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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You’re in luck!

    Why would you carry an Axe over the should opposite the hand you’re holding it with?

    That’s not an axe, it’s a bindle - exactly what a fool (in french, le fou) would carry.

    What is up with his pants

    He’s wearing medieval trousers - that is in fact two ‘hose’

    These trousers, which we would today call tights but which were still called hose or sometimes joined hose at the time, emerged late in the fifteenth century and were conspicuous by their open crotch which was covered by an independently fastening front panel, the codpiece.

    And again le fou is so stupid, his junk is out and all over the place.

    See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers





  • Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).

    The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?

    Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.

    Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say:

    Islamist groups purposely … twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.




  • Actually, PDF is a turing complete programming language.

    PDF is a simplification and wrapper around the computer language PostScript - a PostScript or PDF doc literally runs on the printer or computer and outputs the rasterisation of the thing you want to print.

    PostScript is language based around a stack. You can define functions (which may be fully recursive) that run on the stack.

    Here’s a small example:

    /ANGLE {
       newpath
       100 0 moveto
       0 0 lineto
       100 50 lineto
       stroke
    } def
    
    10 setlinewidth
    0 setlinejoin
    100 200 translate
    ANGLE
    
    1 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    
    2 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    

    As such, PDF that’s actually similar to Python, and HTML is closer to something like a JSON or XML document.

    Note however that HTML can contain Javscript or WASM programs, but these are embedded rather than features of HTML.





  • I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

    An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

    (Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

    A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

    Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.








  • Completely agree.

    People are tribal - they tend to conform to what the group thinks and does. We’re also primed with strong us vs. them tendencies, that is you want your team to win whatever happens.

    As you say, if you believe that (for example) your friends and neighbours think democrats are radical socialists out to destroy American life, it would be highly dangerous to vote democrat let alone be on team democrat.