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I just did today's word and I thought this was pretty fun. M⁻¹M stumped me for a while, but once I got it, it gave me a good chuckle for how obvious it was in hindsight. I do work in physics, so that gives me a head-start on recognizing all these formula. From the other comments here it seems enjoyment is very correlated to amount of these formula one already knows.

Anyways looking forward to checking this the next couple of days


thank you!


I don't think I would classify all stages of fetal development as persons, though obviously that line is crossed at some point during pregnancy. However, I read Judith Thomsons "A Defense of Abortion" at some point and she succesfully convinced me fetal personhood doesn't actually matter that much to the morality of abortion.

It can be found on the internet[0], and is only 13 pages. Alternatively I think the wikipedia article outlines her three main arguments quite well[1], and is a quicker read. The most known part is her violinist thought experiment, which can be read to only allow abortion in cases of rape. However, the subsequent parts convinced me that, abortion is moral in general. So long as reasonable steps have been taken to avoid pregnancy.

[0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion


> I mean: you can disagree with Jordan Peterson (I'm certainly not a religious person, for a start) but what did he do that warranted the old Twitter censoring him?

This tweet[0] was the kickoff point as I recall. I don't really think that getting banned pending deleting the tweet is that egregious. It's one thing to have non-woke opinions and argue for them. I don't follow Jordan Peterson, but I imagine he had posted many times on transgender issues, before he posted the offending tweet.

The issue seems more to have been specifically calling out specific persons, "criminal physician", Elliot Page, in a way that could be construed as inciting to violence

[0] https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...


What tweet?


Ah that's embarrassing. I had wanted to link to this article since it contained some context. https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...

Thanks for pointing it out, will fix.


I mean, I think that Tweet was more a last straw; he had been making a nuisance of himself for years.


The github repository is a godot project. Godot is a game engine. The quickest way is to download godot. Clone the repository and open the folder as a project in godot.


My impression is that the arrest has to do with telegrams failure to cooperate with law enforcement. Hardware manufactorers don't generally have the ability to monitor and moderate what their product is used for. I guess one could imagine a hardware manufactorer being arrested for refusing to turn over a log of sales or similar.

Obviously god has no such restriction, but he's probably outside French jurisdiction, and i don't think they have an extradition deal in place.


I think that's an overly uncharitable read on this approach. Lots of tasks that have difficult thoughts, that need to be thought before they can be completed, also have phases in which work just has to be done. I'm in the middle of collaborating on an article for submission to a physics journal. I wouldn't term it filler work, but most of the complex thoughts on the problem have been thought through and the work right now is creating a coherent story that goes over our results. An outline method would work fine for this part of the project.

As for the spy novel, i think the outlining is actually quite similar to how Sylvester Stallone described his writing process[0]. You wouldn't fill the outline with generic beats, you would put in your basic plan for the story.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xqfkVNwEU


It sounds like we are mostly in agreement, actually. Mathematicians don't start by creating an outline of a paper they have to write. They start by proving a theorem of some kind -- that's the part that involves thinking hard -- and only after they have something worth publishing does it make sense to think in terms of an outline. Proving the theorem take take a mathematician months (or a lifetime). Writing the paper takes an afternoon.

It's the same for software. By time time you understand the problem well enough that you can write down a list of things to be done you're already way past the "thinking hard" stage.

Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for rocky in 3 days. He could do this because he had already figured out the concepts, the theme, the characters and their personalities way ahead of time. He had worked on it in his head for years. By the time he started typing 90% of the work was already done. Nothing Stallone wrote later in his career was as good as his original rocky script.


It's related, but as i recall the reason that short pulses cut better has to do with heat transfer. Most heat transfer in metal is due to the vibration in the electrons, being much lighter than the atomic lattice they move in. Very short pulses, means that the heating in the beam path happens faster, than the electrons can transfer it out to the rest of the metal. In long pulses once the metal is vaporised, a lot of the surrounding material has melted. This molten metal cools into jagged structures and that leaves the edge weird. All this doesn't happen if the pulse is short enough. It vaporises metal before the surrounding structure has a chance to heat up.

Here's a figure showing the quite stark difference. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/SEM-image-of-the-substra...


Awesome, those photos do illustrate the difference really well.

Thanks heaps. :)


Here's a figure comparing the hole left in a metal surface with normal and femto-second pulses. The difference is quite stark.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/SEM-image-of-the-substra...


Could be that fiber doesn't have any resale value. Whereas copper theft is a somewhat common issue.


IMO the word intelligence doesn't seem a good description for the thing LLMs possess, they perform pretty well on some tests measuring it. But they're also sometimes wrong in ways intelligent beings (humans) never are. Like this[0] riddle about boats and farmers i stumbled over recently:

> A farmer stands on the side of a river with a sheep. There is a boat on the riverbank that has room for exactly one person and one sheep. How can the farmer get across with the sheep in the fewest number of trips?

It's obviously riffing on the classic wolf sheep lettuce riddle, but I don't think that's gonna fool any humans into answering anything but the obvious. ChatGPT-4o on the other hand thinks it'll take three trips.

They perform a good approximation of intelligence most of the time but the fact that their error pattern is so distinct from humans in some ways, suggests that we probably shouldn't attribute intelligence to them. At least in a human sense of the word.


I just tried it with chatgpt and got what seems like the right answer:

The farmer can get across the river with the sheep in one trip. Here's how:

1. The farmer and the sheep get into the boat. 2. They both cross the river together.

Since the boat can hold one person and one sheep, they can make the journey in a single trip. The fewest number of trips required is just one.


That's fair. I get the wrong answer on the gpt3 and gpt4-o models, but there's always some uncertainty involved in these gaps. When I appended "Consider your answer carefully." to my prompt, it answered as though the goal was for only the sheep to get across, and that the farmer had to get back to the original shore.


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