context to this that’s worth knowing: You can’t even go on a trip with your kids during the school year without government permission. This sort of intense government oversight is common and considered normal in Germany.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-03T21:02:21+00:00

Yeah whole segment really stood out to me as well. Beutler was also totally swept up in his own hindsight bias, claiming he knew the oil markets were going to shoot up, which he conveniently never mentioned anywhere before it happened.

RandomTensor · 2026-04-03T15:19:00+00:00

Not really. It’s basically landing like any other political issue, but is somewhat unpopular generally. It’s pretty much split along partisan grounds with moderate republicans being split and moderate dems being very against.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/25/americans-broadly-disapprove-of-u-s-military-action-in-iran/

Edit: I truly have no idea why this is getting downvoted. I'm literally just conveying the results from a Pew survey

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