3willows's comments

includes an interesting discussion of how Legrange took seriously Biship Berkeley's criticism of calculus and how he worked towards modern rigorous calculus

Switch Angel is the best

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips

Nice thought provoking game. Won it in around 20 minutes (likely just luck; the cards dealt seem to be random).

Blog post about this by the creator: https://thoughtwax.com/2025/07/2027-race-to-agi/

> After all, philosophy advertises itself as a home to critical thinking. Some of my professors said that I was too critical, which may seem prima facie absurd. It turned out that they were right, in a way. I was too critical of and for my profession.

I think that puts the finger on the issue.

- Any form of philosophical discussion needs to start from some shared background assumptions.

- The academics who spent their life and work solving problems based on these assumptions would not be pleased to have these assumptions challenged: just as a Christian theologian would not be pleased if a student suddenly turned round and said, actually, the Muslims are right.

I've been looking for a way to play chess/go with a generalist LLM. It wouldn't matter if the moves are bad (I like winning), but being able to chat on unrelated topics while playing the game would take the experience to the next level.

The point being: when you find someone who is tailoring all his/her/its attention to you and you alone, why bother talking to anyone else.

Perhaps that is the real danger. Everyone except a small elite who (rightly) feel they understand how LLMs work would simply give up serious thinking and accept whatever "majority" opinion is in their little social media bubble. We wouldn't have the patience to really engage with genuinely different viewpoints any more.

I recall some Chinese language discussion about the experience of studying abroad in the Anglophone world in the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Paradoxically, even if you are a university student, it may now be harder to break out of the bubble and make friends with non-Chinese/East Asians than before. In the early 20th century, you'd probably be one of the few non-White students and had to break out of your comfort zone. Now if you are Chinese, there'd be people from a similar background virtually anywhere you study in the West, and it is almost unnatural to make a deliberate effort to break out of that.

I have been hyping up Hacker News for people who are not otherwise into tech/engineering: so here's version (a minor tweak of https://jsomers.net/hn/) that filters out the tech content.

The filter is not perfect, but there are lots non-technical gems that you wouldn't readily find elsewhere:

- An interactive map of history (https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/)

- Is Literature dead? (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/27/is-literature...)

- The Philosophy of Anger (https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/agnes-callard-philosophy-...)

Enjoy!

Yes, when I got to that part, I was unsure whether you actually need 350 logic gates to implement Conway's Game of Life. It feels like that cannot be the minimum number. But presumably other mechanisms already exist where we can automatically whittle down the number of logic gates necessary given a desired truth table.

Judges and lawyers should shape legal tech's future. If they don't, VCs will.

I think Nozick's example is meant to make us re-think whether there is a strict separation between music (or other artistic) reputation and love of reputation.

In Anarchy, State and Utopia, he tackles some utopian theorists' claim that, if equality prevails, everyone will rise up to the level of the greatest writers and artists. Would people be content then? Or will they still want to vie for "eyeballs"? If the latter, should we just admit that there is just a deep-seated human desire to compete for dominance?

For what it is worth, I've written up my reflections on skimming Anarchy, State and Utopia here: https://books-blog.3willows.xyz/posts/2024-10-26-anarchy-sta...

To clarify, what Nozick meant was what if Beethoven was just turning the crank.

"Yet our experience of Beethoven's string quartets would be diminished if we discovered he had stumbled upon someone else's rules for musical composition, which he applied mechanically". (p. 38 of https://archive.org/details/examinedlife00robe/page/n15/mode...)

I guess another way to put the question is this. Suppose there is an alien civilisation where their brains are hard-wired to make Beethoven level music automatically. Most of us can hum a tune without effort: these aliens can hum music that would strike us as original and compelling without much effort. How would we react then?

Plus: nice pointer on the math scholar link. I remember loving the musical parts of Godel Escher Bach. Wish there is a good interactive website where I can revisit all the content (and listen to all the music) there in the browser.

On the last point, why struggle with history:

Robert Nozick (in Examined Life) asked how we feel if we found out, say, Beethoven seriously composed music based on a secret formula, which is entire mechanical and required no effort for him at all.

Would we still appreciate the music in the same way? If not, does our appreciation really stem from the fact that we feel he has also struggled like we do, and nevertheless produced something incredible.

I remember as a very small child watching figure skaters on TV and thinking "that's no big deal". And before I started programming: "it's just logic, all very straightforward". But that was before I first entered an ice rink or centre-d a div

Maybe we don't really appreciate something unless we appreciate it is hard in a visceral way.

Love the links to SWISH playground: really got me to want to try it out!

Lols you are offering to sell this for $1? https://iamwillwang.com/dollar/

This was something I did in Oct 2024 when I was keen to self-learn programming and turn it into a job. Now my interest has shifted, but I am glad I wrote down the journey!

Special thanks to J_H's helpful comments (https://codereview.stackexchange.com/users/145459/j-h).

Agree. The whole point of the article is to generate the long list of regex programmatically.

A quick way to verify this is to download the repo, remove everything other than main.py and regex-chess.json, and the programme will still work.

All the other python files are building up to regex-chess.json, see e.g. the imports and output to write_regex_json.py.

My own answer is here: https://github.com/3willows/Darklaga/blob/main/README.md

Good stuff! Is there any chance you could write some instructions on how to make "darklaga.bin" locally.

I ran "npm install" and then the build script, but then got a bit lost.

When I open dist/darklaga.html, my browser dev tools (correctly) tells me that I can't get at "darklaga.bin".

I worked around this by going on the live demo, grabbing the "darklaga.bin" from the dev tools "Networks" tab, and plugging it to the dist/ directory. But it would be even better if I could just download the repo and make the bin from there.