it/its or she/her, old enough to remember when something awful was where the cool kids hung out. non-spiritual robotkin/dollkin. more stuff under the readmore.
sometimes i Discourse, tagged #discourse. feel free to ignore or filter that out
It was late when your doll was rushed to you by its sisters. The moon was high and the day’s summer heat persisted into the night. You were reading when a trio of dolls barged into the room, supporting a slumped fourth. “Miss! Miss! Something’s wrong with Fern!"
Off down the stairs and into the workshop went the lot of you, Fern now cradled in your arms. You asked the three dolls, Daisy, Daffodil, and Dandelion, if they had seen Fern before its collapse as you laid it out on the bench. Daisy said it had seen Fern chasing butterflies in the garden. Daffodil had shared cookies with it at lunch, and Dandelion overheard it happily talking with another doll for hours throughout the day. As you examined Fern, it wasn’t long until you knew the cause of its malfunction. Rust and dirt collected in its joints. Its spring was overwound and its emotional matrix was hot enough to scorch your fingertips. "It looks like Fern has been through so much.” you mused aloud. “Too much for any doll in such a short time. It’s overloaded and burning itself up.”
The dolls were curious, and asked to know why. Fern hadn’t been assigned any chores that day, so how could it be overloaded? You told the three that Fern needs quiet while you worked, and sent them back outside. Slowly you set yourself to Fern’s repairs. Unwinding a doll is a delicate affair, and you were cautious and careful as you reduced the tension of its mainspring. Incantations chanted over its magical core reduced the intense burning light to a gentle violet hum. Hours of meticulous scraping cleaned Fern’s joints of debris.
Fern woke with a start as you were finishing your repairs. The clatter of its shaking form against the hard bench echoed through the house, drawing the attention of the three dolls who had brought their companion to you as you all held it tightly, whispering reassurances. Once the shaking had subsided, Fern was left to rest. It would be several days before it would be seen in the garden chasing butterflies again. Stress and injury is not the only thing that can damage a doll. Pleasant activities, too, can cause these simulacra to burn out.
It seems unfair to become broken by happiness and joy, but this limited capacity for all kinds of emotions is the fate of a doll.
isolating the vocals on the last verse of Once In A Lifetime reveal many dark secrets
fyi that rough cut right in the middle of a “same as it ever was” isn’t my doing, that’s in the actual mix, somebody apparently needed to stitch that last bit together right in the middle of a word
David Byrne hanging out in his basement doing his laundry
i saw a post going around about various mountains in the US PNW and how they’re named by indigenous people compared to the conventional English name
and I’m not going to comment on whether or not we should adopt those names in English, but in saw a bunch of people describing the indigenous names as the “real names” and that’s… fundamentally not how names work for inanimate objects. they don’t have objective names. people do; if I say my name is Sarah then there’s a sense in which that’s my real name even if everyone else calls me Katie. but mountains aren’t alive; they can’t name themselves
also presumably at least some of these mountains have multiple names because they were seen by people with different languages. so which one is the “real” one?
virgin airlines isn’t a great name for an airline, but imagine getting on a virgin galactic flight. christ alive. there’s a new inherent risk that simply doesn’t exist with earthbound flights: you might have to explain the concept of virginity to aliens, and then explain why you’re on a spaceship named after it
if they don’t have a concept of virginity, you’re now stuck explaining to the aliens why it does or doesn’t matter to you, which would just be an incredibly uncomfortable situation for everyone involved
after you spend several hours spent explaining things, the tall one bows his head. “I see,” he croaks in a murky voice, “but what is sexual reproduction?”
and if they do have a concept of virginity, what if they make fun of you for flying on the virgin spaceship
“we have heard of your kind only through your stray communications. would it be presumptuous to assume there is also a chad galactic we might speak with?”
Pretty much every presentation of the halting problem I’ve ever read or heard pretty much represents the idea of halt-opposite as if it can take itself as an input and the whole proof is that if it does do that it cannot compute whether it will halt or not because if it halts it won’t and vice versa
But like, halt-opposite takes in an input, and its output depends on that input.
We can describe the output of a machine (whether it halts or not) as depending on the input, meaning that the output cannot be computed independently, obviously. This linear dependency of input -> output means that halt can never just take in the code, it needs some sort of input for the inner machine to run. So our halt machine takes in n+1 arguments, n is the amount of arguments the inner machine takes and the 1 is the actual inner machine.
If we try to pass halt-opposite into itself, it means that the upper halt needs to take in 2 arguments, “inner halt-opposite” and inner halt-opposite’s argument. Halt-opposite’s output depends on inner halt-opposite’s output which depends on inner halt-opposite’s input.
We can never try to run halt-opposite in itself simply because it will always depend on something else, is what I’m trying to say.
