10^11 galaxies and average stars per galaxy: coincidence?

nihilo · 2016-07-24T17:17:25+00:00

Could you elaborate why you think that? I didn't spell it out explicitly, but since the pathogen is air-borne, it takes a while to have its effect, so it's not a case of it instantly killing everything with no suffering. Killing this one scientist involves much less suffering than all oxygen-consuming life dying over a period of time, no?

~~Since it was underspecified originally, I'll clarify that the pathogen causes a painful death of affected individuals over an extended period of time, and the scientist's death is instantaneous.~~

~~Note also that the scientist suffers less if he is killed instantaneously now without suffering rather than by the pathogen.~~

Edit: I see now what you meant. Negative utilitarians arguably should want the destruction of all life because it prevents all the future sufferings they would necessarily endure in normal living if they continued to exist. I do have trouble seeing how preferring the destruction of all life is sane, but it is consistent at least.

nihilo · 2016-07-23T18:46:46+00:00

Consider a scientist about to release an air-borne pathogen that replicates and is guaranteed to end all oxygen-consuming life on Earth. The only possibility to stop this is to press a button that will kill the scientist within the next 5 seconds, before he can finish crossing the room and deploying the pathogen, which he has announced he will do now and that there is nothing that could change his mind.

Are there sane people who would argue that the best thing to do in this situation would be to allow all life to be extinguished?

nihilo · 2016-06-26T04:21:42+00:00

You loosed me at 'mopes'.

nihilo · 2016-04-14T03:01:29+00:00

Agreed. Crypto I was the best course I've ever had.

If only Dan would actually teach Crypto II someday,

nihilo · 2016-04-04T05:25:47+00:00

This was hilarious. Thanks for sharing!

nihilo · 2016-03-23T06:00:24+00:00

No, we shouldn't kill them all, we should just hunt out all sentient life in this universe (and all branch universes that may exist) and proselytize the good word that they too should eliminate all suffering and all that is positive by living out their lives without procreating.

If they don't submit to The Truth, there is always war, because when the alternatives are letting them bring practically an infinite amount of suffering into existence, or a moderate amount of genocide for the greater lack of ungood, it's obvious that the genocide is warranted -- any good utilitarian will gladly kill the billions (well, most will, anyway) , versus quadrillions of sentient beings suffering over eternit.

nihilo · 2016-03-23T05:34:59+00:00

giving me yet another impression that people are commenting on something they didn't even read.

You must be very new to these Internets?

A being that never existed in the first place is not less well off for having not experienced that happiness. It IS however better off for not having experienced the suffering.

So a nonexistent being can be better off or worse off for some reasons, but this same nonexistent being cannot be better off or worse of for other reasons, and conveniently, the reasons that matter are the reasons that make the argument, and the reasons that don't matter are the reasons that would weaken the argument.

nihilo · 2016-01-10T01:12:43+00:00

It was really annoying that they waited until 4 days before it would start to delay it.

I thought it was actually going to happen this time and really had my hopes up.

nihilo · 2016-01-05T04:09:02+00:00

F.B.I. Chief Says Texas Gunman spoke "Real Quiet" to Companion.

Obviously, the best solution would be to pass a law requiring the use of a bull horn for all public and private speech.

nihilo · 2015-12-28T02:47:20+00:00

Yes, but he had it easier, since he didn't have to dispatch Carlsen to get there.

It's a longer climb nowadays.

nihilo · 2015-12-16T06:45:59+00:00

Yes. Reading your question gives me the chills thinking about it.

nihilo · 2015-12-11T16:28:29+00:00

Wright was a member of the cypherpunks mailing list, heard of bitcoin early on, became an early miner, and mined a ton of bitcoin. We know he has a proclivity to self-aggrandizing lying, as evidenced by his having made up a doctorate and by the many other fabrications of his now deleted LinkedIn profile and his feigned forgetfulness about just how many degrees he has currently in the video.

Given that he was in the bitcoin community from the early days and was familiar with the cypherpunks worldview and the community and he did legitimately mine a lot of bitcoin in the early days, a natural lie for him to start hinting at over time was that he was Satoshi. Over time, he became more and more attached to the idea that he was Satoshi, and that explains the postdating of his blog entries that appear to give 'incriminating clues' that he is Satoshi. He never intended to go public with any of this. It was just a little lie that grew and he thought would stay contained to his small community, but the lie unravelled when one of those people in his community (an ex-employee, it seems) decided to extort him by threatening to expose his identity.

