I don’t know if it’s necessary to delete, but I’ll bet you’ll get a lot more uptake if you repost another in August.
jaspax
Karma: 631
Meta: in the future, it would probably be better to space these challenges out more. I think that a lot of people blew their effort and interest on the previous one. It might be interesting if these came out once a month like the D&D.Sci challenges.
The nature of binary representations of floating-point is that nice bit-patterns make for round numbers and vice-versa, so I’m not sure that we can conclude a lot from that. The fact that the floating-point interpretation of the data results in numbers that cluster around certain values is telling, but could still be a red-herring. Part of my reluctance to endorse that theory is narrative: we were told that this is a simulated alien message, and what are the odds that aliens have independently invented double-precision floating point?
In any case, I’m reading those threads attentively, but in the meantime I’m going to pursue some hunches of my own.
Okay, here’s something interesting. Showing binary representation, in blocks of 8 bytes:
00000000: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11110100 00111111 .......? 00000008: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 00000000 01000000 .......@ 00000010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11100000 10111111 ........ 00000018: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11100100 00111111 .......? 00000020: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11110000 00111111 .......? 00000028: 10011010 10011001 10011001 10011001 10011001 10011001 11100101 00111111 .......? 00000030: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 11110010 10111111 ffffff.. 00000038: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 11110010 00111111 ffffff.? 00000040: 11011000 10100011 01110000 00111101 00001010 01010111 11111011 00111111 ..p=.W.? 00000048: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11011000 00111111 .......? 00000050: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11011000 10111111 ........ 00000058: 10100000 01110000 00111101 00001010 11010111 10100011 11010100 10111111 .p=..... 00000060: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 00000010 11000000 ffffff.. 00000068: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 00000010 01000000 ffffff.@The obvious pattern now is that every 8 bytes there is a repeated sequence of 6 bits which are all the same. Despite my initial protestations that the latter part of the file is less regular, this pattern holds throughout the entire file. The majority of the time the pattern is
111111, but there are a decent number of ones which are000000as well.
Actually, the opener is quite a bit more structured than that, even: it’s three 4-byte sequences where the bytes are all identical or differ in only one bit, followed by a different 4-byte sequence. There is probably something really obvious going on here, but I need to stare at it a bit before it jumps out at me.
ETA: Switching to binary since there’s no reason to assume that the hexadecimal representation is particularly useful here.
Hex dump of the first chunk of the file:
00000000: cdcc cccc cccc f43f cdcc cccc cccc 0040 .......?.......@ 00000010: 0000 0000 0000 e0bf cdcc cccc cccc e43f ...............? 00000020: cdcc cccc cccc f03f 9a99 9999 9999 e53f .......?.......? 00000030: 6666 6666 6666 f2bf 6666 6666 6666 f23f ffffff..ffffff.? 00000040: d8a3 703d 0a57 fb3f 0000 0000 0000 d83f ..p=.W.?.......? 00000050: 0000 0000 0000 d8bf a070 3d0a d7a3 d4bf .........p=..... 00000060: 6666 6666 6666 02c0 6666 6666 6666 0240 ffffff..ffffff.@ 00000070: 713d 0ad7 a340 fa3f d8a3 703d 0a57 f53f q=...@.?..p=.W.? 00000080: d8a3 703d 0a57 f5bf 8fc2 f528 5cef f13f ..p=.W.....(\..? 00000090: 007b 14ae 47e1 aabf 007b 14ae 47e1 aa3f .{..G....{..G..? 000000a0: 6666 6666 6666 f2bf 6666 6666 6666 f23f ffffff..ffffff.?I just picked out enough lines to make some obvious observations. There are multiple sequences of
ffffff, which I assume to be some kind of record separator. The beginning of the file is highly structured; the latter part of the file much less so. The obvious conclusion is that the first part of the file is some kind of metadata or header, while the main body begins further down.
