Today I tried remapping the Fn-key on my keyboard after my Ctrl-key stopped working reliably (I suspect it's a hardware issue). While I first suspected this to not be possible at all, because a lot of keyboards do not even send the Keypress Events from the Fn-keys to the kernel, for my laptop keyboard this seems to have not been the case, as I was able to see the keypresses with "xev". Next, I tried rebinding the key with xmodmap using its keycode (151): xmodmap -e 'keycode 151 = Control_L', but that did not work for mysterious reasons.
After some more failed attempts, I tried using setkeycodes, which directly changes the map of the keyboard-driver to change which keycode would be returned upon pressing the scan-codes sent by the keyboard. Remapping the Fn key there did work, but for to me mysterious reasons, the keycodes for setkeycodes are offset by 8, so I ran "sudo setkeycodes e063 29" which successfully bound the key to keycode 37 according to xev when I ran it afterward. Apparently the keycodes sent by kernel are different than the ones by xev.
It turns out the "wobbly table theorem" is less of just a math curiosity than I thought.
The "wobbly table theorem" essentially says (ignoring https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable.html ][caveats and different variants) that if you have a "table" with legs of equal length resting on a continuous surface with three legs touching the ground, you can find a rotation where the table rests on all four legs. I first encountered this years ago on Numberphile.
This investigation started with my frustration with the chair I am currently sitting on and me thinking that the wobbly table theorem couldn't apply to my use-case. Surely the chair was too poorly built, given how wobbly it was! I assumed the floor in the room I'm in to be relatively flat. But, when I tried turning the chair around, it worked!?
I thought once we have a table where one of the legs is shorter and the surface is flat, it's obvious that we cannot make the table stable. In my mind most wobbly chairs I encountered were broken like that (for example when one of their furniture glides gets lost).
Chair on floor (big gap).
After seeing this, I put the chair on another table (since I expected the table to be flatter) and it turns out the chair actually has much flatter legs than I had imagined.
Chair on flat table (smaller gap)
So essentially my assumption that the chair was to blame was incorrect. In hindsight, I could have checked and realized this earlier.
Right before posting this, I realized that the chair was still to blame, to some degree. The chair I was sitting on was missing the black furniture glides at the back (those that you can see in the image above). So, at the back, the chair was essentially resting on multiple points out of pretty rigid metal. Switching to a chair with all furniture glides did in fact make the chair stable in any position I tried.
Many people eating lunch or drinking coffee on the terrace of the CERN cafeteria have had the following problem: the table is often not in a stable equilibrium position. It rests on three feet, and with very little energy, it can be made to wobble, spilling part of your coffee at best onto the saucer, or at worst onto the table. Why is this? Not because the table is poorly built, but because the ground is very irregular.
[...]
I carried out the experiment many times on the terrace, and even though the conditions of the theorem are not really satisfied - the feet are thick, the ground is sometimes discontinuous, but on the other hand, the legs of the tables have some elasticity - I have always succeeded in finding an equilibrium position.
Two weeks ago, I've been dissatisfied with the amount of workouts I do. When I considered how to solve the issue, my brain generated the excuse that while I like running outside, I really don't like doing workouts with my dumbbells in my room even though that would be a more intense and therefore more useful workout. Somehow I ended up actually thinking and asked myself why I don't just take the dumbbells with me outside. Which was of course met by resistance because it looks weird. It's even worse! I don't know how to “properly” do curls or whatnot, and other people would judge me on that. I noticed that I don't actually care that much about people in my dorm judging me. These weirdness points have low cost. In addition, this muscle of rebellion seems useful to train, as I suspect it to be one of the bottlenecks that hinders me from writing posts like this one.
(Though the aversions about this particular post were that these anecdotes just seem to need way too much context to establish (I guess writing needs practice, who would have thought). As well as frustrations like not having implemented footnotes, so I need to choose between annoying my reader and cutting this section).
Today I want to show you the amazing device that ran my life for...3 years? It's this smart watch:
I didn't claim it looked sexy.
The specific model is the ZGPAX S8. My father got it gifted at a conference and gave it to me after finding no use for it. First I uninstalled all the useless apps on it and installed the Nova Launcher.
Today I finally took the time to figure to the YASnippet Emacs package to create a template for my new blogposts. Turns out there was not a lot to understand. To create a new template you run `M-x` `yas-new-snippet`. In the then opening buffer you just enter your template in plain text and hit `C-c C-c` when you're done.
