Anne Brandes

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on the atlas — 21

highlights — 15

It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally ... obvious.
Oliver Heaviside (1850 - 1925) - Biography - MacTutor History of Mathematics
As he began to experiment with this technique, he gradually adapted it to make himself more comfortable and to get more height out of it. Nonetheless, it was nowhere near as coordinated as a well-performed straddle method jump, and one historian has referred to Fosbury's early attempts as an "airborne seizure". However, during the latter part of his second year and the beginning of his junior year, it started to produce results, and he gradually was able to clear higher jumps.[4]
Dick Fosbury - Wikipedia
Nope! All times exist, they don't blip in and out of existence. Existence has causal direction and structure within itself, not a sweeping present that is the only real. All of your selves at different times exist, and all say, "Here I am in the present moment!"
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ on X: "@Aella_Girl Nope! All times exist, they don't blip in and out of existence. Existence has causal direction and structure within itself, not a sweeping present that is the only real. All of your selves at different times exist, and all say, "Here I am in the present moment!"" / X
The broad spectrum of consequentialist ethics—of which utilitarianism is a well-known example—focuses on the result or consequences, with such principles as John Stuart Mill's 'principle of utility': "the greatest good for the greatest number". This principle is thus teleological, though in a broader sense than is elsewhere understood in philosophy. In the classical notion, teleology is grounded in the inherent nature of things themselves, whereas in consequentialism, teleology is imposed on nature from outside by the human will. Consequentialist theories justify inherently what most people wo…
Teleology
At first, while living, victims are considered to be monstrous transgressors that deserve to be punished. But, once they die, they bring peace to the community. Then, they are not monsters any longer, but rather gods. Girard highlights that, in most primitive societies, there is a deep ambivalence towards deities: they hold high virtues, but they are also capable of performing some very monstrous deeds. That is how, according to Girard, primitive gods are sanctified victims.
Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
When mimetic rivalries accumulate, tensions grow ever greater. But, that tension eventually reaches a paroxysm. When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. Thus, people that were formerly struggling, now unite efforts against someone chosen as a scapegoat. Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate in the execution of violence against a specified enemy.
Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
According to Freud, the child has an innate sexual desire towards the mother, and eventually, discovers that the father is an obstacle to the satisfaction of that desire. Girard, on the other hand, reinterprets the Oedipus Complex in terms of mimetic desire: the child becomes identified with his father and imitates him. But, inasmuch as he imitates his father, the child imitates the sexual desire for his mother. Then, his father becomes his model and rival, and that explains the ambivalent feelings so characteristic of the Oedipus Complex.
Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In Girard’s view, mimetic desire may grow to such a degree, that a person may eventually desire to be her mediator. Again, publicity is illustrative: sometimes, consumers do not just desire a product for its inherent qualities, but rather, desire to be the celebrity that promotes such a product. Girard considers that a person may desire an object only as part of a larger desire; that is, to be her mediator. Girard calls the desire to be other people, ‘metaphysical desire’. Furthermore, acquisitive desire leads to metaphysical desire, and the original object of desire becomes a token representi…
Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In this world, the rocket means different things to different people. For the Nazi mystic Captain Blicero (father of the 00000), the rocket will catalyze humanity’s ascension to a higher realm of being. For the African revolutionary Enzian, the rocket is a weapon of global genocide that will force the colonial project to its logical conclusion. For Slothrop, the rocket is the key to his own history and deep family ties to vast conspiracies that date at least as far back as the Puritan migration to New England. (Slothrop is, like Pynchon, a descendant of the first wave of colonists who settled …
We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow | WIRED
Despite this critical disregard, many writers, prepped with "templates" and "recipes" for the matter, sought to create the next Great American Novel; Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis both sought to create the Great American Novel with The Jungle (1906) and Babbit (1924), respectively.[16][4] William Carlos Williams and Clyde Brion Davis released satirical explorations both entitled The Great American Novel – Philip Roth would later release a novel of the same name.[14][17][18] Bernard F. Jr. Rogers said that Kurt Vonnegut's "entire career might be characterised as an attempt to produce someth…
Great American Novel - Wikipedia
How to define reward hacking? Can we capture reward hacking during RL training or inference without human intervention? How to prevent “whack-a-mole” style of fixes for reward hacking during RL training?
Why We Think | Lil'Log
Interestingly the DeepSeek team showed that with pure RL, no SFT stage, it is still possible to learn advanced reasoning capabilities like reflection and backtracking (“Aha moment”). The model naturally learns to spend more thinking tokens during the RL training process to solve reasoning tasks. The “aha moment” can emerge, referring to the model reflecting on previous mistakes and then trying alternative approaches to correct them. Later, various open source efforts happened for replicating R1 results like Open-R1, SimpleRL-reason, and TinyZero, all based on Qwen models. These efforts also co…
Why We Think | Lil'Log
Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects during the early '60s. One story told of his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway's suicide.[30] While there, he stole a pair of elk antlers hanging above the front door of Hemingway's cabin. Later that year, Thompson moved to San Francisco, where he attended the 1964 GOP Convention at the Cow Palace. Thompson severed his ties with the Observer after his editor refused to print his review of Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlin…
Hunter S. Thompson - Wikipedia
Government by Journalism was a form of New Journalism[1] pioneered by the English newspaper editor William Thomas Stead in which he began to think of journalism as more than just a position to report information, but through the paper the journalist or editor could become ruler.[2][3]
Government by Journalism - Wikipedia
This analytical error has also led many clever, well-intentioned people to insist that Silicon Valley should—and could—repent. To insist, as these critics do, that Google should start protecting our privacy is, for Zuboff, “like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or asking a giraffe to shorten its neck.” The imperatives of surveillance capitalism are almost of the evolutionary kind: no clever policy, not even in Congress, has ever succeeded in shortening the giraffe’s neck (it has, however, done wonders for Mitch McConnell’s).
Capitalism’s New Clothes | Evgeny Morozov