ihm

I thought maybe to account for the origin of italics, it could be that it's easier to slant in that direction while writing left-to-right than the other way.

However, when people write Yiddish (which has a right-to-left script) they slant the same way[^1], whereas you'd expect the opposite if it were easier, so maybe it is just arbitrary.

[^1]: An example of Yiddish handwriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_orthography#/media/Fil...

Trade what exactly? Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

What part of Marx's work do you think has been disproven?

Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.

Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.

I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

> Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers probably might as well not exist.

What does this even mean? Do you think in an ant colony only the queen is needed? Or in a wolf pack only the strongest wolf?

This is really impressive, especially the way they've used formal verification. Great work.

It can very much be. Here’s one example of this phenomenon (there are many others but this is the most famous): https://wiki.haskell.org/Curry-Howard-Lambek_correspondence

In summary: the capitalist class won the class war.

Consumers are not part of the problem. There is literally no action a consumer can take to ameliorate this situation because there are no tires produced that don't have this problem, and many consumers need to have a car to live.

It’s not remotely true that prices are capable of transmitting all the information required to reproduce society.

This is for the simple reason that prices more or less only communicate information about the amount of labor required to produce a thing[0].

Therefore prices on their own are, for example, incapable of transmitting information about what action needs to be taken to correct the relationship to the biosphere. Information about the state of the biosphere will only enter into prices to the extent that things start taking more labor to produce. But there’s no market mechanism that would then cause that to direct action towards stabilizing the climate.

[0]: This is because cost resolves into business owner’s cut + labor cost + cost of inputs, and the inputs can recursively be split into the same until you’re left with the amount owners take, the amount paid to workers, and the amount paid to owners of natural resources.

The business owner’s cut and the amount paid to owners of natural resources are socially determined and bear almost no relationship to the physical world or reproduction of society.

I think there are a few errors here. First there is afaict no reason the image of phi has to break up into power-of-two cyclic groups.

Second and more importantly, it seems very difficult to start with the decomposition into cyclic groups and then choose a map from the multiset group into the permutation group that corresponds to the given decomposition in a good way.

Relatedly, the isomorphism between the image of phi (i.e., the action of accumulating hashes) and the decomposition into cyclic groups may be difficult to compute, which can make finding collisions infeasible for an attacker when they could do it easily if given the explicit representation.

So overall the conclusion that “you might as well make this forced structure explicit, and just pick the block structure you want to use in advance” seems incorrect.

There are a bunch of hash based signature schemes, e.g., SPHINCS https://sphincs.org/

The set of sequences of length n ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) and beginning with a T are in bijection with the set of sequences of length n-1 ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) by the bijection

   def f(s):
     assert(s[0] == 'T')
     return s[1:]

whose inverse is

  def f_inverse(s):
    return 'T' + s

There's huge variation in Latin American dialects, there's definitely no universal speed of speech.

Horrifying to see open and talk of war with China with no shame whatsoever. Not only is there 0 reason for such a war besides providing a market for these stupid murder gadgets, the human toll of such a war would be unthinkable.

The parent was saying "Superrational" is a satire of HPMOR, not that HPMOR is a satire of Harry Potter.

Cuba is a completely different social organism to America so you can't draw such a conclusion. For example, people are densely connected to each other while in America people are quite isolated. Cuba is extremely safe (there is no private gun ownership, children play in the streets until late, lots of wholesome street life generally), and there is high trust. In the US it is the opposite.

Moreover as the sibling comment pointed out, in the US there is widespread high speed internet which makes alternatives like torrenting possible.

All this makes a sneakernet in Cuba much more viable than it would be in the US.

A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war.

To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government.

Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government.

This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.

For what it's worth, I tried Spain Spanish afterwards and had no issues at all. My accent is pretty good (not native but grew up hearing and speaking Spanish as a kid, can sometimes pass for native if we don't talk enough that they hear my poor vocabulary).

Mexican Spanish didn't work at all. It asked me "Como te llamas" and I replied, "Me llamo Isaac", which got speech-recognized into some French sentence. I tried again saying "Si, me llamo Isaac" and it got recognized as some gibberish like "C. Mi anno E Sack" or something.

As mentioned on page 9 of the thesis, IO as constructed in the thesis implies IO for RAM machines, so yes you can do programs with iteration.

Hebrew is a much broader linguistic phenomenon than just modern Hebrew. Hebrew existed as a spoken language thousands of years ago and has existed continuously since then in many different forms in different Jewish communities primarily as a liturgical language.

Modern Hebrew (or probably “Israeli Hebrew” would be more accurate) was then constituted as a vernacular fairly recently as part of the Zionist project of creating a new national identity, distinct from the existing identities of the Jewish populations would emigrated to Israel.

Sounds interesting. It‘s cool they found an OK way to approximate the assembly index given that it sounds like something uncomputable (will have to read the paper but it sounds like computing something like Kolmogorov complexity in some model of computation).

That’s just a story told by employers. The reality is the very nature of being an employee in most cases is to be exploited and expendable, last in line and first on the chopping block.

I would say this is unfair to communism. State ownership of all land is actually totally compatible with capitalism.

This article gets very close, but ultimately fails to get to the root of things. It’s like a liberal facsimile of a radical analysis. This can be seen clearly with logic like

> Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism

Actually, it is. Market competition in the search for a steady profit pressures capitalists to reduce wages as much as possible, and eliminate any human aspects from work that are not strictly necessary for production. So, definitionally lousy, poorly paid work[^0].

Workers can fight back against this pressure, but it’s a Sisyphean task. As this article explains, it’s difficult and any gains will be eroded over time and a new generation of workers will have to fight again.

The real solution is to construct systems (technologies and institutions) that can perform the functions of capital (coordination of production and distribution, giving people something to do with their day), and then eliminate capital as a social process. Generating poverty (not to mention war, ecological destruction, etc.) is just an intrinsic consequence of the dynamics of capital and will be with us until we do away with it.

[^0]: I didn’t say underpaid because on average all jobs in capitalism are underpaid: profit comes from paying people less than they produce…

Nope, could be a lot of people are just leaving or apartments are being kept vacant at high asking rents.

This could be straight out of American Psycho:

> Saturday morning Hannah texted me she couldn’t make it, so I slept in and skipped the gym. When I woke up, I put the finishing touches on a blog post I had started earlier in the week and published it. It hit the #1 spot on Hacker News; I couldn’t stop myself from constantly refreshing the post as it got more upvotes while chuckling at the classic Hacker News hate comments.