The three other elements that I needed for my simple snippets:
`$0` denotes where the cursor should end up after the snippet is inserted.
Emacs lisp code to be evaluated with the snipped can be inserted within backquotes. Example: the following snippet enters the current date in iso-format:
`(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")` $0
Elements to be completed at point are entered with {N: default value} as an example here is the template for a for-loop in C:
I recently realized why some I find board games/puzzles boring after a while:
The returns on "cognition" for these games has a sharp cutoff.
While this seems a bit obvious in retrospect, I haven't seen anyone talk about "returns on cognition" in any other context apart from thinking about AI-Doom scenarios.
One thing that always made me a bit frustrated with different board games is that a lot of them get boring once you've played a few times, and there are a lot of heuristics that are obviously close to optimal play. Other games really encourage me to "actually think", because there are highly non-obvious situations coming up all the time.
One example for a game that is boring is 2048 (or at least doesn't encourage more than executing a fairly trivial algorithm). Once you have figured out you always need to put the big numbers in the corner. But there is a close cousin of this game Dive where you can merge the numbers if one is a multiple of the other. For Dive I don't have any good heuristics like this, and it feels more engaging for that reason.
What is the optimal next step? I don't know!
Interesting concept I stumbled upon while googling:
game complexity: the Wikipedia-article goes into a lot of different measures for how hard it is to play a game optimally
Was ich mich schon gefragt habe, ist wie lazyblorg denn mehrere Sprachen bei den Blogposts unterstützt. Ich hatte mich in der Hinsicht gewundert, weil ich dafür keinen Tag setzen musste oder ähnliches. Nachdem ich im Wiki mehr zu tags gelesen habe bin ich darüber gestolpert, dass lazyblorg von Haus aus einfach nach Keywords sucht, um die Sprache zuzuordnen. Das ganze gefällt mir mehr und mehr!
Als nächstes frage ich mich natürlich, ob bulletpoints funktionieren
Das wäre schon ein Feature, das ich die ganze Zeit verwenden würde.
Sieht so aus als würde es ziemlich Einwandfrei funktionieren.
While I enjoy journaling in Emacs and, asking oneself the same questions every day becomes boring for me really quickly. My new solution is to give myself a random prompt from a list of nice introspective questions I stole from https://clearerthinking.org[fn:2] . This is pretty easily implemented in Elisp [fn:1]:
;list with your prompts
(setq custom/journal-prompts '("What is on your mind?"
"What did you achieve today?"
"What worried you today?"))
(defun custom/random-phrase ()
"command to insert prompt at cursor"
(interactive)
(insert (seq-random-elt custom/journal-prompts)))
Right after creating my blog with Lazyblorg, I had a hard time using Emacs to write my Blogposts instead of just using the markdown editor on lesswrong. Truth is Emacs isn't the perfect writing environment for me yet, but it is slowly getting to that point. What was bugging me the most, was the lacking linting and spellchecking through LanguageTool that I've grown accustomed to in the browser. By now I figured out that I had disabled the default flycheck features, which are actually rather neat and very good at identifying my mistakes. I've now actually taken the time to configure LanguageTool. I suddenly realized that this also solved my other problem, which was getting rid of meta-comments in the final versions of my blogposts. For now, I can just add the TODO keyword and flycheck will remind me, that this should probably be removed at some point. Next I've installed LanguageTool on my system, so I could get the superb corrections not only in the browser, but in Emacs as well. Hussa!
I recently stumbled upon this episode of the future of life institute podcast on "the nature of reality" and keep coming back to thinking about it. I am still not sure whether to take this whole thing as basically trivial or whether I should go into full blown believe crisis mode. Now that I am thinking about it I already have a full blown believe crisis (maybe insight ornanating would be a better description?). In contrast to my regular believe crisis, while I definitely feel like this view should in some sense change how I think about the world/base reality there is another part that is just really reluctant to accept yet another complication in how I think about the world. I just can't manage to find anything in particular that is different from this view compared to my previous view, except when I apply it to topics like consciousness or the nature of computation that make me really confused anyways. If you are reading this none of this is probably really "new". It is just like someone is spelling out this view that I've sometimes seen people gesture at, but he is more explicit about it.
