flowerfeatherfocus

• flowerfeatherfocus 7 Apr 2022 7:09 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dave Orr’s comment on: Don’t die with dig­nity; in­stead play to your outs

  It seems this isn’t true, excepting only the title and the concluding question. FWIW this wasn’t at all obvious to me either.

• flowerfeatherfocus 7 Apr 2022 0:15 UTC

  15 points

  on: MIRI an­nounces new “Death With Dig­nity” strategy

  Separate from the specific claims, it seems really unhelpful to say something like this in such a deliberately confusing, tongue-in-cheek way. It’s surely unhelpful strategically to be so unclear, and it also just seems mean-spirited to blur the lines between sarcasm and sincerity in such a bleak and also extremely confident write-up, given that lots of readers regard you as an authority and take your thoughts on this subject seriously.

  I’ve heard from three people who have lost the better part of a day or more trying to mentally disengage from this ~shitpost. Whatever you were aiming for, it’s hard for me to imagine how this hasn’t missed the mark.

• flowerfeatherfocus 6 Nov 2021 1:41 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Baby Sister Numbers

  Yeah, agreed :) I mentioned $\omega -1$ existing as a surreal in the original comment, though more in passing than epsilon. I guess the name Norklet more than anything made me think to mention epsilon—it has a kinda infinitesimal ring to it. But agreed that $\omega -1$ is a way better analog.

• flowerfeatherfocus 5 Nov 2021 14:25 UTC

  5 points

  on: Baby Sister Numbers

  This is great! It reminds me a bit of ordinal arithmetic, in which addition is non-commutative. The ordinal numbers begin with all infinitely many natural numbers, followed by the first infinite ordinal, $\omega$. The next ordinal is $\omega +1$, which is greater than $\omega$. But $1+\omega$ is just $\omega$.

  Subtraction isn’t canonically defined for the ordinals, so $\omega -1$ isn’t a thing, but there’s an extension of the ordinal numbers called the surreal numbers where it does exist. Sadly addition is defined differently on the surreals, and here it is commutative.$\omega \times -1=-\omega$ does exist though, and as with Norahats $\omega \times -1\times -1\times -1$ does equal $\omega$.

  The surreals also contain the infinitesimal number $ϵ$, which is greater than zero but less than any real number. it’s defined as the number between $0$ on the left and all members of the infinite sequence $1,\frac{1}{2},\frac{1}{4},\frac{1}{8},\dots$ on the right. Not exactly Norklet ($\omega -1\ne ϵ$), but not too far away: ${\omega }^{-1}=\frac{1}{\omega }=ϵ$ :)

  (h/​t Alex_Altair, whose recent venture into this area caused me to have any information whatsoever about it in my head)