I've been unmedicated for the last six weeks, and although my energy level is all over the place, nothing feels as 'alien' as it did before. Interacting with people isn't grating on my nerves. My hearing isn't overloaded all the time. Random anxieties feel like outside thoughts that can be dismissed instead of taking over like they used to. And seasonal disorder is the real deal; I'm drowsy and yawning all the time without a trace of antidepressants in my body, despite having tweaked every screen to flood my eyes with extra blue light. 'Hazy' is a good word.

This is a temporary, motivated to both check my heart etc while meds-less and gauge mental changes, gonna go back to quetiapine in a couple of weeks, but it's been truly an eye-opening experience.

I didn't say it isn't thoughtful or as thoughtful, just that it doesn't flow as well. I think most people who aren't pretentious literary students would be pro Tom Bombadil's removal, and it doesn't take a lot of digging to find it's a remnant from the time Tolkien wasn't sure if LotR would be a full-on children's book or not. The book could easily lose about 50 pages of descriptions and scarcely anyone would care? I could go on, but to me at least, it's simultaneously polished and rough as hell.

EDIT/Addendum: Maybe to elaborate and add a bit of comparison with GEB (you CS folks love it): GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture. So a lot of their impact is just lost on me: I got it in a refined version before, so the progenitors feel clunky.

Recently read some Sherlock Holmes and did get that feeling though- everything was such a predictable trope, but I suppose at the time it was a lot more new

I'm not sure, but it was certainly influential. That's why we see it as trite and need its retelling repackaged.

By the way, if you like British humor (humour?) with commentary on (among others) writers stealing and redoing things, I recommend Upstart Crow.

You know that meme of a teacher stapling McDonald's job application forms to failed tests? In weeks like the recent ones, I think my academic employment ought to have come with a blank BA in Administration (to be filled and stamped after three years). I sometimes dream this was Futurama, and we each got our bureaucracy-issued bureaucrat who'd do all the things other bureaucrats care about. Oh Hermes, I beseech thee!

I'm reading both Boethian Number Theory (De Institutione Arithmetica) and Fundamentals of Music (De Institutione Musica), and it's a good insight into how people conceptualized numbers and their relations/representations. It has a lot of that "continuous function is the one I can draw without lifting the pen off the paper" meets Feynman's lectures flair to it, describing in word or simple drawing what today would have been a formula/proof. They're even less rigorous than expected, but (often enough) very intuitive and demonstrative at the same time. Not always, heaven forbid; when it's muddled, I can spend more time working through a paragraph than an entire pulp novel, but it's easy to see why they were amongst the primary textbooks pretty much until the early modern period. They also tangetially inspired me to read some of the 'lesser' works by Aristotle in the near future, like On Generation and Creation or Meteorologica.

Combined with my earlier readings of Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, I guess I'm about to finally graduate the Quadrivium ;).

Oh, and yesterday I finished The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy. Good read, covers the basics and goes the extra mile to point out the differences between what we know, what we can't know, and what is just romanticized later/modern vision of vikings and their mythology. The translations/retellings in the second part of the book are a bit too stilted, and it honestly wouldn't take that much effort to improve them, but they certainly aren't bad either.

Let's make one thing clear: when it comes to puzzles, you have to take them as at best a rough estimate of the ability... of puzzle solving. In chess, I routinely beat people with puzzle ranks in the grandmaster range -- and the cockier they are about it, the wider my smile -- because it's one thing to solve a problem and another to get to those positions by skill. In that regard, it's like training for a marathon exclusively on an elliptical: even if you develop endurance, you'll probably die of blisters and fresh air overdose around 10k. But damn, does it bring me joy to see some numbers improve. I even won a couple games.

From what I understood so far, the (opening) theory is muuuch less rigorous than chess, but leagues ahead of Go's "to win, you have to green-fish blue-fish, red-fish two-fish" bullshit. So much more my speed! Dunno. Maybe I have some bizarre learning disability, but it's clear that the more the game is front-loaded with rules and lingo, the less likely I am to enjoy it. And no, it's not 'Western bias'; I despise Bridge/Whist - possibly the West-est, most English game - for the same reason.

All 16 potato plants produced berries. Because I planted six different types, maybe some of them are (viable) crossbreeds? No idea, but it'll be cool to see if they grow next year. I'm also planning on leaving some potatoes behind on purpose, to see if they can self-perpetuate in an enclosure I made for less dog-resistant plants.

Because there are many unused fields nearby, two months ago I decided to help the wider butterfly population by dumping a couple cupfuls of radish seeds over the area. If it doesn't sound like much - radish seeds are about a third of the size of poppy seeds and grow best when a couple inches apart, so they've been tossed widely and sparingly. Doesn't seem like anyone but bugs noticed, though it looks like most seedpods I inspected were already eaten from the inside by caterpillars and the like. Dunno if those will have a chance to continue, but that's also something to see next year.

Nah, I told you already: we're pretty understanding of this. Hell, we have plurals of collective nouns, like 'the police' (nominative singular: policja, plural: policje), so go and wrap your head around that. It's like Latin, but much weirder and less regular. You're fine.

