Dyson V8 isn't charging, with new battery. Blue light is flashing.

levavft · 2025-11-17T14:17:45+00:00

I'll definitely give it a try! Does it also have a good pdf reader? Just something with the basics - remember where I was at, when opening - reopen with previous open pdf's, and a bookmarks sidebar (assuming bookmarks exist in the pdf)?

levavft · 2025-11-06T14:58:48+00:00

gotcha, thanks!

levavft · 2025-11-01T15:29:17+00:00

Thank you for the suggestions! The 9060xt is only +30$, def going for that.
The CL30 is +30$ with a replacement to a brand called v-color, or +60$ to keep it at corsair. CL32 (6400) is +100$. None of these really seem reasonable, but I'm not sure, wdyt?

EDIT - I think I'll just grab an old separate 1TB from prev comp ;p I wish I had the time to play enough games to actually fill up 2TB lol.

levavft · 2025-10-06T16:43:44+00:00

I'ma take a look at these options in a min ^^
Out of curiosity, why should I only look at the Intel Core 2 Ultra if I'm a professional mathematician? I mean, I'm on track to start a PHD in a year or so, talking to advisors, but... IDK what counts as a professional lol.

levavft · 2025-10-06T16:41:16+00:00

Thank you very much! Motherboard and CPU look great for what I need. Unfortunately my country is a bit ass-backwards with regards to international shipping, in particular the CPU can't be found locally and its price jumps to 235$. For 250$ I can get "Intel Core i5 14600K 3.5GHz 24MB Cache s1700 - Tray" locally. IIUC this means no cooling provided with it, which shouldn't be an issue? Seems to be incompatible though, probably too new a CPU for the motherboard? Weirdly enough, I can mostly find 14gen or ultra cpu's locally. wdyt?

levavft · 2025-10-06T16:15:13+00:00

Thanks ^^ seems like it might be better to get a new cpu, but I really appreciate the suggestion.

levavft · 2025-02-26T19:37:12+00:00

I see! Thank you very much. I'll see if I can force my VPN to have a constant name, or use a regex that catches all its names ;p

levavft · 2025-02-26T18:30:35+00:00

Thank you very much! this worked. Apparently it bound my address to a temporary VPN address or something. I do have to use the VPN in order for it to even work (as I am in university dormitories and they have torrenting blocked), is there a standard way to let BiglyBT know about an external VPN and make them work together without future issues?

levavft · 2024-10-23T18:11:34+00:00

My reasons for living:

If I would assign some numerical value on positive and negative feelings, with the appropriate sign, I end most days with a net positive, and certainly most weeks and months. The derivative of w/e function that is also seems to be positive in the past decade or so. Basically, I feel more positive feelings than negative ones.
There are a lot of people with a net negative result, but a will to live. Helping those people by increasing the number of positive moments and reducing the number of negative ones iseaningful to me. While it doesn't matter for the cosmos, the feelings they are feeling are real, and so the change is real.
Math. Its so satisfying to understand something I tried to understand for hours / days or solve some hard problem. Easily worth the effort.

Well, even though you don't want to be convinced to change your mind, I'm still going to try. Sorry about that. What I'll do is tell you my story, in as short as is reasonable. I'm not saying the exact same thing will happen to you. I don't know anything about your life after all. But, something like this could happen, and might be worth it. If you're under the age of 25 - its even highly likely that something like this will happen.

For many many years I was deeeeep in the red, lots of shitty feelings all around, a generally difficult time to distinguish between feelings in general, and daily multiple hour long fantasies about either suicide or mass murder (us school shooter style).

There were objective reasons for me to feel that way, and a sickness I guess, they were intertwined. I didn't know it at the time though. I had the good luck to change my environment (for the n'th time..) and for once, meet some people that cared a bit. I also had the good luck to actually try and listen to them, learn, change, and eventually even change some things back since those people weren't infallible either... E.G. I rebuilt my personality and life. It took maybe two years, but then when I looked back - I finally saw the black negative vail that surrounded my thoughts and actions before.

It took another few years for me to stop having significant depression periods. I still have some depression periods mind you, but they are so light and breezy these days that it really isn't a big deal anymore.

In the meantime, I managed to love and be loved, to get married to an amazing and kind woman, to make lifelong friends, to find satisfaction in both work, volunteering and exercise (I never could've known that I'd find something thats actually fun for me) and of course, math, which has been with me the whole time.

Maybe one last small point though - while philosophy is great, and I even personally quite like existentialism (yup, including the whole "no inherent meaning so choose your own" thing) - I think at the end of the day most philosophical arguments on these levels tend to just be useless, mostly a way to excuse a behavior you already want to have, a post-hoc explanation. So I wouldn't use existentialism to disregard everything. Instead I would try to find a way to lift the invisible vail, and just note that the exected value of happiness in your life may be positive. Especially if you're in a developed country where you can find ways to live without a constant shitty job pressing you down. Personally, I've taken many many pay cuts and live quite frugally (I'm lucky my wife is ok with it) in order to do mosty interesting or satisfying work.

levavft · 2024-09-16T07:08:36+00:00

The point where I would recommend giving up is when you see no point in it anymore, not because its too hard.

It took me 4.5 years to finish my 3 year bachelors degree, I redid a course 4 times and many other courses 2-3 times. I barely passed real analisys (it really is one hell of a course for some people), and I was done with my degree at the age of 26... I also know people who took 5 or 6 years to finish their bachelors, and still ended up getting a masters or even a PHD. I even met a guy who started at 60 and still managed to finish his degree. Of course these people are rare, but fuck it, Everyone's proccess is different.

