sparkplug94

That's actually shockingly similar. I'm sure someone has studied the mathematics of fuel transport in much greater detail -- I wonder if it's a simple problem to optimize or something closer to the traveling salesman problem

Haha thank you! I'm the original author of the linked article, and I had a LOT of fun naming the donkey transfer algorithms I came up with.

You might be able to fine-tune GPT-3 on Assyrian Inscriptions and create a GPTiglath-Pileser III

I actually wrote an article about this a couple weeks ago. https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich...

My contention is that the definition-first approach to defining sandwich is wrong, and that we should use PCA/unsupervised learning first to cluster sandwich-like objects into distinctive groups, which we can then name.

An article I wrote about a fascinating pre-Roman British counting system, that happens to sound hilarious.

This is fascinating, thank you! You’re absolutely correct, the single GR course i took linearized the EFE for the section on gravity waves and the concept that gravitation self-gravitates did not really come through. In hindsight maybe that should have been obvious though, since all waves have this property.

This is clearly a double-bluff by science. Nice try science, I don’t trust science enough to believe this pseudoscience!

In all seriousness though, with the magnitude of the psychology replication crisis right now, you might legitimately be better off with a blanket mistrust of ALL social psychology. I think the replication rate for social psychology papers is under 50%.

This article makes an interesting contrast with another article on hackernews this morning, about the median student debt of Columbia MFA students: https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-th...

I guess I’m lucky that the subjects I enjoyed at school are fairly lucrative.

I'm not an Egyptologist, but I can read hieroglyphs and can say with surety that Egyptian hieroglyphs are both pictographic AND alphabetic. It's actually an interesting system, where an alphabet (abjad, sort of) exists, but is not usually used in isolation from pictographic writing, nor can most Egyptian words be expressed entirely pictographically. For example, "Nile" is written "i t r w picture-of-water." "Sun" can be written as either a picture of the sun (with a single stroke added, indicating it is a logogram) or as "r ' picture-of-sun." The ' is the common transliteration for the arm hieroglyph, and my understanding is that it's likely pronounced something like the Arabic ayin.

There is a lot of not-quite-correct information about Egyptian hieroglyphs in the replies to this comment. Hieroglyphs are actually a hybrid system, incorporating uniliteral glyphs (representing a single consonant sound), bi- and triliteral glyphs (representing two or three consonants), and logograms, representing a full word or concept. They also include "determinatives," which are basically helpful pictures at the end of a word that tells you something about the category of the word. Sometimes, a word incorporates all three types of symbol. For example, the word "Ra," if it refers to the sun god, might have the two consonants r and ' (which is close to a), followed by a picture of the sun, followed by the seated god determinative.

So I guess the real answer here is that the Egyptian writing system incorporates elements of alphabets and logographs, used together. Vowels were (mostly) not marked, though some "consonants" are treated as vowels in transliteration. I'm not entirely sure what the distinction is there.