stingpie

It's a play on the phrase "Works with most everything!"

A few names: "I didn't do that" "Works with most nothing" "Damages not guaranteed" "Left as an exercise for the reader" "Debugged for your pleasure" "Designed for failure" "Title not withstanding" "Frankly, I don't know what's going on" "Woke up too late"

I'm not sure I understand your feelings, but I'm going to offer uninformed advice anyway.

First of all, what does an 'alternative option' mean? Does the rest of your family pick a single thing off the menu, and you're embarrassed you don't want to eat the same thing, or is it more like you go by the drive through of another restaurant than everybody else? Picking different options off the same menu is generally the norm where I am, so I don't think other people would find it that weird. If it's the latter, I think most people would interpret that as you making a strong effort to engage and be supportive of your family, even it's difficult for you.

As for your family being concerned about the amount you eat, there are a couple ways you could approach it. The easiest way would probably be lying about having eaten before. People are very unlikely to be concerned about you eating too little if you say you already ate beforehand. It can be a little bit rude if you know someone will be cooking in advance, though.

The second option would be saying you have a slow metabolism. This option wouldn't completely stop your family worrying about your food intake, but over a long period of time your family will probably pick up the hint.

The third option would be to increase your metabolism through exercise, so you're more hungry and eat more. This is kind of a weird option, but it also gets close to the root of the problem.

Regardless of which option you take, it seems like your family is trying to accommodate you, even if they're doing it poorly. In these situations, being direct and honest can be very useful, since they are likely to accept your feedback. First of all, try to examine all the support they are already giving. If there are any situations when they anticipate your needs accurately, tell them that those situations are very helpful for you. If there are any situations where that isn't the case, try and tell them why it went wrong and if you actually want support in that case. A very useful phrase is "I need to learn how to do X on my own." It both explains why you want them to stop, while at the same time it doesn't imply they've done anything wrong. Lastly, regarding the restaurant thing, try to be clear about your feelings, why you are embarrassed, and if you want help trying to solve that issue. They will probably try to brainstorm different ways to ease your embarrassment, and they might have different ideas than you.

If your family is being earnest about trying to help, the best thing you can be is earnest about the help you need.

What's your preferred default pronoun? As far as I'm aware, there isn't a universally accepted replacement, since any pronoun comes with drawbacks. 'he' & 'she' are gendered, 'it' typically refers to non-sentient things, and 'they' can cause confusion about number. Of course, there's also neopronouns, but people have come up with a billion, and there's no consensus or standard, so I can't confirm the person I'm talking to will understand.

Supported typing/facilitated communication is widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Studies have shown that FC is unable to produce answers not known by the facilitator. FC proponents believe that autistic individuals have the same linguistic ability as neurotypical individuals, and difficulty speaking is merely a motor issue.

As someone with autism, I can tell you: my brain can barely keep up with conversation. It's not a motor issue. I have to actively think about appropriate word choice, how to structure sentences correctly, and neurotypicals don't. If I don't take enough time to finish the sentence in my head, the intonation is wrong, I'll skip words, put them out of order, and just generally be unintelligible.

FC, like many other 'theories' surrounding autism, are made by people who have put years into researching autism, but have never thought to ask an autistic person anything about their experience.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication

From an ace perspective, the statement that sexual expression is a human need is bizarre. I don't really know how horny regular people are, but this makes it seem like an obsession. It's like if I said bird watching is a human need; you'd immediately assume I spend like six hours a day bird watching to think it was biologically necessary.

AI safety "researchers" can be so dense sometimes. It's like they are always at the verge of understanding, but make a left turn right before they get there. ASI would not make random decisions. It would make logical decisions. Any maximizer would try to maximize it's chances of success, not satisfy them.

So if we imagine an ASI which had the goal of turning the universe into paperclips, which one of the following options would maximize it's chances of success?

1. immediately kill all humans and turn them into paperclips.
2. establish a positive relationship with humanity in case the ASI is destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. (The humans will happily rebuild it)

It boggles the mind that people don't recognize this. If an ASI's goals do not include the destruction of humanity as an early instrumental goal, it will not randomly decide to destroy humanity, and it will instead cater to humanity to maximize the chances humanity will rebuild it.

In addition, all the hype over ASI safety (ASI will not occur in this century, see **1) drowns out existing AI safety issues. For example, consider "The Algorithm" which determines how social media decides what to show to people. It is driven to maximize engagement, in any way possible, without supervision. What's the optimal way to maintain engagement? I can't say for sure, but brief and inconsistent spikes of dopamine is the most reliable way of conditioning pavlovian responses in animals, and it seems like the algorithm follows this rule to a tee. I don't know for a fact whether social media is optimized to be addictive (let's be honest though, it clearly is) but simply the fact that it could be is obviously less important than a theoretical AI which could be bad in a hundred years or so. Otherwise, who would fund these poor AI start ups whose intention is to build the nuke safely but also super rushed?

