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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 17 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As suggested at this thread to general "yeah sounds cool". Let's see if this goes anywhere.

Original inspiration:

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, there's no quota here

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh boy, I have thoughts about Kolmogorov complexity. I might actually write a section in my textbook-in-progress to explain why it can't do what LessWrongers want it to.

A silly thought I had the other day: If you allow your Universal Turing Machine to have enough states, you could totally set it up so that if the first symbol it reads is "0", it outputs the full text of The Master and Margarita in UNICODE, whereas if it reads "1", it goes on to read the tuples specifying another TM and operates as usual. More generally, you could take any 2^N - 1 arbitrarily long strings, assign each one an N-bit abbreviation, and have the UTM spit out the string with the given abbreviation if the first N bits on the tape are not all zeros.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

You could use the recent-ish Junferno video about Turing machines to demonstrate that point as well