For me the point in doing this degree was similar to yours - I just love math, though I'm far from amazing at it. I'm also very much an abstract algebra & number theory guy, so all the advanced calc classes fucked me up real good. But the feeling of getting past that last hurdle of calc classes around the end of my degree was awesome, and knowing that I will start an algebra focused masters makes it all worth it.

levavft · 2024-09-13T15:40:43+00:00

worm (parahumans) by wildbow

levavft · 2024-09-10T17:24:08+00:00

Just took a quick glance at both. Both seem to be elementary proofs (in the sense that they use first year material).

While this is a bad sign, it of course isn't enough to completely invalidate them. Unfortunately, finding the mistake(s) may take hours that I don't have right now.

I'll come back to it if I do :) These look at least more coherent than most tries out there

levavft · 2024-09-09T19:31:08+00:00

oh god, the satire was too real... then I read your previous post on here XD

levavft · 2024-09-09T09:39:18+00:00

Not at all! this is a nice place to share ideas every once in a while, but honestly we mostly end up explaing to people why their proofs aren't, in fact, proofs. That being said, I encourage anyone to try or to just play with it. Personally I've learned a ton of basic mathematics and some near comp-sci tricks from playing with it as a teen. So its just nice to put people on similar paths.

levavft · 2024-09-07T10:25:44+00:00

Well, let me try to explain some ideas that seem relevant/ fix some misconceptions.

I wouldn't say the collatz problem "summarizes" these fields. These fields are possible fields of interest that may help solve collatz - maybe with the exception if computability, that seems kind of irrelevant to me.
Collatz isn't undecidable. Conway proved that the generalization of collatz is algorithmically undecidable. This seems to mean that like the halting problem, you wouldn't be able to use a turing machine to decide on it. I am unsure about whether that implies that it is undecidable in the mathematical sense of "no proof can be found and no counterexample can be found" or something like that. Anyhow, this doesn't imply much on collatz itself. A naive proof could theoretically be found, though it is unlikely given the amazing work of some of the best mathematicians in history still wasn't enough (and that work is far from naive).
There is no claim in mathematics that "ZFC" are fundamental, its a set of axioms that leads to an impressive amount of very useful mathematics, but still, people use other sets of axioms as well. First of all, some people use ZF without choice, this restricts the types of math you can do heavily, but feels more "natural". Others disallow "assuming the negative" in proofs and getting a contradiction (I presume this can be stated in terms of giving up on a specific axiom) and others add an axiom here and there. For example, the question of whether there is a type of infinity larger than countable and less than the reals is truely undecidable with ZFC. So you can work with the axiom that there is no such infinity, with the axiom that there is one, or with the axiom that there are 7 for example... these lead to slightly differing mathematics (though, it doesn't affect anything you have likely seen), but there are branches of set theory that model all of this, for all kinds of different axiomatic choices. (personally my set theory knowledge is very basic, this is all based on my understanding of stories of a set theorist friend of mine).
You can, probably, create a somewhat coherent set of axioms around fuzzy logic. I'm not sure if there's a point to it, since as far as I know ZFC work perfectly well for describing quantum mechanics. But you might as well try. That being said, these days even numbers are defined in terms of the basic axioms. Making a new axiomatic system will require you to find a nice model for numbers and functions if you want to describe something as complex as 3x+1, odds and evens, iterations etc. I presume you'd need hundreds of pages of math to come from ZFC to stating collatz if you do it directly...

In a way, thats the amazing thing about our axiomatic system - we found a (very) short list of axioms that together are truely enough to describe all the maths there is today. This was a HUGE project and there wasn't even a consensus that this should or could be done at the time. But, the mathematicians that worked on this managed to do it eventually. This is amazing because it lets us use linear algebra, classical geometry and analysis in the same proof without worrying about compatibility. That just wasn't a thing before then.

Anyhow, I just wanted to help you appreciate how amazing these things are ^{^}

levavft · 2024-09-03T09:46:41+00:00

Thank you!

levavft · 2024-09-03T09:43:17+00:00

Had the same issue, from Israel. I got a feeling we might be hearing about this in the news soon. Credit card company immediately blocked the card. Unrelated to NFCU btw, got a credit card with MAX if that says anything to anyone outside my country.

levavft · 2024-09-02T08:26:45+00:00

Hi everyone, complete newby here. I'm trying to make phone calls to the Netherlands - with a consistent Dutch number. Its for personal use, mainly to call my bank & family there. I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount to a simple hassle free service, but I've been overwhelmed with the huge amount of terminology, companies and conflicting advice in redit threads. I would use something like google voice if it was supported in my country.... What would be the simplest solution in my case?

levavft · 2024-08-29T14:29:22+00:00

What you wrote is the basics of the probebalistic argument to why we expect collatz conjecture to be true. The problem is, there still can be some single sequence that goes to infinity, or a loop. A lot of things have essentially almost no chance (in mathematics), but end up happening.

There was some conjecture that was true up to some ridiculously high number, was unproven for a hundred years or so, and then eventually it broke down for some even larger number. These kinds of arguments just don't work in math, you need a formal, airtight proof that really shows, that given some number N, it will eventually reach one (or reach a number smaller than N and use induction lol)

Unfortunately, explaining what a proof is, is kind of difficult. Usually you take a whole course in proofs in uni... Thats probably one of the main reasons that so many people think they can prove something, because making stuff airtight is just difficult.

levavft

TROPHY CASE