youzicha's comments

youzicha | 2 years ago | on: Fixed-point combinator

Sure I understand that, but nevertheless I have seen at least 3 people who were confused in the same way. (c.f. https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/728810860450136065). I think the issue is that if you see an equation f(c) = c you think about trying to evaluate the function f at the point c, since that's what you do in almost all other situations involving a function call.

youzicha | 2 years ago | on: Fixed-point combinator

Indeed. I think this something that people are often confused about, e.g. one blogger[0] comments:

> The key to understanding the fixpoint theorem, for me anyway, was realizing that when it says FG=G, it does not mean that for every F there is a G such that by calling F with parameter G one can get back G. I mention this in the blog post, above. The equality operator in FG=G is the equivalence relation induced by the calculus rewriting relation: that is, it's the symmetric reflexive transitive closure of the rewriting step relation. When you look at the proof of the theorem, it actually works by constructing an expression G such that evaluating G produces, as an intermediate result, FG. There is no need for F to even be a function, and if F is a function it doesn't matter what, if anything, F would actually do when called, because the proof of the theorem doesn't involve calling F.

I think the name "fixpoint combinator" is kindof bad, it it was called e.g. the "recursion combinator" I think people would find it more intuitive.

[0] https://fexpr.blogspot.com/2013/07/bypassing-no-go-theorems....

youzicha | 5 years ago | on: What Colour are your bits? (2004)

The blog post writes:

> Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on.

There was a real court case in 2012 which I think is interesting because it's very similar to this example. A photographer was accused of "copying" the concept of taking a photo of a red bus in front of a grey Houses of Parliament. He defended himself by saying that that those ideas are very common and should not be copyrightable---but failed:

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/162846191544/what-colour-ar...

youzicha | 6 years ago | on: An actor who was really stabbed on stage

Here's a similar example except the victim didn't survive: https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/137883089259

youzicha | 6 years ago | on: Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale

Or perhaps good teachers are also better at getting social services to poor students, so they can get food stamps, eat better, and grow talller?

https://xhxhxhx.tumblr.com/post/189336550187/teacher-effects...

youzicha | 7 years ago | on: A DIY Cruise Missile (2004)

Or a gym training plan, since terrorists don't want to be overweight!

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/166323190559/documents-bann...

youzicha | 7 years ago | on: Varieties of Argumentative Experience

Despite the book title, there is no single form of "good writing": different readers prefer different things. For example, some people really like thick fantasy novels in the style of Robert Jordan.

I would be interested to see a survey of the reading speed of people who like/dislike SSC. It could be that the fans tend to skim texts and read more words per minute, so the posts don't feel as long.

youzicha | 8 years ago | on: H-1B abuse: Bay Area tech workers from India paid a pittance, feds say

Exactly this was proposed last year in a bill with a democrat sponsor. But right now H1b is basically the only way to get hired as an immigrant. If you made it wage-prioritized there would be basically no way to get an h1b for entry level jobs, which would really suck for new graduates.

http://alexyar.tumblr.com/post/156649015342/anyway-heres-the...

youzicha | 8 years ago | on: Translations of the Dao De Jing

Oh, let me plug Peter Boodberg's startlingly bizzare version, which begins "Lodehead lodehead-brooking : no forwonted lodehead"... It's such an alien approach to translation, you can see his logic, but the end product looks like something from a Markov chain.

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/142657117089/philological-n... http://www.jstor.org/stable/2718364?s

youzicha | 8 years ago | on: Translator's Note to the Odyssey

I think she's making a reference to an existing theory---that historically people have talked about translations using gendered metaphors, with the translation in the role of the wife. In particular, by googling a bit I found an article "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" [0] (with 662 citations according to Google Scholar) which says

> The sexualization of translation appears perhaps most familiarly in the tag les belles infideles--like women, the adage goes, translations should be either beautiful or faithful. The tag is made possible both by the rhyme in French and by the fact that the word traduction is a feminine one, thus making les beaux infideles impossible. This tag owes its longevity--it was coined in the seventeenth century--to more than phonetic similarity: what gives it the appearance of truth is that it has captured a cultural complicity between the issues of fidelity in translation and in marriage. For les belles infideles, fidelity is defined by an implicit contract between translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author).

and gives various other examples where people use (patriarchal) marriage as an image.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174168

youzicha | 8 years ago | on: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/129386003779/relative-and-a...

Someone else also pointed out that the U.S. population has increased by about 20% since the 1980s, so although the absolute number of women CS students are about the same, that still means it's proportionally going down.