I read the first paragraph of this post, and before reading the rest I said to myself, “I sure hope this person has a good model for why parties exist in the first place so they can ensure that their replacement actually works.” Unfortunately, the rest of the post didn’t pan out.
I’m very sympathetic to your goals here, but without a better model for the behavior of political coalitions, I strongly suspect that these proposed solution will either fail or make things worse. In particular we need to consider both the intra-parliamentary function of parties (allowing representatives to coordinate with each other), but also the public, communicative function of parties to allow voters to choose a candidate and have a good model for his behavior without having to invest tons of time.
Thank you!
[Question] Filter out tags from the front page?
Medieval Latin tarifa “list of prices, book of rates,” from Arabic ta’rif “information, notification, a making known; inventory of fees to be paid,”
So yes, tarifae delendae sunt, but fascinating that it originally comes from Arabic!
I find this reply confusing. It seems to me that you’re mixing up a descriptive and a prescriptive discussion of values.
“Your life isn’t long enough” <-- prescriptive, a value that I largely agree with though we might argue about some specifics.
“No one has ever died wishing” <-- descriptive, but as a description of what people in fact want it’s inaccurate.
No one in history has ever died wishing they had paid more dues to hierarchies, bureaucrats, and society’s systems.
False, and indicates a significant failure to appreciate people with values and desires different from your own.
There are lots of people who approach their death wishing they had acquired more social status, which is what “paying dues to society’s systems” means. And it’s literally a cliche that people approach death and start thinking about religion, which I suspect falls into your “hierarchies”. And people do these things because they actually find that their own values align with those of the system, a possibility which you don’t even seem to consider.
How much more mitigation do you think you’re going to buy by stalling for time? We already have vaccines and Paxlovid, each of which reduces the likelihood of severe COVID effects by at least 90%, and that’s coming down from a baseline of less than 1% for people who are young and healthy.
I think you’re typical-minding here. The original quote doesn’t suggest that Africa is being wronged to me at all; there are dozens of reasons why ICC investigations would be concentrated in Africa. I have read it several times, and whatever moral wrong you perceive doesn’t appear to me at all.
It seems much harder to track sales-per-election, and it seems to involve a lot more overhead. Specifically, before every election, you have to remember to put your vote up for sale, and this is likely to involve enough effort that most people won’t do it, which means that available votes will be scarce before niche elections.
Fictional example: In The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto, the Emperor is elected by the entire body of nobles descended from a semi-legendary ancestor, but the number of votes is determined by a calculated blood quantum representing the percent of your total ancestry from that person. (In the book, the exceptionally pure-blooded dowager empress casts something like a quarter million votes by herself, but she is nonetheless outvoted by a coalition of most of the rest of the nobles.)
One could imagine something similar for the US where voting rights are apportioned according to your ancestry from the Mayflower or the like.
Or: all citizens are granted a single vote upon reaching the age of majority, but they are free to permanently sell that vote. Current vote holders are recorded in a public registry. There is a large and thriving vote-trading market. Savvy players will buy up large numbers of votes before an election that they care about, then sell them off before elections of lesser importance.
Honest question: why is annexation judged to be impossible? I know nothing about Russia’s internal politics, and only a little about Ukraine’s but directly annexing conquered Ukrainian territory seems like a completely natural outcome to me.
I think you missed the point of the air travel comparison. The idea is that airlines are supposed to move people around, and we would find (probably) that giving people free access to airline tickets results in them moving around more. The idea is not that air travel increases overall wellness or somehow substitutes for health care, but just that “it does what it says on the tin”.
Health care, on the other hand, does not do what it says on the tin. Giving people more health care does not actually make them healthier. This is the mystery that the post is trying to answer.
That seems not only likely, but also correct. This is basically the attitude we have towards every other endemic disease, after all.
I endorse this conclusion. Speaking only for myself, I am not a person who “likes kids”. I tend to be indifferent and easily bored by other peoples’ kids. But I feel completely differently about my own kids, and the anecdata that I have available to me suggests that this is a common experience.