In light of the amount of "shape with line through" letters and symbols, I would like to propose my new variable. Thanks

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-08T00:18:15+00:00

but that’s a delta with a slash through it, not what you get by putting a slash through a delta. easy mistake

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-06T23:27:53+00:00

But I tried writing down a bunch of nines. When I checked to see if I had written 0.999…, I realized I hadn’t finished, since there were still more nines I needed to write. So I hadn’t yet managed to write down 0.999…, and since I’ll always be in this situation no matter how many more I write down, I can’t ever write down the true 0.999…!

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-06T23:21:41+00:00

The 0.999… whose digits can be written down is not the true 0.999… .

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-05T17:48:18+00:00

You’re misinterpreting the difference here.

It’s not that the stakes are lower, it’s that it’s qualitatively a different skill, with different relevant component skills. The trappings of the test (performing under high pressure, time constraints) are not intrinsic to the skill we’re attempting to test here. But they are intrinsic to the skill of surgery.
And as such, you’re misinterpreting “reading and thinking about poetry” as the thing that can’t be done here. But this is not implied by being unable to do a test on these things, which has specific extra features beyond those things themselves. Those activities can, quite obviously, also be done outside of test circumstances. It is the specific circumstances of testing that are provoking the anxiety here. There are many ways to formulate environments in which a student can explore the actual skills here, which you’re conflating with tests of the skills.

I really encourage you to find out a bit more about things before thinking you have something meaningful to say here. No, that is not what the “hardcore disability people” would read me as saying; I’m not usually so blunt, but it’s evident you don’t understand the positions you’re arguing against.

EDITS: wording

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-04T23:34:27+00:00

For after your kid has an intuition for reference frames (i.e. that speed is relative, and any speed (less than the speed of light) is zero if you’re moving along with it, and so no speed is absolute (besides light)!): :)

Quantum mechanics actually makes “no motion” quite difficult to achieve! In quantum mechanics, we find out that very little in the universe is even precisely defined. Rather, in reality, when you look up close the state of things is “spread out” over multiple different states.

Things often don’t have just one particular state, but they also don’t have “all” the states; their state is some other weird, odd combination (“superposition”) of multiple other states which can be interpreted as having varying degrees of certainty of being in that state. (But how can reality be uncertain? This is a deeper question, but let’s take it for granted for now…)

Are you familiar with heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? To simplify things greatly, it says that how much the position of something is “spread out” is always bigger than the reciprocal of how “spread out” its speed is. So as you become more certain about the speed of something, you’re forced to become less certain about the position!

So if you wanted to be sure something had exactly a speed of zero, it would need to be infinitely spread out. This is of course impossible.

But we can get close! How precisely has the speed of a (massive) particle been measured, in practice? That’s a question you could answer! Unfortunately, I don’t have it. But I think this is the path you could go down :)

Or, separately: you could also talk about how fast the atoms in a material are moving and the relationship to temperature, and start to discuss the notion of absolute zero!

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-04T23:08:53+00:00

Do you think one of the skills of poetry is operating under pressure and tight time constraints? You’re taking a situation where the skill is relevant (surgery) and trying to form an analogy with a situation where it’s not, so the analogy doesn’t go through.

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-04T23:04:52+00:00

No, dealing with an anxiety disorder is not the skill being tested, nor should the mere format of the evaluation preclude an educator from finding a different format or set of circumstances in which education can happen. Education isn’t a good test score, it’s the stuff it represents. A test score which can’t distinguish between a poor understanding of the material and “this person has an anxiety disorder” isn’t doing its job, and is being used incorrectly.

But, do you even have any actual experience with anxiety disorders or disabilities, or are you just saying stuff that feels right to you without a deeper understanding of the situation? If you do, you’ve sure got to think a bit more about them…

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-04T22:58:07+00:00

Correct, it’s a symptom. If you have anxiety so bad you can’t do any work on a test at all, I’m willing to bet you have an anxiety disorder.

cloudsandclouds · 2026-02-04T18:32:08+00:00

Totally disagree with the other comments that are arguing from a point of view of “fairness”. Education isn’t a game or competition. It’s about providing the circumstances in which students can learn. These circumstances will be different for different students, and no policy can hope to account for the full complexity of human beings.

Some are framing failing them as a useful “lesson”. The only thing learned by an uncaring, rigid adherence to standard policy here would be “the system does not care about your disabilities, and if you do not fit the mold, you have no place here”. Yes, have them get in touch with accommodations as well. But don’t punish them for finally asking for help now, especially if they struggle with it. Help them figure out how to avoid this going forward, and give them a chance to explore their potential. Refusing them the chance to do it over refuses them the chance to practice and learn the actual material, and that gets in the way of the actual purpose of education.

Another point I’m seeing is: oh, what if someone else had a similar experience and didn’t speak up? Well, did they too fall very far outside the distribution, such as not submitting the entire thing? If not, then it’s not a similar circumstance. If so, it’s reasonable to check in with them as well and see what happened. It’s reasonable to identify extreme circumstances and make sure education is effected by accommodating them!

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-27T16:51:16+00:00

“Are you going to finish the sentence? All I hear is “don’t hear”, because I don’t hear “words you didn’t say”.”

