Alok Singh's Shortform

This is inspired by the old 'trade _ for money' posts.

I think the Anova Oven should be the default rationalist oven. It is $500, but on this community isn't usually hurting for cash.

That $500 gets you something so beyond a normal oven it's basically a different tool. It's better thought of as a largish box whose temperature you control. To see this, make scrambled eggs in it. They have a recipe in their app.

It can reliably control temperature all the way down to 77 F (25 C), making it capable of cooking almost any kind of meal. It's programmable, so longer recipes are simple to set up.

Reheating food (and making a lot) becomes trivial, and unlike a microwave there's no problems with ice staying frozen. Reheating to 150F makes almost all leftovers taste fresh.

Example of hyperfinite quantity: number of sides of a circle

reading https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/formal+disk convinced me that there's something to my feeling that nonstandard analysis is similar to algebraic geometry.

formal disk ~ infinitesimal neighborhood/halo of a point ~ formal spectrum of power series, which extends prime spectra, one of the main concepts of algebraic geometry. maybe i can skip the category theory and just write out some polynomials

Ivan Karamazov ranting to his brother Alyosha about basically a cabal watching over the world, thought of herenow

reading https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/formal+disk convinced me that there's something to my feeling that nonstandard analysis is similar to algebraic geometry.

formal disk ~ infinitesimal neighborhood/halo of a point ~ formal spectrum of power series, which extends prime spectra, one of the main concepts of algebraic geometry. any help here appreciated

models let us conduct words, and soonish pictures

chatgpt is very micromanageable too

lawyer ~ social programmer

precedent ~ import 'precedent'

judge ~ debugger

jury ~ the actual, buggy thing that runs in the very end

jargon ~ lang syntax

Dissection tonight at Merritt College in Oakland, building S202. 5:30-9, you can pay by paypal. 

(Something that came up yesterday, parens give the particular case.)

Have you spent a lot of time on a skill without a cap? (like math)?

Have you paid money for it? (math tutoring) 

How much?

How much have you paid towards a complementary unbounded skill (managing people, voice coaching). 

So yeah, between learning another hour of math and a voice coach, both at $~80/hour, is the marginal util of voice coach^[1] way lower^[2]?.

1. ^{^}

   Or whatever soft skill you would benefit from but don't do.

2. ^{^}

   way because estimates of utility are fuzzy. [don't lie to yourself.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/302239-above-all-do-not-lie-to-yourself-a-man-who)

fact: there is no set of all finite sets

One way size goes seems to be:

Limited/finite, actual infinity (countable), potential infinity (uncountable/hyperfinite/compact regions).

On limited and uncountable inputs, we can define a uniform distribution naturally.

A uniform distribution on a countable set, there's no natural way to do that. So in a way, they're "bigger".

Differential games lend themselves to a hyperfinite description. You can even have turns. Each player takes an infinitesimal move, then the other goes. A hyperdiscrete approach.

Observing your opponent becomes really important, like in a fight, soccer, or a relationship 😶. I have the intuition that the OODA loop falls out of this.

There's a classic game here where you run from a lion, and the optimum is running along a harmonic spiral since it's infinitely long. What would that look like under this?

A while ago, I saw Dan Savage's film festival. As an intense art student ate 1000 condoms, a thought flashed. Many gears, all ticking. Click. Click. Clock.

And it hit me: every finite commutative group is a product of cyclic groups of prime power order, just like a prime factorization.

I still have no idea how that came in that context.

What can 20k USD buy, including projects?

Edit: I live in Berkeley.

handy trick inspired by compactification: we can work with completed structures by adding endpoints and taking them away.

example: for a lattice, we can adjoin 0 and 1 as min/max elements by defining a structure where the sentences $0\le s$ and $1\ge s$ are true for all $s$ in the original structure, then do what we want, then delete 0 and 1.

cool goldbring paper: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/19419/1/nonstandard_everett.pdf

handy hyperreal trick

take "the hilbert space" talked about in QFT. Set it to $R^H$ where H is hyperfinite. Have fun. "Compact operators" fall out, and everything finitary is in there, but the whole thing isn't finite

.

late 14c., ethimolegia "facts of the origin and development of a word," from Old French etimologie, ethimologie (14c., Modern French étymologie), from Latin etymologia, from Greek etymologia "analysis of a word to find its true origin," properly "study of the true sense (of a word)," with -logia "study of, a speaking of" (see -logy) + etymon "true sense, original meaning," neuter of etymos "true, real, actual," related to eteos "true," which perhaps is cognate with Sanskrit satyah, Gothic sunjis, Old English soð "true," from a PIE *set- "be stable."

mathy interpretation of the bit about truth: (longer ~ chains are weaker) true ~~ stable ~~~ a starting point for reasoning ~ point ~ .

try using chatgpt to optimize life. they have an api too.

try giving it really specific instructions and general stuff, then the particulars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_density_of_discrete_points

log(infinite number) seems a promising avenue of investigation. also reminiscent of harmonic series--in euler's words-- its sum is the log of an infinite number. 

L1 and L infinity norm in another way:

see infinity as an unlimited integer N. The max property of the infinity norm 

will still hold.

Where to get shoes: Meermin