And good one, but what would we do with whole three lie-bear-ians?

If you shuffled the words and were about 1/3 families and nuclear superbreeders, it'd be sustainable even without lye-baer-oons.

So is this a winning move? Vote Biden, elect the prick, hope the VP can score at least a 10 on Glasgow Coma Scale? 'Cause this sounds better than the alternative and less wasteful than independent in your climate. I'm sure mk will 'rebuke' this with some meaningless faux-profound tautology, at least he does that whenever talking to me, but you can use this as... amunition (ba dum tsh!).

Since it's likely Biden won't last four years, due to death or decline, wouldn't banking on strong vice president taking over be a good strategy? That's still a thing and US didn't instate tanistry or some shit?

Hah, no worries, I'm Team Mulder too. And science is probably always a blast, so it looks like an interesting thing to check out for myself. For instance, I looked into chemical, but completely neglected (the applications of) magnetic properties it could have, which is much more my day-job area of interest. I'm just lukewarm on the whole controversy, because Avi "chair of physics at Harvard" Loeb crying foul at the 'physics establishment' is a tad hilarious. If nobodies like am_U or I seriously postulated anything like he did, we'd be keelhauled under the liquid nitrogen cystern, not published. ;)

Ever seen Pt/Mn?

Not really, but maybe it's more notable industrially, considering what you wrote about its mechanical properties. I recall someone from Czechia working on MnPt nanocomposites, but I couldn't see the significance of their work, to put it euphemistically. I guess it could be used as a catalyst, since both manganese and platinum are stupidly robust in that role? Maybe for alcohol oxidation or more generally as a replacement of sorts for metal-carbonyl complex catalysts. I can search more thoroughly if you want, but nothing pops up in my immediate wheelhouse.

The garbled speech, the replacing of names or objects by unrelated words, the rambling, unconnected thoughts...it's all part and parcel of a man whose gray matter is deteriorating quickly.

From UN translators through John Oliver to people here, folks have been laughing at Trump's speech 'patterns' since around 2015. Why would it matter to anyone now?

I completed the Evil Russian Pushup Program and gotta say two things:

1. It does work. Maybe not 'wonders' - improving from 36 to 53 isn't something to brag about when you're a 20-something - but if you've plateaued and can't/don't want to lift weights, this will give results.

2. Abs to wrists, I've been feeling sore for most of those two weeks. Thank god it stopped today, but I'm only doing the bare minimum this week. Still, I think it was worth doing.

Otherwise, it's been OK. Normalizing on all fronts.

If you're also paywalled.

Funny enough, I thought it's going to be about something a lot more #kleinbl00batshittery-y.

https://ossuaryrecords.bandcamp.com/album/popio-y-wiar

So, did the organizers try to scam some art subsidy? 'Cause, going blind, this gave me major The Producers vibe. Poor everyone, though.

For sure, the word of mouth is as crucial as earning a good reputation. That said, the course is gonna have only 15 seats by design. I'd rather be having 4-6 people who want to come rather than deal with a hundred who just want a pass.

Correct me if I'm wrong

Dunno, probably not, but I think you could instantiate one that can when they can and freeze its learned ability, so the whole hoping it doesn't forget might go away.

But I have no idea. Don't write that much code or work with raw data these days, so bibliographic aid is just about all it can do for me in an hour of need. Otherwise, it's about as tangential to my goings-on as it can get.

When I tried that 'explain paper' site, it left enough of a distaste for me to roll eyes and move past. Between absolutely fucking insisting that some unrelated mathematical concept[0] is absolutely crucial to explain my question and rephrasing a circular argument until I got bored and left, I probably won't bother again for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the above experience mean I'm unlikely to trust LLMs with stuff I don't know a lot about. Also, I kinda regret writing anything in this thread and will probably just add more tags to my ignored list. Fun company notwithstanding - too much hassle, too few fucks left.

[0] - I wrote and deleted 900 word footnote of jargon about orbits of the coadjoint representation groups and operators in de Sitter space, so let's pretend I said Tits index and wiggled my eyebrows in an amusing way.

It's visual and obvious, dude.

I'd go with 'trivial' or 'left as an exercise for the reader'.

You're right, though. Generators seem to be less able to remove 'turbulence' from the output, but rather move it someplace else within it and hope for the best. Like, I tried to make some character art for my game, and it can pull off some handsome faces, for sure more detailed than I'd have patience to draw, but the clavicle-to-armpit areas look inexplicably like Munch's melted cheese period.

Hah. Neeeerd.

It's the gist, yes. My problem is that if the idea is to scale the process to something that's more than a 100ml jar on a bench, this experiment is almost a spherical cow in a vacuum. For starters, you have to take steps to keep it under 80C, so it'll either need to be current-limited (takes more time) or be actively cooled (takes more energy, likely skews carbon balance). As it is, they probably just put a moist paper towel on the vessel and call it a day. Your product and reagents are strongly alkaline, so not all materials will stand the reaction conditions for whatever amounts of time. Those aren't insurmountable problems, sure, but stack enough of them and this might not be as viable as it looks on paper.

That said, if there's a will there's a way. I'd like it to be me making mountains out of anthills.