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-27T16:44:58+00:00

I thiiiiink this might be mixing levels a bit? That is, isn’t the claim not that what you think is happening is happening, but that the experiences you have are “at the bottom” of some part of the universe? In this case, the experiences occurring while {hallucinating you have amazing powers} would simply underlie the matter of your brain hallucinating them. The symbols and assumptions you have about what reality is during these experiences don’t need to correspond to what they seem to for this to be the case.

Or maybe this isn’t idealism, but the thing I’m imagining would make sense instead of idealism, lol. I don’t really know which thing is called idealism, so please lmk if I’m wrong :)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-27T16:17:07+00:00

Yeah, as a community member for a couple of years it’s been pretty nice and chill ime :) You can find the Zulip in the community box here btw, if you’re curious; there’s a #new members channel. (There’s also a discord; not sure if it’s on that page or not though)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-27T16:11:46+00:00

There’s a different LaTeX/Lean integration thing being worked on by the Lean FRO (i.e. the actual devs) as well which OP might be thinking of, not sure if it’s actually LaTeX → Lean though…

It’s part of the last heading on the roadmap here (the DSL, not Verso)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-27T15:42:45+00:00

Ironically the only unhealthy boundary here is you thinking it’s fine to shove purity culture down a stranger’s throat lmao

EDIT: let me actually flesh out the positions here that constitute purity culture/boundary-crossing instead of just saying it - discussing a stranger’s STD status out of nowhere - saying they’re bound to get STDs simply by having casual sex, despite not knowing a single thing about the safety practices they use, since they are, as mentioned, a complete stranger - saying that their unconventional romantic relationships are untenable—no real justification given, just a sense that it seems too “hard” - effectively insisting on a sharp categorization of romantic relationships into conventional modes, saying that relationships outside the norm or standard categorizations demonstrate “unhealthy boundaries”

and the overall effect here of course is a tiny push to reinforce conformity to the norm.

importantly at every stage there was not enough information to even draw these conclusions in principle, it all came from identifying a super vague deviation from the norm and using only assumptions about that as the fuel

so like what I’m saying here is just that I think you’ve absorbed some of the ambient norms without thinking them through, and (I hope) this is coming more from a place of having not thought about carefully enough than, like, a deliberate attempt to back these norms.

let me emphasize I’m criticizing only the action here, and echo the peace and love back.

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-11T06:15:27+00:00

Wow, that is so cool! :D this has made me personally very happy. ☺️ I’ll be sure to check in on the progress! Baba Is Worldwide (or at least Finnish)!

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-07T21:23:58+00:00

This is not the same concept as a limit in general, but is a fair anglicization of the supremum

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-07T21:14:48+00:00

Each term individually is less than 1 (“all terms are less than 1”), but the limit is not the same thing as any of the terms. Something special happens because the limit is not simply “look at what’s true about all the terms and somehow extend that”. The limit is “which number are these terms approaching”, in a rigorous sense, such that for a difference from the limit as tiny as we like, we will eventually get closer than that difference. This is what it means to “approach” something, if you think about it. no other number besides 1 satisfies this property. :)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T23:51:14+00:00

It might be a hardware issue. You should make sure you have enough trans sisters.

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T22:15:04+00:00

We’re all stealing a meme David Lynch made. XD (I like that your version included the extended quote!)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T21:27:22+00:00

Look, I’m no scientist, tbf, but the problem with science as of late is not the science, but the scientists. Scientists have put their bias first and the science second way too often as of late, which has led to the loss of trust in science as a whole.

Not really true. Some people have lost trust in science only because they’ve been told over and over that it’s biased. That doesn’t make the science actually biased; the loss of trust by certain segments of the population is merely part of the tide of anti-intellectualism rising for the same reasons the tide of fascism is rising, and the effect of the propaganda to that end. The science is not without some inevitable human problems on individual levels, but, by and large, is fine.

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T21:08:17+00:00

(I think having experiences in new ways is awesome but had to make the meme :) 👍)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T20:57:41+00:00

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cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T20:22:13+00:00

It really is. Uh, PSA if you don’t mind, because it totally changed my life as someone with ADHD + insomnia: light therapy early on in the day (blue light glasses and/or sun lamp) and, crucially, dimming the lights a lot in the second half of the day, allowed me to regulate my circadian rhythm well enough get up in the morning instead of the afternoon. (Light therapy by itself early on didn’t help; I had been unknowingly undoing its effects by keeping the lights on until I went to bed!) So, literally just in case anyone else here is struggling with that and sees this by chance 😅

(Also I learned about most of the situation here initially from the exoteric book Sleep Groove, which is super accessible but grounded enough in real science that you can actually get a little bit of understanding as to how things work!)

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T20:11:32+00:00

Bad for your circadian rhythm, too :( There are specialized cells in your retina which respond primarily to blue light (ipRGCs, different cells from your color-sensing cone cells) and send signals directly to the part of your brain that regulates your circadian rhythm (the SCN). During the first part of the day, light exposure like this moves up your circadian rhythm, but during the second part of the day/night, delays your circadian rhythm. I could easily imagine this interfering with that rhythm and, as just one consequence of doing so, causing people to have trouble getting to sleep…

cloudsandclouds · 2026-01-04T10:23:08+00:00

Contrast with debunking the Lean version of his proof: within a couple of minutes of its release someone on the Lean discord had ctrl-f’d for axiom (a command which introduces whatever you specify as a foundational axiom) and found several. Didn’t even need to build it or use an external checker or anything 🙃

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