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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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    • /ram - tmpfs filesystem
    • ~/.local/bin - added to my path
    • ~/.local/software - any user-local program more complicated than a binary gets a directory here. Generally a binary would be symlinked to ~/.local/bin
    • ~/.local/venv - shared python venv to use for one liners and small scripts
    • ~/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is configured to install from
    • ~/.local/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is not configured to install from (used for mock, VMs, and external systems).
    • /overflow - Used to point to a large secondary hard drive (back when having a small ssd was the economical thing to do. Nowadays, it is just where my large directories go cause I can’t be bothered to get used to a more sane setup



  • homura1650@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzI AM BETTER
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    2 months ago

    I had a similar realization when studying undergrad linguistics.

    One of the classes had us read Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization” paper. The overwhelming sense I got from it was that the author did not understand X-Bar theory, despite knowing that Chomsky was the one who came up with it (and not realizing at the time that this paper was essentially Chomsky’s first paper on the subject).

    I will also say that it is a credit to his writing that the paper still holds up pretty well; even if it spends an entire section coming up with bad answers to what was literally a syntax 201 homework assignment.




  • Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

    Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

    If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

    Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

    For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

    Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

    It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

    By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

    We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.




  • If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.

    AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.

    Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.


  • “Calories” is actually two different things. The first thing is a unit of energy. In this sense, calories are very much interchangeable. Wood has calories, which is why we use it for fire. However, if you tried eating wood, you would mostly just be increasing the caloric value of your poop. This is not inherent to wood; if you were a termite and tried eating wood, you would actually get nutritionally relevant calories from it.

    For nutritional purposes, we generally use some variant of the Atwater system. The core idea was to measure the caloric value of food, as well as the caloric value of the subjects feces and urine. This gives you a better estimate of how many nutritionally relevant calories there are.

    Nowadays, we have standard values various core food components (e.g various fats, proteins, etc). By breaking down a food into its components, we can apply the standard conversion for each component and add up the results to get a value for the food as a whole.

    This process is actually pretty bad. The digestibility of individual components does not perfectly predict the digestibility of a whole food. The measure of individual components is not perfect. The actual digestibility of some foods can vary significantly between people.

    As a practical matter, “counting calories”, really just means eating less in a way that roughly measures food by effective energy content. It turns out that an accurate accounting of calories just isn’t super important or useful for this. There is even bigger variance in the “calories out” department (including the annoying tendency of bodies to become more energy efficient when less energy is available). Further, all of the errors in calorie counting tend to be consistent. If you reduce calories by reducing the quantity of food you eat, you are reducing actual metabolized calories, even in the exact measurement is wrong.

    It is a little more complicated if you reduce calories by changing the composition of the food you eat, but broadly speaking lower reported calories are actually lower effective calories there as well. Further, if you are adjusting the composition of your food specifically enough for this to be a problem, then you are well past the point where you should be caring about other nutritional factors.


  • Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = 0 = 0 {0 0 } is not a number? No where, that’s where!

    The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the “numbers” of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

    I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.

    <s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>


  • I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

    I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?







  • A typical employee would have taxes taken out of every paycheck. Employers calculate that assuming they are your only source of income and you have nothing interesting going on tax wise, which is correct for 90% of people. Employees can ask for their income tax withholding to be changed and employers will do so no questions asked [1]. At the end of the year, you’re employer will give you a form W2 that says how much they payed you, how much they paid in taxes on your behalf, how much they payed into your tax deductible account on your behalf, etc. Basically everything about your job that is tax relevant. A copy of this W2 form is sent to the IRS.

    If you have investment accounts, work as an independent contractor, or various other forms of income, you will generally be given a form 1099. Again, a copy of this will be sent to the IRS. Income tax is not automatically withheld from these, so if you get a lot of income through them, you may owe taxes at the end of the year.

    You may also qualify for tax deductions that lower your effective income for the purposes of computing your income tax. For instance, the interest on you mortgage, charitable donations, etc. However if you choose not to claim these, you can instead claim a deduction of about $14,000; which is more than most people would be able to deduct anyway, so there often isn’t a point of keeping track of these.

    There are a couple of less common situations that you may need to deal with

    1. You can deduct significantly more than the standard deduction, so actually need to keep track of all of your possible deductions.

    2. You are self employed. In this case, you need to keep track of your business expenses, as those are deductible. You also do not have anyone taking out your income tax for you, so you are responsible for making sure you have enough saved come tax time (these tend to be the people who have problems). You are also supposed to pay taxes quarterly.

    3. You have a significant amount of income that is not from a single W2 employer. This can be multiple W2 jobs, 1099 jobs, investment income, proceeds from criminal activity, etc.

    4. You make a significant amount of money from unreported cash tips. (In practice, you can underreport this and no one will know).

    5. You choose to deduct your state’s sales tax instead of your states income tax; and do so by actually tracking how much you pay in sales tax instead of estimating it based on your income.

    Having said all of that. For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS knows exactly how much you owe; because all of your income was reported to them, as was your only significant deductions, and nothing else matters because you just take the standard deduction for the rest. The IRS could send you a bill/refund based on this and let the remaining 1% file if the IRS gets it wrong. However, that would collapse the tax preparation industry, so companies like TurboTax have lobbied against it for years.

    What actually happens instead is you go to TurboTax, upload all of the forms that were sent to the IRS, and let them file taxes on your behalf. This service was “free” until they were sued for false advertising on account of charging money.

    [0] At least for income tax. There’s a few other taxes on payroll that you cannot change.

    [1] Assuming you asked in the form of a properly filled out W4.