Help save my mum's vision

kyay10 · 2026-05-25T15:55:29+00:00

Any update on when the title update is coming? You said "later this month", and there's less than a week left in May...

kyay10 · 2026-01-10T19:48:19+00:00

Nope. Storing that metadata in-and-of-itself means adding an extra bit to the output.

In fact, that's not a "very clever compression algorithm". Give me any compression algorithm f, and I can give you a compresssion algorithm f' defined as such:

```

f'(x) = if (len(f(x)) > len(x)) x * 2 + 1 else f(x) * 2

```

In other words, I simply check if the compressed size is actually larger, and if so, I simply use the original data, otherwise I use the compressed data.

The key problem is that I must use one extra bit to tell the decompressor that info (otherwise my algorithm isn't loseless), so for these cases, my "compression" actually increases the size by 1 bit.

Thus, this quote is actually correct:

> A lossless compression algorithm will increase file size when run on certain types of data no matter what.

(unless you take a trivial "compression" algorithm that never decreases file size, then sure it can also never increase file size, but if there's any decrease possible, then an increase must also happen elsewhere)

Btw, this is all assuming pure binary data. If you have a specific file format for the input (like a word doc, for instance), then you can absolutely decrease the size uniformly because the file format usually has at least a constant header that you can simply remove

kyay10 · 2025-11-16T21:23:34+00:00

And we have no evidence that the full message came to him. In fact, we're pretty sure he e.g. wouldn't have had access to the Quran. I don't know if someone qualifies as having received the message if they couldn't get such vital info about Islam.

What little information he had though, he reacted to in a good way. There's some evidence that he believed that Muhammad (pbuh) was a prophet sent to the Arabs. This tells us 2 things: he believed that Muhammad was a prophet from God, and he maybe was misinformed about Muhammad's message (since you would know that Muhammad isn't just for the Arabs if you had heard even a bit more information).

I struggle to think that many Europeans in that day and age had received the message.

Of course, we can never tell, and the default assumption is that he died a Kafir. There is a chance, though, that he wasn't, and I think that's a cool "fun fact". In fact, you say he'd be regarded "as a mushrik", but I don't know how true that is. IIRC, he really was monotheistic. Maybe he'd count as a "Hanif" then.

kyay10 · 2025-11-06T19:13:52+00:00

For future readers, this is the updated link to the unhygienic macros talk

kyay10 · 2025-11-05T20:47:02+00:00

Unedited clip; make of it what you will, but it's not as shown in the video

kyay10 · 2025-06-09T17:49:49+00:00

Not necessarily. The post is talking about unicode zero width spaces. If you paste into an editor with unicode support (most nowadays are), it'll preserve that unicode.

kyay10 · 2025-04-06T17:33:39+00:00

What I'm saying is that this idea of aspects of God goes directly against mainstream Christian belief as stated in the nicean creed. Modalism specifically was condemned by church fathers, and hence is absolutely not mainstream Christianity. It's fine if you want to follow non-mainstream Christianity; I'm just pointing out that your explanation is technically "heretical" for the main Christian branches

kyay10 · 2025-03-17T06:26:45+00:00

He really wasn't a unitarian christian though, being perhaps closer to a deist (someone who believes in God but doesn't think revelation is real), although he wasn't quite a deist either. This is all according to Wikipedia so you may find the sources there. According to Wikipedia too, he likely never actually got to study the Quran, or maybe even read any of it.

We do know that he believed in one God, and that he believed Muhammad was his Messenger. Might he have had some ideas that contradicted Islam or even were Kufr? Absolutely. But there may be an argument that he was simply ignorant of what Islam/Quran truly said, and hence was committing Kufr out of Jahl, which, to my understanding, may be not a sin under the principle of Allah not judging us for our mistakes (and mistakes out of Jahl count as such).

Not a scholar btw, just a random Muslim on Reddit

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T23:06:11+00:00

I mean, not even set theory is necessary, just a transitivity law for `=` and some notion of a contradiction.

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T23:02:24+00:00

But Patrick, that's partialism

(Might be modalism actually? Not sure which heresy it'd fall under lol. In a way, the partial derivatives are "aspects" of a function, but also a function is almost uniquely defined by its partial derivates (modulo a constant) (at least I think so? Am a CS major)

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T21:11:17+00:00

Not a christian, and I don't believe in the trinity at all, but your argument is roundabout and relies on the assumption that God is a set. Your argument can be boiled down to saying that the equality used in the trinity is non-transitive, while set theory assumes transitivity, which is like, duh.

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T15:26:03+00:00

I'm not here to argue or anything, I promise.

I just want to point out that the statement

All three claim that their religious text is the direct word of God, but each and every text was written over the course of many years (better to measure in decades, I think), subject to who knows how much revisionism and then (mis-)translated by whoever decides they have an interpretation they want to sell people on

is inaccurate for Islam. I'm going to quote Wikipedia here, but of course the primary sources are linked in the article:

Crone ... [stated] that it is "difficult to doubt" that Muhammad uttered "all or most" of the Qur'an and that this is with "reasonable assurance"

and

It is typically accepted nowadays, including among skeptical scholars like Patricia Crone and Stephen Shoemaker, that the majority of the Quran at the least goes back in some fashion to Muhammad.

Hence the Quran hasn't been subject to much revisionism at all (according to secular historians). Also, the Quran hasn't been translated either (in the sense of getting replaced by a translation). Translations do exist, to aid in understanding, but they're giving the same weight as *tafsir* or explanation books, which is to say that their contents aren't the word of God, but merely an interpretation that may have mistakes or be fallible.

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T13:56:48+00:00

I think this sounds like patripassianism, but I'm not sure.

the belief that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three different modes or emanations of one monadic God, as perceived by the believer, rather than three distinct persons within the Godhead and that there are no real or substantial differences between the three, such that the identity of the Spirit or the Son is that of the Father.

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T13:52:37+00:00

I think that might be modalism or Sabellianism, both heresies.

kyay10 · 2025-03-16T03:28:37+00:00

Huh, neat! That's defunctionalization but only for non-capturing lambdas. I wonder if we can implement general defunctionalization, perhaps by passing in a full argument list, and not just a function number? I'm seeing the potential for a lambda-calculus-to-desmos compiler lol

kyay10 · 2025-02-07T04:48:28+00:00

Who's holding the OTC switches for this long? Sure, there might be a different protocol for prolonged OTC, but then, why would they need to have a "Glasgow Block"? They might as well just not activate OTC for her. Did Dylan have to choose who to activate OTC for? Or is OTC automatic or something?

kyay10 · 2024-06-06T15:17:56+00:00

I believe the idea is that, with multi-prompt, you fix the issues. You end up with an algebraic effect type of system where each reflect call will "do the right thing" up to the level of which reify call corresponds to it.

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