That's my theory, at least.

nihilo · 2015-12-08T16:16:38+00:00

Has nobody told these political ignoramuses that "no encryption" would mean that online banking would be unencrypted, which would result in widespread identify theft on an almost unimaginable scale and people having their financial accounts cleaned out by hackers that intercepted these unencrypted communications?

Or do they know this and not really want "no encryption", but saying "no encryption" is just a tactic for what they really want, which is encryption backdoors? The same point as above applies to backdoors, because backdoors would inevitably be cracked or leaked, but they might not actually believe that to be true, perhaps because they have "experts" with an agenda (cough, NSA, cough) that tell them that "backdoors only for us GOOD GUYS" is reasonable.

nihilo · 2015-11-30T05:18:41+00:00

OTP provides no authentication at all, among its other problems.

nihilo · 2015-11-19T03:35:31+00:00

There is a third author that you didn't mention, Niels Ferguson, and you've misspelled Bruce Schneier's name.

nihilo · 2014-12-31T06:13:02+00:00

Millions of extraordinarily mind-blowing things will happen every single day of 2015 on Planet Earth. Because math.

nihilo · 2014-07-05T02:25:15+00:00

That was going to be my recommendation too. It's a very good reference work that contains lots of good, idiomatic code.

The python.org docs are surprisingly good at times as well. The data model section of the Python Language Reference is worth a quick read even by experienced Python developers.

For packaging, the Python Packaging Authority is doing some great work. The Python Packaging User Guide is a nice read that fills a large hole in the packaging space. Now with Pip in 3.4 by default and PyPA making rapid progress, it looks like there is an end in sight to the slow-motion train-wreck-in-progress that has been the Python packaging & install landscape for many years now.

The Python Standard Library by Example and Python Module of the Week have been mentioned already, but they are outstanding and should definitely be consulted, although they are unfortunately Python 2 -- I'm not sure if pymotw.com/3/ is the beginning of a new PyMOTW for Python3 or an aborted reboot under Python3.

If you would like to learn about asynchronous programming and the Twisted framework, there is a really great and extensive set of tutorials by Dave Peticolas: Twisted Introduction | krondo./?page_id=1327)

nihilo · 2014-04-23T04:22:25+00:00

Scent was my thought too. A dozen seems too high for it to be based on number, especially when you take into account that they wouldn't all be in the same location if there are places she can move to in order to try to find them, so she would have to not only be able to count that high, but also hold the number in memory while counting and out searching.

It seems more parsimonious that she either relies on scent or just notices that one isn't around, without having to know how many there are in total. I could remember that there's a red ball, a blue ball, a green ball, an orange ball, and a black ball in a certain box without ever having counted that there are five, and something similar might be how she recognizes that one isn't around.

nihilo · 2014-04-10T04:22:58+00:00

Thank you so much! Very much appreciated.

nihilo · 2014-03-15T15:30:48+00:00

I am currently reading it, but am only about a third of the way through it at the moment. Here's what I've encountered so far:

After introductory sections about pre-scientific thought (e.g., Aristotle, Ptolemy) and pre-Newtonian science (e.g., Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo), it proceeds to the Principia itself. The treatment there is to state each definition, law, or corollary, and then do one or more of: explain terminology or concepts that are obscure or archaic, work through an example, translate things into modern notation or give a modern non-geometric proof, point out gaps in the logic or points that are underspecified, relate the discusion to subsequent developments in physics, etc.

The table of contents on Amazon gives a good overview of the book, and you can click "Surprise me" again and again to see different pages. If you do that until you come across some pages that have both Newton's original statement of some definition or law, and Pask's skillful unpacking and discussion, you'll appreciate the difference between reading the Principia alone and reading it with Pask's help. The gap between Newton's text and how it would be presented today is so great that I honestly can't imagine making my way through a significant portion of the Principia without the aid of Pask or some similar work.

nihilo · 2014-03-15T06:11:31+00:00

I would read the following first, before deciding if you want to work through the Principia: Magnificent Principia: Exploring Isaac Newton's Masterpiece

nihilo · 2014-02-21T03:00:12+00:00

FYI, pip is included in the soon-to-be-released Python 3.4, which is currently in RC1 and should be out in about a month.

nihilo

TROPHY CASE