And I think that’s a more elegant proof than just pretending that halt-opposite can evaluate itself? I think this demonstrates that the halting problem is not an impossible problem because it’s self-referential in some way but because it simply cannot possibly be modeled. It’s not even a problem, our little dependency chain shows that the idea of a “machine that can compute if any machine will halt and do the opposite” is not actually defined, since the halting of a machine depends on more that the machine itself.
I’m pretty sure I’m missing something significant, which is why I’m posting my thoughts, it’s just that this is a thought that no amount of independently reading about this problem has resolved. Maybe it’s worth actually trying to find the original paper on this, I’m suspecting that vulgarization of the problem is what led to this chain of thought
I’m not 100% sure on this so don’t quote me (not my field of math) but my impression is that you have a function h(s) with input a 0-ary function s and output a boolean. h(s) outputs True if s() halts and False if s() doesn’t halt. Then you can define a 0-ary g() such that g() loops forever if h(g) and stops if ~h(g).
So I don’t think the intention is to develop a halt-opposite in general and self-evaluate it, but rather you have an inputless function that is a halt-opposite on itself alone.
so the proof as i always did it is that h is a two-input function such that H(f, x) is true if and only if f halts when given x as input. then you construct a g such that g(f) halts if and only if f(f) doesn’t halt, and then you try to compute H(g, g) and you get a paradox
it’s maybe instructive to compare this to a function steps(f, x) which is true if f(x) takes fewer than 100 steps on your turing machine, and is computable. this is because if you try to make the proof go through, you have to construct a function g(f) that takes fewer than 100 steps to halt if f(f) takes more than 100 steps to halt, and it’s not at all obvious that that’s possible (and it seems intuitive that it wouldn’t be!)
That moment when you go HEY GIVE THIS PERSON A PRIZE!!
[text from twitter user lovedoveclarke: “are we living through traumatic event after traumatic event or are we just the first generation with worldwide communication and social media and life has always been this fucking horrific?”]
two notes, however:
It’s both, guys. Both is good. We are living through traumatic event after traumatic event AND this has been human experience since before we were humans.
No no it was often, on average, much Much MUCH worse!
We are living in the best time to be alive, basically ever. We have massively reduced cancer, we have amazing vaccines and technology to rapidly produce more, child mortality is not 50%, there are fewer wars going on than basically ever (Ukraine is big, but there are a lot fewer civil wars going on, and it’s still small by the scale of, like, the Franco-Prussian War, which was like the 3rd major Prussian war in 10 years), global poverty is like 10% of what it was a decade ago, murder rates are super low (they are up a lot, but still a fraction of the 1990s), and American prosperity is at the highest level ever. (Yes I know the US has a lot of rights backsliding in the last 5 years, but it’s still way better than even 20 years ago).
You see a lot more about what you don’t have and a constant stream of bad stuff going on, but I promise all of that was going on absolutely constantly.
Yeah like very often these kinds of questions have a hidden and unexamined assumption that there’s a baseline state of Not Awful that is normal, for humans; a baseline state of “No Mass Trauma Events Happening” from which all else is deviation.
This has not been our history, as a species. It’s not really ANY species’ experience. There’s this nonsense book out there about ~*why zebras don’t get ulcers*~ when a) because ulcers in humans are caused by an h pylori infection that does not affect zebras and while the symptoms can be exacerbated by stress (and while stress can cause heartburn severe enough to feel like an ulcer even though it isn’t one) it is not caused by it but also b) stress can make zebra mares literally abort near-term pregnancies while they’re running and actually zebras (and other wild animals) die of stress-related ailments all the time. They just immediately get eaten or otherwise die of the environment by the time it gets bad enough.
The life of a living creature on this world is not “ahh I have reached my Assigned Niche of Perfect™ and now I shall live in equilibrium and harmony”, it is “shit fuck shit that’s a predator crap do I have enough to eat augh where’s my offspring” until death.
(Interspersed, of course, with moments of delight and joy and fierce pleasure at being alive and success and so on.)
Is that gonna make anyone feel better to engage with and realize? I dunno - I’m a chronic major depressive, I am kind of an outlier and can only carefully be counted. For ME remembering that humanity has been reeling from traumatic event to traumatic event since before we were modern humans is very helpful and grounding.
ok. listen. it’s about your girlfriend. you know how we thought she was a crop-blighting witch and we were planning to stone her? so, here’s the thing. every stone we threw drew not blood but like, the black and fathomless rage of a race of titans that were once slain but could not die. and she like, rose from her hastily-shoveled roadside grave as their resubstantiated champion or something. yeah, we’re suffering the onslaught of her vengeance right now. yeah. I guess we inadvertently created that which we had so feared. yeahh. could you like, answer her texts and ask if she’ll stop sloughing our flesh with her baleful gaze every time she sees us. thx in advance
you’re simping. calves are stillborn in the fields, food rots on the plate, holy symbols for miles around are tarnished black, and you’re simping.