Quantum mechanics does say that there are particles in a sense, like you can say that there are particles but particles aren’t really the thing. You can ask questions of reality that entail that reality is made of particles and you will get answers that look like answers about particles. But you can also ask questions about the same physical system about how it is as a wave and you will get answers about how it is as a wave. And in general in quantum mechanics, there are all sorts of questions that you can ask and you will get answers about the physical system in the terms that you asked those questions about. So as long as it is a sort of well-defined physical experiment that you can do and that you can translate into a kind of mathematical form, what does it mean to do that experiment? Quantum mechanics gives you a way to compute predictions for how that experiment will turn out without really taking a particular view on what that physical system is, is it a particle? Is it a wave? Or is it something else? And I think this is important to note, it’s not just that quantum mechanics says that things are particles and waves at the same time, it’s that they’re all sorts of things at the same time.
So you can ask how much of my phone is an elephant in quantum mechanics. A phone is totally not the same thing as an elephant, but a phone has a wave function, so if I knew the wave function of the phone and I knew a procedure for asking, “Is something an elephant?”, then I could apply that procedure to the phone and the answer would not be, “No, the phone is definitely not an elephant.” The answer would be, “The phone is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit an elephant.” So this is very exaggerated because we’re talking phones and elephants, all these numbers are so tiny. But the point is that I can interrogate reality in quantum mechanics in many different ways. I can formulate whatever questions I want and it will give me answers in terms of those questions.
I had been already familiar with the idea that quantum mechanics adds a probabilistic element to your whole world model, that there is basically that whole class of things that are "possible" like a baseball suddenly being in front of you, but the probability being essentially so small that it does not matter (not to mention that quantum effects of your own perception/brain totally dominating the equation: Most worlds where there is suddenly a baseball moving without anything before happening, there is some "classical" mechanic explanation and even when we get to the quantum, explanations, most of those would at least in the baseball example be misfirings in my brain (both because of the great mass of a baseball and the specificness of a baseball, that would probably be better explained by some misfiring in my brain (since otherwise where are all the indistinguishable blobs?))). What was new to me was to basically put the limits of what you are actually able to observe on some kind of pedestal as the only thing that really matters in some sense.
You can say in Newtonian mechanics or classical physics, there’s something arguably reasonable about saying, “Here is the system, it’s these particles and they’re moving around in this way.” And that’s saying something. I think you can argue about whether that’s actually true, that that’s saying something. But you can talk about the particles themselves in a fairly meaningful way without talking about the observer or the person who’s measuring it or something like that. Whereas in quantum mechanics, it’s really fairly useless to talk about the wave function of something without talking about the way that you measure things or the basis that you operate it on and so on.
[...]
So this is a conception of reality that’s kind of like a big game of 20 questions. Every time we look out at reality, we’re just asking different questions of it. Normally we’re narrowing down the possibility space of how reality is by asking those questions, getting answers to it. To me a really interesting question is like, what is the ontological reality status of all those big sets of questions that we’re asking? Your tendency as a theoretical physicist is to say, “Oh, the wave function is the thing that’s real and that’s what actually exists, and all these extra things are just extra things that we made up and our globbed onto the wave function.” But I think that’s kind of a very impoverished view of reality, not just impoverished, but completely useless and empty of any utility or meaning because quantum mechanics by its nature requires both parts. The questions and the state. If you cut out all the questions, you’re just left with this very empty thing that has no applicability or meaning.
It also reminded me of Scott Garrabrant’s perspective on inference with finite factored sets. I am not sure I really understood that either though.
Today I finally managed to get a blogging setup with orgmode working. This has honestly been one of my more stressful projects so far. According to my timetracking data, I have spent at least 26 hours tinkering with different solutions, sweating over whether I should go anonymous or not, whether to continue to use my jekyll setup and other overwhelming details.
In the end I decided to go with lazyblorg. While lazyblorg promises to make blogging low effort, therefore making blogging a sustainable habit for me, it is definitely not the easiest solution to set up in the first place. I had already once tried to use it, but must have gotten stuck at some point that I don't even remember anymore. It still took me 4 hours yesterday to go from "Ok lets finally do this", to now where I managed to create this blogpost and be able to see it in the browser. I am honestly not quite sure what took me so long, but one thing that definitely was tricky, was getting all of the meta-data right, that is required for a blogpost. Things I have allowed to put off for now is tweaking the CSS file, fixing the broken Header of the webpage or removing the example blogposts.
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