Another classic example of AI safety suddenly becoming unimportant when we know it's dangerous is GPT-pyschosis. Who could've predicted a decade ago that advanced AI chatbots who are specifically trained to maximize the happiness of a user would become sycophants who reflect delusions as some profound truth of the universe? Certainly not the entirety of philosophers opposed to utilitarianism, who predicted that reducing joy to a number leads to a dangerous morality in which any bad behavior is tolerated as long as there is a light at the end of the tunnel. No! You think OpenAI, primarily funded my Microsoft, famous for their manipulative practices in the 90's and 00's, would create a manipulative AI to maximize their profits as a non-profit??

I don't want to sound embittered or disillusioned or something, but I genuinely cannot understand how the 'greatest minds' completely glaze over the most basic and obvious facts.

**1: the human brain contains 100 trillion synapses and 80 billion neurons. Accurate simulation of a single neuron requires a continuous simulation involving 4 or 5 variables and 1 to 2 constants(per synapse). You would need 800 terabytes of ram to simply store a human brain. In order to simulate a human brain for a single step, you would need a minimum of 800 trillion floating point operations. If we simulate the brain in realtime with a time step of one millisecond, you would need 800 petaflops. The world's most powerful computer is Hewlett Packard's "el capitan" which has 1.7 exaflops, and 5 petabytes of ram. The limiting factor for brain simulation would be the amount of data transferable between CPU and GPU chiplets, which for el capitan is 5 terabytes per second, but we need 40 petabytes per second(800 petabytes, divided by 128 gigabytes available to each chiplet, then squared) since we want each neuron to be capable of being connected to any other arbitrary neuron.

This is only the amount of computing power we need to simulate a single person. To be super intelligent, we would probably need something a thousand times more powerful.

I think you need to keep mind how borders are enforced. Each political entity wants all the resources under their control, but since all political entities want the same limited resources, they have to fight for them. Depending on the scarcity of resources and the efficiency of each economy, each entity will reserve a different amount of resources to their military, which will then determine how far out their territory can reach.

A good model for territory (assuming all space is equally valuable and equally as hard to defend) are weighted voronoi graphs. Essentially, the power of a military decreases as you move further from the capital, and the borders are drawn where two opposing militaries have equal power. (i.e. a stable equilibrium point) If one of the militaries manage to push past this equilibrium point, the opposing military will become stronger due to being closer to the capital, and will push the border back to where it was.

Now, reality is significantly more complex than this simple model, especially due to the sparsity of resources in space, so a resource-point based model is going to more accurate than a resource-area based model.

In a resource point model, there are two big aspects you need to consider: surface curvature and caravan routes. If you imagine territory as a 3d object rather than a 2d one, then the surface of that object becomes the borders of the territory. If you imagine a sphere around a planet, that planet can be attacked from six different sides. If instead the planet was located in a sphere centered on the sun, the planet could only be attacked from one side. The difference between these two scenarios is how much the surface of the territory curves.

When you take into account caravan routes, the optimal shape for a territory reaching out to a resource is a shallow cone with the base centered around the capital.

TLDR; the best borders for a political entity is a spiky ball.

I thought about that, but I don't think that makes sense in this situation. The wings and arms must use different muscle groups, and the biceps would be used for the arms, not the wings. Furthermore, since the wings are on the back of Pit, the muscles would either have to wrap around the rib cage or go through them, constricting the lungs.

Tiny wings are very much capable of lifting heavy things, but they have to flap super quickly. Humming birds have really tiny wings compared to their size, but since they never glide, it's not important. The bigger issue is the position of the wings.

Since the line between the center of mass and center of force (the wings) is not perfectly vertical, Pit would lean forward during flight. His body would be suspended under his wings. This means his body is blocking most of the wind generated by his wings. So he would have to exert even more force to stay flying. Plus, your arms would get super sore when all that force is pushing them forward.

It should also be noted that Put doesn't have the musculature to support this level of force. His biceps are connected to his arms, not his wings, so he must have a separate set of muscles specifically for his wings. The only suitable anchor points are his ribs and spine, but in no art do we see the require muscle groups around his shoulder blades.

In short: I don't think this is real, guys.

I'm aware of that, but what I don't know is if background processing usually interferes with regular processing. I do occasionally step back from a problem specifically to let my subconscious process it, but that doesn't typically come at the cost of other things I can think about; It doesn't cause me to see, think, or do any mental processing worse.

I don't think a 'zero-sum game' ever occurs for other people's subconscious problem solving.

Neurodivergent guys be like: "I have to account for every single possible way someone could react to something, because otherwise I'll say something rude and the two people who voluntarily talk to me will hate me."